The Boudicca Parchments (28 page)

“Did it not occur to you that little girls might
lie
? Especially as they are the daughters of
Chilonim
.

Chilonim
was a term, for non-religious Jews. HaTzadik continued.

“You are an idiot! You knew they weren’t
Yiras Shamayim
!”

In other words, they were not God-fearing Jews; therefore they couldn’t be trusted.

“I am sorry my teacher, I’m sorry.”

“Just make sure you stay away from the house. The police will come looking. In fact,
do
go back there and clean out anything that can link them back to us. Do it quickly and
then
get out of there!”

Shalom Tikva ended the call, his mind in turmoil.
This
was a bigger failure than those of his son. With his son’s failure, at least there was no trail to follow. He had hired strangers in the attempt to kill Klein and they had ended up dead and thus unable to talk. When he failed to kidnap the youngest of the Sasson girls, at least he had made a clean getaway, unless they got the number of the car and traced the rental back to his son’s name. But aside from that Baruch was now on his way back to Israel and so the British police couldn’t arrest him.

But this failure was different. The girls had run away from a apartnment and they could identify the flat and lead them back there. The one thing he had going for him was that the girls were probably traumatized and so would initially be counselled by psychologists before eventually being asked to help the police find the house. That gave them a window of opportunity. And that was why he had told his follower to go back to the flat and clean it out.

The phone rang again.

What is it this time?

But as he looked at the readout on his mobile phone, he saw that it was a foreign number. It looked vaguely familiar. At the back of the mind he suspected some kind of a trap. But what could they do from the other end of a mobile phone.

“Yes?”

“Hallo…”

The voice spoke in English. But it was not a British accent – it sounded like an American.

“Yes?”

“Is that Shalom Tikva?”

HaTzadik hesitated.

“Who is this?”

“It’s Father Enoch. You remember you asked me to tell you if anyone showed an interest in the Domus Aurea parchment.”

“Yes?” said HaTzadik realizing what he was about to hear.

Over the next few minutes, Enoch told HaTzadik about the visit of Daniel, Ted and Sarit, including their apparently successful decipherment of the manuscript and the fact that they had also found out about a similar document in the Temple Mount tunnels and were coming to Israel to meet the Israeli professor whose team had discovered it.

At the end of the call, HaTzadik thanked Brother Enoch for his assistance and spoke a few pious sounding words about “the brotherhood of our peoples” and the “wickedness of the Zionist impostors who pretend to be Jews.” Then he called an Arab friend. As he waited for an answer, he realized that he now had a perfect opportunity. His grievance was not with the Sasson family, but with Daniel Klein.

And now Daniel was unwittingly about to enter the lion’s den.

“Shahaid, I have a favour to ask of you.”

Chapter 65

“This is the most preposterous theory I’ve ever heard.”

Seated in a Jerusalem café with her British and Irish guests, Professor Leah Yakarin, didn’t trouble to hide her opinions. In the rough and tumble world of academia, she knew that one had to fight one’s corner with vigour or go down to a tougher slugger. It was like prize-fighting, except that it was usually gloves off and to hell with the Queensbury rules.

“Any more preposterous than the theory that Essenes didn’t really exist?” asked Daniel.

The Essenes were one of three, or possibly four, Jewish factions that existed in Judea in between the second century BCE and the first century CE – the others being the Sadducees, an aristocratic priestly sect notionally descended from Tzadok the first High Priest in Solomon’s temple, and the Pharisees, a sect of learned but humble men. Some scholars, basing their beliefs on the writings of Josephus, also identify a fourth school of thought – the “Sicarii” – whom Josephus distinguished from the Essenes. Both Essenes and Sicarii – so named for the dagger or
sica
that they carried – are sometimes referred to as zealots. But the Sicarii were believed to be of Galilean origin, whereas the Essenes were identified with Jerusalem,

But Professor Yakarin was one of a small number of academics who argued that the Essenes were real or a figment of the imaginations and propaganda of certain Greco-Roman writers.

“There is no credible evidence that the Essenoi existed,” said Professor Yakarin, using the Greek name by which Josephus had called them. “The Dead Sea Scrolls, which the Essenes supposedly kept and guarded, make no mention of them. The so-called Essenes were former priests who had lost a power struggle. The Biblical scrolls were removed from the Temple… when they were ousted by other factions.”

Daniel was in an argumentative mood.

“But not all of the Dead Sea Scrolls were Biblical texts. Some were about daily life and other matters. One of the scrolls describes a small sect living communally in the Dead Sea area. That can hardly be a reference to Jerusalem.”

“No, but that scroll may have been
by
the priestly sect who
fled
from Jerusalem. They may even have lived in Qumran or Masada. But that doesn’t make them a separate sect – just a group of deposed priests hiding out from their enemies in a civil conflict. But it didn’t mention the name Essenes. And all that talk about ascetic lifestyles is just a load of baloney. Josephus had spent three years travelling in Judea with an ascetic called Banus who probably filled his head with those ideas. And as a scholar he read about the Spartans and their lives of deprivation. He was writing a mythology for his Greco-Roman audience.”

“Look, I’m no great fan of Josephus myself,” said Daniel. “But the Essenes weren’t only described by Josephus. Pliny the Elder and Philo also mention them. And in fact Pliny mentioned them even before Josephus. He even said they lived in Ein Gedi –
right by the Dead Sea and Masada.
”

“Yes but Pliny’s total summary of them is confined to no more than half a dozen lines. And what does he
actually
say about them? That they didn’t use money, that they existed for thousands of generations –
and
that they never married!”

“Okay so he exaggerated a little, but that – ”

“A little? Look I’m not saying that its impossible for a celibate sect to maintain itself like the Shakers, through conversion and recruitment. But for how long? And remember the Shakers operated in America which had a larger population from which to recruit new members. Also Pliny insisted that
all
the Essenes were men. They didn’t recruit women at all. That sounds like some sort of Spartan sect or some sort male-only club that characterized certain groups of Christians. And that kind of Christianity was itself an outgrowth of certain Greco-Roman traditions, not Jewish ones.

But in Greco-Roman tradition, the life of deprivation was associated with military preparedness, not devotion to God.”

“Not necessarily Daniel,” said Ted. “The Stoics were hardly militaristic.”

“And according to Josephus the Essenes
were
,” replied Daniel.

“Which leads right back to my theory,” said Leah Yakarin. “Josephus was writing fiction to appeal to his Greco-Roman readership.”

“Maybe not
entirely
fiction,” Ted suggested. “Maybe just gilding the lily.”

Leah Yakarin thought for a moment.

“If they were celibate, then they would have
really
been a small sect – and probably wouldn’t have lasted more than two generations at most.”

Daniel stepped in.

“Okay but Josephus says that the Essenes
did
marry. It may be that a small number carried there asceticism to the extreme of celibacy. And Philo wrote about them even earlier, crediting them with similar communal lifestyles.”

“But Philo didn’t speak Hebrew, despite his Jewishness. He was essentially a Greek of Jewish origin. And he may also have been pandering to Greek ideas. He didn’t even call them by the Latin form, Esseni, or even the Greek form, Essenoi. He called them
Essaioi
without an N and said it meant ‘holy’. It was Josephus who called them Essenoi and Pliny called them Esseni.”

“We’re getting a bit hung up on nomenclature here,” Ted stepped in. “Surely whatever they called themselves, we can all agree that they existed?”

“No we
can’t!
” snapped Professor Yakarin, still fighting her corner. “We can accept that there were communities living in the Dead Sea area, Qumran, Ein Gedi and even Masada. But that doesn’t mean they were a large ascetic sect. They were deposed priests who lived in exile from Jerusalem after losing a power struggle.”

Daniel decided to bring the discussion back on track.

“We’re moving a bit of the point here. We
were
talking about the Domus Aurea manuscript.”

Leah Yakarin shook her head.

“I remain sceptical about that too. You said yourself, you never saw the original – just an image on a computer screen.”

“Yes but we do have the original of the map.”

“Which you still haven’t shown me.”

“We don’t want to take it out too much,” said Ted. “You know what excessive handling can do to a document.”

“Of course I know. In fact a Russian colleague of mine has pointed out that there’s been a lot of careless handling of the Dead Sea Scrolls.”

“Then I’ll ask you to take our word… for the time being.”

“I trust your integrity Professor Klein. Your reputation precedes you. But what is it you want from me?”

“Well we understand that your archaeological team discovered a parchment manuscript, that hasn’t yet been deciphered, in the Temple Mount tunnels.”

Leah sat still as she considered this.

“Not exactly in the tunnels. It was in the earth removed from the excavations at Solomon’s Stables between 1996 and 1999.”

Ted looked confused.

“But wasn’t King Solomon much earlier than the rebellion against Rome – I mean like a thousand years before that?”

“The name Solomon’s Stables is actually a misnomer,” said Leah. “It actually dates to the time of Herod the Great. One of his prestige projects was to extend the Temple Mount platform with twelve rows of vaulted arches, supported by eighty eight pillars on huge stone blocks. The space below became storage space.”

“And that’s been excavated?” asked Ted incredulously. Wouldn’t that threaten the structural integrity of the entire site.”

This was Ted’s area of expertise.

“Tell me about it,” said Leah, shrugging her shoulders.

“And the Muslims didn’t object?”

“It was the
Waqf
who
did
it – to build another mosque.”

Ted was about to ask what the
Waqf
was when Daniel stepped in to explain.

“The Muslim religious trust that controls the Temple Mount.”

But it was Leah Yakarin who was in her element now.

“We told them it was dangerous, but they did it anyway. It could have led to the Dome of the Rock or the Aqsa mosque collapsing. And then they’d have blamed us.”

“But when you said they found it in the
earth
, do you mean they just handed a mass of earth over to… what? The Israel Antiquities authority.”

“Not exactly Professor…”

“Hynds,” he reminded her.

“They weren’t doing a proper archaeological dig for research purposes. They were just digging it up to build another mosque. They put the earth on trucks and unceremoniously dumped it in the Kidron Valley near the Mount of Olives. They knew that it was likely to contain priceless artefacts associated with the long Jewish period before the Muslims invaded but they just didn’t care. As far as they were concerned, if the historic artefacts associated with the Jewish period were destroyed or lost forever, so much the better.”

Ted picked up on this.

“But you said something
was
found.”

“A
lot
of things were found. You see the Israel Antiquities Authority didn’t want to get involved. After effectively allowing the
Waqf
to get away with an act of brazen anti-Semitic vandalism, they kept a low profile. But others weren’t so willing to allow thousands of years of archaeological evidence of the Jewish connection with the temple mount to be wiped out by a bunch of Philistine savages. So in 2005 a salvage operation was mounted under the auspices of Bar-Ilan University.”

“So it’s in Tel Aviv?”

“No. Bar-Ilan are supervising. But any artefacts found are stored in Jerusalem.”

“And you were in charge of the project.”

“Not exactly. I was one of several historians asked to review and analyze the finds at the time when they made the discovery. But since then, my controversial views on the Essenes led to a big falling out and so I was asked to resign from the project. Anyway, the project is still going on and so far we’ve found flint tools dating back some ten thousand years, ostraca, jewellery, clothing, coloured stone and glass fragments that we think come from mosaics, official ritual seals, something like a thousand ancient coins, statuettes and figurines, ivory dice, game pieces made of animal bone, mother of pearl furniture inlays, weights of both stone and metal and – as you mentioned – a parchment manuscript found inside a clay jar. And as you said a parchment manuscript written in Hebrew lettering but in a language that we cannot decipher. We’re not even sure what linguistic group it belongs to.”

Daniel and Ted exchanged a knowing glance. She was about to say more, but was interrupted by a commotion at the entrance to the café. An Arab with a bulging waistline had barged past the security guard at the door and was reaching into his jacket.

“Get down!” Leah shouted, realizing what was happening.