The Last Testament (26 page)

‘I’m home,’ he called as he walked inside. He prayed there would be no reply, that he would be alone.

‘Shimon? Is that you?’ His wife.

‘Yes, I won’t be long. I’ll be in my study.’

‘Did you eat yet?’

Shimon ignored her and headed straight for his desk, closing the door behind him. With his arm, he swept a pile of junk –

video-camera, digital sound recorder and piles of paper – to one side, to clear a space. Slowly he took out the clay tablet Afif Aweida had given him an hour earlier. For the last half of his 216

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journey he had wrapped it in a handkerchief, to keep the sweat of his own clammy hands at bay.

As he unwrapped it now, reading again those first few words, he felt his body convulse with anticipation. In the market he had been able to make out only the opening words: the rest were obscured, their meanings out of reach. To decode the full text, he would have to study it closely, using some of his most arcane reference books. He would labour over it all night.

The thought thrilled him. He hadn’t felt this way since . . .

since, when? Since his work on the Bet Alpha site, discovering the houses that adjoined the synagogue, which proved the existence of an entire Jewish village from the Byzantine period?

Since his work, as a student of Yigal Yadin at Masada? No. The exhilaration he felt now was on an entirely different scale. The closest comparison, he was ashamed to realize, was with the moment when, as a shy sixteen-year-old, he had lost his vir-ginity to Orna, the nineteen-year-old beauty on his kibbutz. The ecstasy rising in him now was explosive, just as it had been then.

I Abraham, son of Terach . . .

He was desperate to find out what it said, but there was a feeling in his gut like a lead weight. What if he were wrong?

What if this was an extraordinary case of mistaken identity?

Shimon tried to calm himself. He got out of his chair, shook his head, like a dog shaking off drops of rain, and sat down again. The first task was to confirm that this really was the word of Abraham; the meaning would come next. He breathed deeply and started again.

The text was in Old Babylonian language. That, thought Guttman, fitted: it was the dialect that would have been spoken eighteen centuries before Christ, when Abraham was commonly believed to have lived. He looked back at the text. The author gave his father’s name as Terach and identified his sons as Isaac and Ishmael.

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It was conceivable that there had been other Abrahams who were sons of other Terachs, even possible that they lived at that time and in that place. These other Abrahams might even have had two sons. But two sons with those exact names, Isaac and Ishmael? It was too much of a coincidence.
It had to be him
.

The door opened. Instinctively, Shimon placed his hand over the tablet to hide it.

‘Hello,
chamoudi
. I wasn’t expecting you back. Aren’t you meant to be with Shapira?’

Shit. The meeting.

‘Yes. I was. I mean, I am. I’ll phone him.’

‘What is it, Shimon? You’re sweating.’

‘It was hot out. I was running.’

‘Why were you running?’

He raised his voice. ‘Why all these questions? Leave me alone, woman! Can’t you see I’m working?’

‘What’s that on your desk?’

‘Rachel!’

She turned around, slamming the door behind her.

He tried to calm himself, looking back to the text, his eye tracing the line in which the author named his hometown as Ur, the Mesopotamian city where Abraham was born. He saw the seal on the reverse side of the tablet, in the space between the text and the date at the bottom, and repeated in another corner and again on the edges. It had not been made by a cylinder, the seal used by kings and men of wealth, the carved stone tube that could be rolled into the soft clay, thereby leaving a unique marking, a signature. Nor was it a series of crescent shapes, etched into the clay by the use of the author’s right thumbnail. No, it was a pattern found much more rarely than that, one that Guttman instantly recognized – and found unaccountably moving.

It was a roughly circular pattern, formed by a criss-cross of 218

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lines. Shimon had seen it only twice before, and one of those was in a photograph. It was formed by pressing into the clay the knot found at the fringes of a male garment, of the kind worn by Mesopotamian men at exactly Abraham’s time. Such fringed garments had faded from history, with one exception: the Jewish prayer shawl. Shimon would only have to step outside his house to find an ultra-orthodox Jew waiting at a bus stop, or buying a paper, wearing the exact same garment now, nearly four thousand years later. And here was its mark, pressed deep by Abraham, son of Terach.

Regardless of what it said, the importance of this object, no more than four inches high, less than three inches wide and barely half an inch thick, could not be overestimated. It would be the first significant archaeological evidence of the Bible ever discovered. Sure, there was the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, on display among the pharaohs and mummies of the British Museum.

One of the five scenes shown in the obelisk’s sculptured relief depicted the Israelite king Jehu, paying tribute to the Assyrian monarch. Jehu appeared in the Bible and this obelisk, found by Henry Layard in the nineteenth century, corroborated it.

But Jehu was a minor character in the great Bible story. Of the lead players, from the patriarchs to Moses to Joshua, the archaeological record had yielded nothing. Until now. Here it was: physical confirmation of the great forefather himself.

Surely it was too good to be true. What if it was a fake? Guttman thought back to the scandal that had spooked scholars and histo-rians the world over. He and his friends had followed it with a mixture of
Schadenfreude
and fascination. In 1983 the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper had declared the Hitler diaries genuine and had paid for it with his reputation. His mistake was simple.

He had
wanted
to believe they were real. Now, sitting in his Jerusalem home, Shimon Guttman knew how Trevor-Roper must have felt: he wanted so desperately for this tablet to be what it seemed.

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He looked at its reddish-brown clay, precisely the shade any expert would expect from Iraq in that period. It was craggy and weathered, the way pieces of this vintage always looked. Guttman brought the tablet closer to his eyes: the angle of each line of the cuneiform script, each syllabic character, was entirely as it should be. And the wording. Every phrase, every formulation, was idiomatically and historically fitting:
in front of the judges have
attested thus
. . . There were only about half a dozen people in the world who could fake an item as well as this – and he, Guttman, was one of them.

But a fake made no sense. Trevor-Roper had got the Hitler diaries wrong because he had overlooked a crucial fact. Someone had brought them
to
him, wanting his validation. A vast fortune rested on his verdict. There was always a risk of a con.

This was not like that. No one had come to Guttman, trying to pass off this tablet as the last will of Abraham. On the contrary,
he
had found it. If it hadn’t been for his impulse visit to Aweida it would still be in that marketplace now, sitting in a tray, ready to be sold off to some know-nothing collector. A smile spread across Shimon Guttman’s face. Logic was on his side.

To believe this was a fake, you would have to believe a series of wildly unlikely propositions. That someone had gone to painstaking and expensive trouble to inscribe a clay tablet that could pass as a four-millennia-old Mesopotamian relic. That this trickster had then, without mentioning it, dumped his handi-work in the hands of an East Jerusalem market trader, in the hope that fate would bring one of the world’s few cuneiform experts into the trader’s shop. That this expert would see this item in particular, picking it out from everything else in the shop, that he would translate it and comprehend its profound significance. The faker would be gambling that all those circumstances would materialize, and for what? What would this con artist have earned from his trick? Certainly not money, since Guttman 220

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had paid nothing to a trader who had no idea what he was giving away. No, if this was a fake, the trickster would surely have brought it to Guttman demanding millions of dollars.

The cold, rational truth was that it made more sense to believe this tablet was genuine than to believe it was phoney. The logical leap entailed by the latter was greater than the former. It had to be real.

His mind was racing. How on earth had it got here? It had come to Jerusalem from Iraq, part of the huge outflow of antiquities since the fall of Saddam: that much was obvious. Whether it had come via Beirut, Amman, Damascus, it hardly mattered.

How it had been found in Iraq, whether it had been in the ground until recently or plundered from a collection, perhaps even a museum, was unknowable. Maybe the authorities under Saddam had found it and hidden it from view; perhaps they had never realized its significance.

What fascinated Shimon Guttman was its earlier journey. The tablet was written in Hebron, the place where Abraham was buried, the place so holy in Judaism that Guttman and his fellow radicals had been determined to restore a Jewish presence there as soon as they could after 1967. Did this mean that Abraham had lived his last days in Hebron, then? His two sons had been involved in his burial, but did this discovery mean there was some kind of final deathbed scene, involving the father and his two heirs? Had there been a dispute the aged patriarch had to resolve?

Guttman wondered how the tablet would then have got back to the land of Abraham’s birth, Mesopotamia. Perhaps one of the sons had taken it there. There was no mention in the Bible of Isaac returning to Ur, but perhaps Ishmael had gone back, to see for himself the town where it had all begun.

This, he realized, could be his life’s work. Translating this tablet, decoding its history, displaying it in the great museums of the world. It would make his name forever – it would be known as THE LAST TESTAMENT

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the Guttman tablet – he would be on television, hailed at the British Museum, toasted at the Smithsonian. Scholars would tell and retell the story of how he had stumbled across the founding document of human civilization in a street market on a hot afternoon in Jerusalem.

This small, silent object had taught him something he had not expected to discover about himself. He realized that he was, despite his recent decades of activism, an archaeologist first and foremost. The mere discovery of this tablet, whatever its ultimate meaning, thrilled him as a scholar. It was the connection with Abraham, the sense that he had, like those telescopes in New Mexico, made contact with a faraway world, that delighted him more than he could say.

But the other voice in his head, that of the political campaigner, would not be stilled. It had been nagging away throughout, desperate to know the exact meaning and significance of this document, and now its impatience boiled over.

Guttman duly reached for the three or four key volumes required in the deciphering of cuneiform and got to work.

I Abraham, son of Terach, in front of the judges have attested thus.

The land where I took my son, there to make a sacrifice of him to
the Mighty Name, the Mountain of Moriah, this land has become
a source of dissension between my two sons; let their names here
be recorded as Isaac and Ishmael. So have I thus declared in front
of the judges that the Mount shall be bequeathed as follows . . .

Guttman couldn’t help it. He was overwhelmed all over again.

Here was Abraham referring to one of the defining episodes in world culture, the
akeda
, when the great patriarch led his son up Mount Moriah, there to sacrifice him to the god in whom he had become the first believer. For centuries, Jews had struggled to understand what kind of father could slay his own child 222

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and what kind of God would ask him to do it. And, make no mistake, Abraham had been ready to do it, raising his blade, only staying his hand when an angel descended to announce that God did not demand this act of child sacrifice after all. It was a moment that would bind Abraham and Isaac and their children to God for ever more, sealing them into the covenant between God and the Jews.

Now here was textual proof of that event. But that was not what made Shimon Guttman giddy. He read the words again, syllable by syllable, in case he had made a mistake.

The Mountain of Moriah . . . has become a source of dissension
between my two sons, let their names here be recorded as Isaac
and Ishmael.

Mount Moriah. The Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site.

Tradition held that this spot, where the angel had saved Isaac, was the centre of the world, the Foundation Stone on which the universe had been created. The Jews of ancient times had built their temple here and, when it was destroyed by the Babylonians, they had built it again. All that was left now was the Western Wall, but this place remained the spiritual centre of the Jewish faith.

Yet Mount Moriah was holy to Muslims, too, those who traced their ancestry back to Ishmael. For them it was Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary, the place where Mohammed had ascended to heaven on his winged horse. After Mecca and Medina, it was the Haram that was holiest.

. . . this land has become a source of dissension between my two
sons; let their names here be recorded as Isaac and Ishmael. So
have I thus declared in front of the judges that the Mount shall
be bequeathed as follows . . .

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Here the characters were faded, as if the carving had gone less deep. Guttman opened a desk drawer and pulled out a mag-nifying glass. Some of the formations were novel: they required checking against other texts, looking for repetitions that might suggest a specific local usage. More than two hours later and it was done.