The Moses Stone (26 page)

Read The Moses Stone Online

Authors: James Becker

Tags: #Mystery, #Thriller, #Suspense, #Adventure

Yacoub turned to Hassan, who reached slowly into the outside pocket of his light jacket and pulled out a bundle of notes, then stepped forward. Yacoub raised his arm to stop him advancing any further.
“And you have the goods?” he asked. “Let me see them.”
The man nodded and turned back toward one of the cars. As he and Yacoub reached it, one of his companions popped open the trunk, and all three men peered inside. On the trunk floor were two black briefcases, their leather scuffed and scratched. The man glanced round, then leaned inside, snapped open the catches and lifted the lids. Each case contained half a dozen semi-automatic pistols of various types, each with two or three magazines. All of the weapons looked well used, nicks and scrapes all over them, but they were all clean and oiled, which suggested they had been properly cared for.
Yacoub bent down and picked up several of the weapons for inspection.
“We’ll take the two CZ-75s and two of the Brownings,” he said, “and two magazines for each. You have plenty of shells?”
“Of course. How many boxes do you need?”
“Four will be enough,” Yacoub said.
The man opened another, smaller case, took out three boxes of nine-millimeter Parabellum ammunition and handed them to Hassan, who passed over the money he was holding.
“Thank you, my friend,” Yacoub said. “A pleasure dealing with you.”
“The weapons,” the man replied, as he checked the money and then slammed the trunk shut. “When you’ve finished with them, call me. If they’re undamaged we’ll buy them back at half the cost.”
“Only half?”
“That’s our normal rate. Take it or leave it. You have my numbers.”
49
 
The longer Angela and Bronson worked at the translation, the easier it seemed to get, and although the first line had taken them over an hour to crack, they managed to get the entire inscription finished in just under three hours, which Angela didn’t think was bad going, even though there were still three words that had stubbornly refused to yield their meanings.
They rewarded each other with a drink from the mini-bar and then started the most difficult phase of the entire operation—trying to decipher what the Aramaic text actually meant. As he’d done before, Bronson wrote out the words they’d translated, in the order they appeared on the clay tablet:
 
Then he reversed the order to allow them to read the words in the correct sequence:
 
Bronson looked at what he’d written, then flicked back through the other pages in front of him.
“Right,” he said, “I’ll incorporate these words in the full translation and then maybe we’ll be able to see the wood rather than just the trees.”
He worked for a few minutes, then passed over the final version—or at least the final version with the information they had to hand:
 
 
“I can probably fill in another couple of the words we haven’t deciphered.” Angela pointed at the third and fourth lines. “I think that section reads ‘the settlement known as Ir-Tzadok B’Succaca.’ I just wish we had a few more . . .”
Her voice died away as she stared at the page, and Bronson looked at her sharply. “What is it?” he asked.
“The lines just before it,” she said. “From the tone of what you’ve read in this translation, how would you describe the person who wrote it?”
“I don’t follow you.”
“I mean, do you think that person was a priest, or a warrior, or what?”
Bronson read the text again and thought for a moment. “There’s not a lot to go on apart from that last section, where it looks as if he could be justifying fighting the invaders. So if I had to guess I’d say he was probably a warrior, maybe a member of the Jewish resistance or whatever they had in those days.”
“Exactly. Now look at this section, from where it says ‘the copper scroll’ to ‘the cave.’ Remember that around the beginning of the first millennium the Jews didn’t have an army. They weren’t organized in the way that the Romans were, into formalized fighting units. They were more like gangs of fighters that would band together against the common invader when it suited them. The rest of the time they fought among themselves when they weren’t raiding settlements to steal food and money and weapons.”
“Like guerrillas?” Bronson suggested.
“Precisely. With that in mind, I think we can make a bit more sense of that section of the text. Put the words ‘which we’ in front of ‘took from’ and that could be a description of a raid. They hit some settlement, and one of the things they took from it was a copper scroll.”
“So?”
“So they obviously realized it wasn’t just any old copper scroll, because it then looks as if they hid it in a cave, and probably a cave at Qumran because the reference to
Ir-Tzadok B’Succaca
occurs very shortly afterward.” Angela paused and looked at Bronson. “What do you know about Qumran?” she asked.
“Not a lot. I know the Dead Sea Scrolls were found there, and I think they were written by a tribe called the Essenes, and then they hid them in the nearby caves.”
Angela nodded. “That’s one view, but it’s almost certainly wrong. There
was
a community at Qumran, and the Dead Sea Scrolls
were
discovered in eleven caves located just to the west of the settlement. The scrolls contain multiple copies of the books of the Old Testament, and include every book of the Hebrew Bible apart from the Book of Esther. About eighty percent were written on parchment, and the rest—with one exception—on papyrus. Those are the facts. Everything else is a matter of interpretation.
“One of the problems is that the archaeologist who first excavated at Qumran in 1949—he was a Dominican friar named Father Roland de Vaux of the École Biblique in Jerusalem—started with the caves and the scrolls, assumed that the Qumran community had prepared them, and used that as the basis for his deductions about the people of that community. That’s a bit like somebody excavating the remains of the Bodleian Library in a thousand years’ time, finding only some of the ancient Roman texts that are stored there and assuming that the people of Oxford were Latin-speaking and addicted to gladiatorial games.”
“A lot of people at Oxford
do
speak Latin,” Bronson pointed out, “and it wouldn’t surprise me if some of them were into gladiators as well.”
Angela smiled. “OK, but you can see what I’m driving at. The point is that Father de Vaux made the assumption that, because the scrolls had been hidden close to the Qumran community, they must have been written by members of that community, though there was actually no empirical evidence whatsoever to support this hypothesis. And if the Essenes did write the scrolls, why did they choose to hide them so close to where they were living? It would have been pointless as a means of concealment. But once de Vaux had got that idea set firmly in his mind, it slanted his view of every single piece of evidence that he looked at.
“He came to the conclusion that the people of Qumran were members of a Jewish sect called the Essenes, a very religious group. When he started looking at the settlement itself, he claimed to have identified a
scriptorium
—a place where monks or scribes would have copied or prepared manuscripts—based purely on his discovery of a bench, two inkwells and a handful of writing implements.
“But there are plenty of different possible interpretations: it could have been a schoolroom or a military or commercial office, for example. And not even the tiniest fragment of a scroll has ever been found in the so-called
scriptorium
, and that is just ridiculous—if it really had been a room used only for that purpose, it would have been full of the tools and materials used by the scribes. At the very least you would have expected to find some scraps of blank papyrus or the remains of scrolls in the ruins.
“To support his belief that the Essenes were devoutly religious, he also identified several cisterns on the site as Jewish ritual baths, or
miqva’ot
. If he’d looked at Qumran in isolation, without knowledge of the scrolls, he would probably have assumed that the cisterns were just receptacles for holding water, which would be the obvious and logical deduction. De Vaux also ignored numerous other significant items that were recovered from the site. Don’t forget, archaeologists are very good at ignoring inconvenient facts—they’ve had a hell of a lot of practice.”
“But I thought archaeology was a science,” Bronson said. “Scientific method, the peer review process, carbon dating and all that?”
“Dream on. Just like everyone else, archaeologists have been known to fudge results and disregard things that don’t fit. Now, if Father de Vaux’s theory was correct, then the Qumran Essenes would have lived lives of abject poverty, but other excavations on the site recovered money, glassware, stoneware, metal implements and ornaments, and assorted other relics, all of which seemed to imply that the inhabitants had been both secular and fairly well-off.”
“But if Qumran wasn’t a religious site, what was it?”
“More likely suggestions are it could have been a wealthy manor house; a principal or second home for an important local family; a stopping-off point for pilgrims en route to Jerusalem; a pottery factory; even a fortress or a fortified trading station.
“The other thing de Vaux did was try to stop anyone outside his select group of researchers from gaining access to the scrolls, or even seeing photographs of them. At least, that applied to those found in Cave Four, which represented about forty percent of the total material recovered.”

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