Authors: Michael Byrnes
Khaleel placed his right hand on Aaron’s shoulder and extended his left invitingly down the tunnel. “It may not look like much, but what it leads to is very special. Come.”
They walked abreast, the tunnel just wide enough to accommodate them.
Aaron flinched when he saw a scorpion darting along the earthen floor. Khaleel, however, paid it no mind as it skittered over his sandal.
“Your grandfather has told me you’ve learned quite a lot. ‘An excellent student,’ he says.”
“I know it is very important to study our history,” Aaron replied.
“Our history is the doorway to our future,” Khaleel agreed. “You have read about Onias and the tell?”
“Yes, sir ...I mean, Khaleel.”
To calm his anxiety, Aaron told him what he’d learned from reading Josephus’s detailed accounts in
The Jewish War.
In the second century b.c.e., Onias had been the high priest at the Jerusalem temple. He’d vehemently opposed the pagan sacrifices being allowed on Yahweh’s sacred altar. The temple had been poisoned by Hellenic culture—defiled. When the Syrian king Antiochus threatened war against the Jews, Onias fled to Alexandria to seek refuge under Ptolemy (who detested Antiochus). Onias was granted this land in what had then been the nome of Heliopolis. And here Onias had constructed a fortress city atop a man-made mound. Upon its highest point, he’d built a new sanctuary—a new temple to God, modeled after the one in Jerusalem, but on a smaller scale, and free from any pagan influences.
“It happened just as Isaiah prophesied,” Khaleel added. “The prophet told us that in a place called the City of the Sun, the language of Canaan would be spoken in the land of Egypt, and an altar to the Lord would rise up. And just as Isaiah had said, here is where the Savior came to begin His mission to rescue the Israelites.”
They walked further down the passage in silence. Halfway down the tunnel, they turned along a slight bend. The lighting remained dim, so Aaron could barely make out what lay at the tunnel’s terminus—a rectangular outline of some kind.
“You know what happened to Onias’s temple, yes?” Khaleel asked, testing him.
“The Romans burned it down. Not long after they destroyed the Jerusalem temple in seventy c.e.” Josephus, Aaron recalled, had been very explicit about that too. “The Romans were looking to destroy any hope of another Jewish rebellion. Not only was Onias a priest, but he had his own army here in Heliopolis. The Romans considered this the last Jewish stronghold—a rallying point for further sedition.”
“Excellent, young Aaron,” Khaleel said. “And since the days of Onias, time and nature have colluded without hindrance to reclaim what little remains of his grand temple city. Up there”—he pointed through the five meters of earth that hovered overhead—“we’re left with only ravaged foundations. But down here, Onias’s real legacy has been preserved. Are you ready to learn about it so that you may truly become a Son of Light?”
“Yes.”
“Are you ready to
see
it? To see what Onias’s army was protecting?”
See it?
“I ...I think so.” When he looked into Khaleel’s eyes, he experienced the same rush he’d felt when his father was about to bring him into Grandfather’s secret room—two men embarking on a journey. “You cannot be a Kohen without first going to Egypt,” Grandfather had told him. “There, everything you have learned will become clear.”
Khaleel’s voice suddenly dropped low. “Did your grandfather also tell you that Yeshua walked down this very same tunnel?”
This shocked Aaron. “Jesus?”
“That is right. As Isaiah foretold, the Savior came here, just as you have. To learn. To understand. To believe.”
They stopped at the intimidating steel door that materialized from the shadows.
As Khaleel worked a second key into its lock, he said, “And inside this room, Jesus was given God’s most wondrous gift.”
I am a Son of Light,
Cohen thought.
The earthen walls looked the same now as they had in 1974, with the exception of some steel reinforcement beams recently retrofitted along some of the crumbling ancient stone arches, and the electrical conduit that snaked between the modern overhead light fixtures.
Five meters below the surface, the subterranean passage ran a perfect line stretching two hundred meters to a secret chamber beneath Tel elYahudiyeh’s foundation. The dusty parcel situated directly above it attracted little attention, but it hosted the faint remains of a massive elliptical fortification built by the Hyksos in the seventeenth century b.c.e.; like the mound, the site was protected by the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities. Therefore, excavations required SCA authorization—virtually impossible to attain. The last meaningful excavation performed here had been in 1906 by Flinders Petrie (the incriminating findings were published in
Hyksos and Israelite Cities
)—and luckily, even though the renowned father of modern archaeology had pinpointed this as the city of Onias, he had not been granted permission to dig below the tell’s foundation.
At the tunnel’s terminus, the rabbi stopped in front of the second security door, which looked nothing like the one Khaleel had trusted to a simple lock and key. Unlike the tunnel and its improved entrance door, here Cohen had insisted upon major modifications. Regularly, new safeguards and enhancements were added to keep pace with ever-improving technology.
Cohen pressed his thumb on the lock’s scanner, then keyed in a second password. The panel flashed blue three times. The steel door’s mechanical guts came to life, multiple jamb bolts smoothly disengaging. The pressure seal released a small
pop
just before the door began opening along a smooth arc. Beyond, a dense matrix of iridescent green lasers snapped off.
Cohen entered the cube-shaped vault.
Stainless steel panels sheathed steel-reinforced zero-slump concrete slabs (with special additives that made their crush value ten times greater). Behind that, the two-meter-thick ancient block walls constructed by Onias’s builders had been maintained.
Cohen stared in wonderment at the supervault’s extraordinary centerpiece.
Less than a minute later seven priests in white tunics funneled through the entry and awaited instructions.
Jerusalem
Amit and Jules entered the Old City’s southern wall through the Zion Gate. They kept close to the stone sidewalls to avoid the cars negotiating the tight L-shaped bend in the tunnel.
“So exactly where are we going?” Jules asked in a loud voice. Amit had been tight-lipped as he parked the Land Rover in the tourist lot outside the gate. Contemplating a plan, she intuited.
Amit didn’t want to compete with the sounds of tire rubber squealing along the glass-smooth ancient paving stones. So he provided the answer only once they’d emerged into the Armenian Quarter along busy Shaar Tsiyon, lined with cafés and souvenir shops.
“We are going to the Jewish Quarter,” he told her.
Passing through a security checkpoint and metal detectors at the entrance to the Jewish Quarter, Amit only hoped that their sly pursuer wouldn’t be able to circumvent the metal detectors. A Mossad agent like Enoch could easily bypass security barriers. The agency’s outside contractors, however, didn’t have that luxury.
He brought Jules through the Roman Cardo, down through Hurva Square (where the only people she spotted were Hasidim), and through the narrow maze of streets that put them on Misgav Ladach. Finally, he stopped in front of a nondescript three-story building neatly edged in Jerusalem stone. A bronze placard engraved in Hebrew and English with the temple society hung above the unassuming entry, which seemed little more than a storefront.
“Here?” she asked, looking up at the sign. “What are we doing
here
?”
“Rabbi Cohen’s office,” he flatly replied, thumbing at the door. “I figured we might ask him if the scrolls were still in Yosi’s office when he met with him yesterday. If the scrolls had been moved, he might know it.”
“That’s your plan?”
Exactly the reaction he’d expected. “Got anything better?”
She put her hands on her hips and huffed. “Yikes. We are screwed.”
“To be determined,” he optimistically replied. He reached out and pulled the door open. “After you, mademoiselle.”
“Rrrr,” she growled as she walked past him.
They entered the reception foyer, whose walls were covered in Torahthemed scenes that would have impressed Michelangelo himself: Moses raising his staff to part the seas; Moses atop Sinai; Moses presenting God’s sacred commandments to the Israelites. A massive gold-plated menorah rose tall behind a reception desk. Seated directly beneath it was a middle-aged woman wearing an ultraconservative navy blouse buttoned to the collar. Like that of many Hasidic women, her thick, wavy hair was a wig.
“
Shalom aleichem,
” Amit greeted her.
She responded in kind, then asked, “May I help you?”
“Yes, I’ve come to speak with Rabbi Cohen,” Amit replied.
This seemed to confuse her. “Sorry, but my husband is out of the country on business. Did you have an appointment with him?”
“Not exactly,” Amit said, his optimism immediately deflated.
“Perhaps I might be of assistance then?” she pried. “What is it you’d like to speak with him about?”
“Well . . . ,” he sighed. “When do you expect him back from . . . ?” Amit let the words linger, hoping she’d fill in the blank. Surprisingly, she did.
“I expect him to return from Egypt this evening.”
“Cairo, was it?” Amit pressed.
That’s when Cohen’s wife realized that she’d already said too much. “If you’d like to leave your name, telephone number . . . I’ll certainly see that it gets to him.”
“That’s okay. I’m sure I’ll see him at the Rockefeller Museum. It’s nothing urgent.”
“Your name?”
Amit wasn’t about to give his own. “If you could tell him Yosi stopped by?”
“Certainly.”
“We came to see the museum as well,” Jules tactfully cut in, as if reminding Amit. She pointed to a sign above a door to Mt. Sinai’s left side— an arrow next to the word museum.
“That’s right,” Amit quickly agreed. “I heard you’ve recently remodeled the galleries?” He could tell this lightened Mrs. Cohen’s mood.
“We just reopened two weeks ago.”
“Then two tickets, please,” he cheerily replied, reaching for his wallet.
The spacious gallery was bustling with tourists, many of whom, Amit
could tell, were American Jews eager to decipher their heritage.
“Do we really have time for this?” he protested.
“Do you really want to draw more suspicion to yourself ?” Jules quickly rebutted. “Why didn’t you just go ahead and wrestle the woman? Besides, we might learn something here. And it’s certainly safer than walking the streets.”
In the main exhibit hall, the walls were covered in wonderfully detailed oil paintings—a virtual storyboard going back to 1300 b.c.e. to trace Moses and the Israelites along their grueling trek out of Egypt, through the forty-year desert pilgrimage and the centuries-long Canaan wars, to King David’s conquest of Jebus in 1000 b.c.e.—the capital city he’d renamed “Jerusalem”—and Solomon’s construction of the first temple shortly thereafter.
In a separate room, the Babylonian invasion and subsequent exile of the Jews was recounted on twelve framed canvases, and over three dozen more bridged the Jewish dynasties and occupying empires leading up to Rome and its destruction of Herod’s temple in 70 c.e. A large display table in the room’s center sat beneath a sign reading, in English and Hebrew, the third temple. Encased in a Plexiglas cube was an elaborate architectural model showing the Temple Society’s vision for a new Temple Mount, absent all Islamic buildings currently on the site, including the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque.
“What do we have here?” Jules asked, stepping up to it.
“That,” Amit said, “is what these guys think should be sitting on top of the Temple Mount—in place of the Dome of the Rock.”
“That’s one ambitious building project,” Jules whispered.
“Mmm.” Amit studied the model more levelly now, something clicking in his thoughts. This wasn’t the re-creation of Herod’s temple that many of Cohen’s conservative predecessors had imagined, but a modern complex of glass and stone set in three concentric courtyards, each with twelve gates. The design seemed vaguely familiar. But he couldn’t place it.
They moved on to the next exhibit room, where rectangular glass kiosks housed authentic replicas of the sacred vessels to furnish the Third Temple. Amit explained some of them to Jules: the gold-plated ceremonial shofar ram’s horn, the handled gold cup called the
mizrak
used to collect sacrificial blood, the ornate silver shovel used to collect ash from burnt offerings, the Table of Showbread to display the twelve loaves representing the Israelite tribes, the crimson lottery box used during Yom Kippur to draw lots for sin offerings, and the gold oil pitcher used to replenish menorah lamps. There were even beautifully crafted harps and lyres for Levitical priests to play orchestral music in the temple courtyards.
“Seems like they’re ready to move in,” Jules said in a hushed tone.
“Indeed.”
“And what do we have over here?” she asked, eyeing a life-sized mannequin wearing a cobalt robe interlaced with gold thread, a gold breastplate encrusted with twelve gems, and an elegant turban with a gold tiara. “Who’s the genie?”
Amit chuckled. “Those are the vestments for the temple’s high priest.”
“Snazzy,” she said, shaking her head.
Amit read the placard aloud: “And to Moses God said”—he took the liberty of saying “God” where the placard read “G-d” in compliance with the Jewish law forbidding the writing out of God’s name—“ ‘Have your brother Aaron, with his sons . . . come to you from the Israelites to serve Me as priests . . . You are to instruct all the skilled craftsmen, whom I have filled with the spirit of wisdom, to make Aaron’s garments for consecrating him to serve Me . . .’ ” The excerpt was noted as Exodus 28.
But Jules was already moving on to the next display.