“You’ve cracked it?” Charlie Hoxton asked. He put down a bottle of local Dancing Camel beer he’d bought that afternoon and walked across to the table where Baverstock had been working.
“I wondered at first if there might be three missing tablets, not just one, but if that were the case, the lines in the corners made no sense. So I tried to reassemble the tablets into a square and looked again at the inscription. The answer was childishly easy. You read the first word at the right-hand end of the top line of the first tablet, which is the one we don’t have, of course.”
Baverstock gestured at the scatter of papers on the table. He’d prepared four sheets of A4, and written the English versions of the Aramaic inscriptions he’d managed to translate on three of them, then slid them into position. The fourth sheet, the one at the top right, was blank apart from a short line in the bottom left-hand corner, that mated with similar lines drawn on the other three pages.
“Then,” Baverstock went on, “you read the word in the same position on the next three tablets, reading counterclockwise, of course. That gives you: ‘by Elazar Ben,’ so the first word, the missing word, is probably ‘selected’ or ‘ordered’ or something similar. The next word on the tablet that we don’t have is almost certainly ‘Ya’ir,’ to complete the proper name of the leader of the Sicarii at Masada. But that word doesn’t occur on the top line of the inscription. Instead, you take the first word from the line
below
, and repeat that process for each tablet. It’s a very simple but clever code.”
“Right, got that, I think,” Hoxton muttered impatiently. “All clever stuff. But all I want to know is what the bloody tablets
say
.”
“I already know what they say,” Baverstock snapped, and handed over another page.
Hoxton carefully read what the ancient-language specialist had written down in block capitals.
“Very impressive, Tony,” Hoxton nodded. “Now tell me what all that lot means. What are we actually looking for?”
“I would have thought it was obvious
what
the inscriptions refer to,” Baverstock replied sharply. “The decoded text explicitly mentions the ‘copper scroll’ and ‘scroll blank silver.’ ”
“But unless there are
two
copper scrolls, that relic has already been found,” Dexter said.
Baverstock snorted. “That’s the point. Look at the inscription, and you’ll see that the discovery of the Copper Scroll at Qumran actually validates what’s written on these tablets. That relic was found in Cave Three in 1952; the people who prepared these clay tablets put it in there. Look at the text.”
Baverstock underlined the relevant passage with a pencil. “Let me just fill in a few of these blanks with my best guesses,” he said, scribbling on the sheet. “Right. That reads something like: ‘The copper scroll that we took from Ein-Gedi we have hidden in the cave of Hammad the place of the scrolls of . . .’ The next word’s missing, because it’s on the fourth tablet. Then the text continues: ‘beside the settlement known as
Ir-Tzadok B’Succaca
.’ That’s as clear a statement as you’ll ever find describing the hiding of the Copper Scroll.
“I don’t know what this word is here, between ‘of’ and ‘beside,’ but it presumably refers to either a place or a person. It might be Jericho or Jerusalem, say, or possibly the name of the person or tribe that owned the other scrolls. It’s a pity we don’t know what it is,” Baverstock mused, “because it might once and for all solve the mystery of who actually wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls. But it’s interesting that the inscription specifically states that the Copper Scroll came from Ein-Gedi.”
“Where’s that?”
“Ein-Gedi was an important Jewish settlement built around an oasis not far from the west side of the Dead Sea, fairly close to Qumran, in fact. And that gives us another clue—or rather a confirmation—that the people who prepared these tablets were members of the Sicarii. About the only raid on Ein-Gedi of any significance, according to the references I’ve found on the Internet, was in either AD 72 or 73, and was carried out by a raiding party of Sicarii from Masada. That ties in quite nicely with the first few words of the inscription because at that time the Sicarii were led by Elazar Ben Ya’ir. About seven hundred inhabitants of Ein-Gedi were slaughtered, and the raiders made off with whatever they could lay their hands on. It looks like one of the objects they found was the Copper Scroll, and another was the Silver Scroll.”
Hoxton and Dexter were both studying the inscription while Baverstock offered his explanation.
“What about these ‘tablets of the temple,’ ” Hoxton asked. “Did they come from Ein-Gedi as well? And what are they?”
Baverstock shook his head. “The inscription doesn’t say that the Sicarii looted them, so it’s possible they already owned them. The complete phrase probably states ‘the tablets of the temple of Jerusalem.’ Maybe they were decorative stone slabs, or perhaps they were tablets with prayers or something engraved on them. Whatever they were, they’re not important to us. What we’re after is the Silver Scroll.”
“And the big question, of course,” Hoxton said, “is where we start looking. This inscription says that the Copper Scroll was hidden at Qumran. Does that mean that the Silver Scroll was put there as well?”
“No,” Baverstock said. “The two relics are referred to quite separately. The Copper Scroll was left in the cave at Qumran, but the other scroll was concealed in a cistern somewhere else. At the moment, I’m not sure what the author of this inscription meant by the expression ‘the place of something end of days.’ The simplest interpretation would be ‘the place of
the
end of days,’ but I’ll need to do a lot more research before I can tell you what he was referring to. And while I’m doing that, you’d better sort out the hardware we need. When we move, we’ll probably have to move fast.”
52
Bronson and Angela were heading southeast toward Jerusalem and the Dead Sea beyond.
Bronson wasn’t entirely sure what he’d been expecting, but he was surprised at how fertile most of the land they were driving through seemed to be, at least the strip along the Mediterranean coast. He supposed he’d been anticipating a much more arid and desert-like environment, but in fact the only bit of Israel that really qualified as a desert was the narrowing triangle of land that poked south from the widest point of the country to the Gulf of Aqaba. This area, bounded by Rafah on the Mediterranean coast, the southern end of the Dead Sea and the Israeli coastal resort of Elat, comprised the Negev Desert, a hot, desolate and largely uninhabited tract of land.
“According to this map,” Angela announced, sitting in the passenger seat with the document in question spread out on her lap, “we should reach the boundary of the West Bank in about ten minutes.”
“Is it going to be a problem, getting in there?”
“It shouldn’t be, no. We’ll just need to watch out for the roadblocks and checkpoints—we’re bound to have to pass through a few of them.”
They got held up in the Jerusalem traffic, which was hardly surprising, given that a population of nearly one million people was crammed into the comparatively small area occupied by the city. Once clear of the city limits, the road turned northeast and ran just to the south of Jericho—the oldest fortified city in the world—before veering east toward the Jordanian border. When they reached the northern tip of the Dead Sea, Angela directed Bronson to take a right-hand turn, and they drove south, down through the Israeli kibbutz of Nahal Kalya, and on to the western side of the Dead Sea itself, the lowest point on the land surface of the earth. A short distance beyond that was Qumran.
The traffic was still fairly heavy, even after they’d escaped the snarling jams that plagued Jerusalem’s crowded streets, and there were several cars both ahead and behind them. What Bronson hadn’t noticed was that one of these vehicles—a white Peugeot with two occupants—had been behind them ever since they’d left Tel Aviv, never approaching closer than about seventy meters, but never losing sight of them.
As they’d driven through the territories of the West Bank, the scenery had changed, the generally fertile land to the west of Jerusalem giving way to a more rugged and inhospitable landscape, and as they approached Qumran it changed yet again, becoming ranges of rocky hills punctuated by deep gullies.
Qumran itself was located partway up a hillside, on a plateau about a mile to the west of the shore of the Dead Sea, offering spectacular views over the flat desert below. The ancient site was partially surrounded by beige-brown hills, banded with subtle shades that indicated different levels of strata. Some of them were pockmarked by dark, mainly irregular oval, openings. It was, Bronson thought, an extraordinarily forbidding place.
“The caves?” he asked, pointing to the west when they reached the plateau.
“The famous caves,” Angela agreed. “There are around two hundred and eighty in all, and most are between about one hundred yards and a mile from the settlement. Ancient remains have been found in nearly sixty of them, but the bulk of the Dead Sea Scrolls came from just eleven.
“The closest cave is only about fifty yards from the edge of the plateau, which is probably one reason why Father Roland de Vaux believed the inhabitants of Qumran were the authors of the scrolls. He simply didn’t believe that the Essenes—or whoever it was who lived here—wouldn’t have known about the caves and what was inside them. What could have been the remains of a series of shelves was found in one cave, and that led to a theory that the caves might have been used by the inhabitants of Qumran as their library. But, as I said before, there are a lot of problems with the whole Qumran-Essene hypothesis.” She took off her hat and mopped her forehead with a handkerchief that was already damp.
The heat was brutal. They were both sweating after the climb up from where they’d parked their car, and Bronson was glad they’d stopped at a shop near their hotel in Tel Aviv and bought wide-brimmed hats and several bottles of water. Dehydration would be a very real possibility if they weren’t careful.
“If the caves are that close,” Bronson said, “it would be surprising if the people who lived here didn’t know what was in them.”
“Agreed, but that doesn’t mean they were responsible for writing them. At best, they might perhaps have seen themselves as the guardians of the scrolls.”
Bronson looked down at the desolate landscape below the plateau, the featureless desert relieved only by occasional patches of green where small groups of trees of some kind barely clung to life. In the middle distance, the Dead Sea was a slash of brilliant blue, a vivid band of color that hid the desolate reality of the lifeless waters.
“Hell on earth,” he muttered, mopping his brow. “Why would anyone want to live in a place like this?”
Angela smiled at him. “At the start of the first millennium, this was an extremely fertile and very prosperous area,” she said. “You see those trees down there?” She pointed at the scattering of green patches on the desert floor that Bronson had already noticed. “Those few trees are all that’s now left of the old date plantations. History records that in biblical times the entire area stretching from the shores of the Dead Sea all the way up to Jericho and beyond was carpeted with date plantations. Jericho itself was known as the ‘town of dates,’ and Judean dates were enormously coveted, both as a foodstuff and for their alleged medicinal properties. In fact, the tree became accepted as a kind of national symbol of Judea. You can see that very easily on the
Judea Capta
coins the Romans minted after the fall of Jerusalem and the conquest of the country. They all show a date palm as part of the design on the reverse. But it wasn’t just dates. This area also produced balsam, apparently the best in the entire region.”
“And balsam is what, exactly?”
“It can be a lot of things, actually, from a flower up to a tree, but in Judea the word referred to a large shrub. It produced a sweet-smelling resin that had numerous applications in the ancient world, everything from medicine to perfume. And the region was also a major source of naturally occurring bitumen. One of the ancient names for the Dead Sea was
Lacus Asphaltites
, or Lake Asphaltitus, the lake of asphalt. That’s a pretty strange name for any body of water, and the reason it was called that was because large clumps of bitumen—also known as asphalt—could be recovered from its waters.”
“You mean bitumen and asphalt as in road-building? The black sticky stuff that holds everything together? What on earth use was that two thousand years ago?”
“For a seafaring nation it was vital, because they could use it to caulk the bottoms of their boats to make them watertight, but the Egyptians were the main customers of Dead Sea bitumen, and they had a very different use for it.”
“What?” Bronson asked.
“As part of the embalming process, the skull was filled with molten bitumen and aromatic resins. Bearing in mind that by about 300 BC the population of Egypt was nudging seven million, there was a lot of embalming going on and the bitumen trade was highly lucrative. Take my word for it, this was a really important part of Judea.”
Bronson looked round at the alien landscape. He found this hard to believe. To his untrained eyes, Qumran looked like nothing more than a confused jumble of stones, only some of which appeared to form walls. He thought of the turbulent history of the region, of the terrible privations the Essenes must have suffered as they tried to cope with the extreme heat, the lack of fresh water, and what had to be one of the most implacably hostile environments on the planet. To him, and despite the brilliant sunshine, Qumran and the whole surrounding area seemed sinister, perhaps even dangerous, in some indefinable way. He shivered slightly despite the baking temperature.