Dead Sea Scrolls: The Copper Scroll

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Speaker 1 So I'm in the Jordan Museum at Amman and we're in this small exhibition room.

Speaker 1 It's black walls and it's a very special place because here they have some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, one of the most extraordinary archaeological discoveries ever made in the Holy Land and indeed in the story of archaeology as a whole.

Speaker 1 Now what I can see straight away in front of me they have a few different scrolls here in Jordan and looking at the detail that survives they are fragments of parchment but the writing this old Hebrew writing, a dialect of ancient Hebrew, well it's incredibly well preserved and it almost looks like it was written a few days ago.

Speaker 1 And these scrolls, a few of them, they refer to parts of the Old Testament. There's Ecclesiastes down there, there's a passage from Isaiah on that scroll too.

Speaker 1 And this is one of the great claims to fame of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It's the oldest surviving examples we have of the Hebrew Bible, of what we call the Old Testament, more than 2,000 years old.

Speaker 1 Now the scrolls survive because they were preserved in caves at the site of Qumran, in the West Bank.

Speaker 1 They were discovered by a local Bedouin shepherd in 1947, so so just after the end of World War II, deep in a series of caves at the site of Qumran, believed to be the location of an ancient Jewish sect some 2,000 years ago called the Essenes.

Speaker 1 And many of these scrolls were preserved in what I'm looking at right now, these large storage vessels. It was within them that the scrolls were found when they were opened up.

Speaker 1 Hundreds of fragments were discovered, these parchments, these pieces of paper, of Jewish religious literature.

Speaker 1 Not just pieces of the Old Testament but also sectarian works relating to the Essenes and how they viewed life and their code of conduct.

Speaker 1 But amongst all of these fragments, amongst all of these scrolls there was one very special one and also a very different one because it's not to do with Jewish religious literature from antiquity.

Speaker 1 And it wasn't also made of parchment. It was made of copper and I'm looking at it right now.

Speaker 1 This is the copper scroll and it's sometimes called the ancient treasure map because it is very very different to the rest.

Speaker 1 What I can see in front of me is this copper scroll divided, it's been cut up into 23 strips.

Speaker 1 Now the story behind the copper scroll is that it was discovered slightly later in the early 1950s at the back of cave 3 at Qumran and because it was made of copper, 99% copper, 1% tin, by the time it was discovered it had become heavily oxidised, so it had compressed and almost formed a cylinder.

Speaker 1 And at first, those who discovered it, they didn't know how to open it without damaging the writing, and they wanted to preserve the writing when they opened it.

Speaker 1 So they designed a very special type of saw.

Speaker 1 And the scroll was cut up in Manchester in the later 1950s. And what it has revealed are almost instructions of where to find gold and silver.

Speaker 1 You have to imagine this scroll, at the moment what I'm looking at is 23 different strips of this scroll but originally it was one big scroll it was one single text and some of the details that survive it's written in old Hebrew too it refers to various locations where this treasure was buried.

Speaker 1 It's not talking about one central location but in total it's talking about roughly 120 tons of gold and silver.

Speaker 1 That's billions in today's money and one particular example I love is in column two and it talks about how if someone was looking for this treasure they would have to go to a filled up system and then descend the stairs go to the bottom of the stairs and there they would find 42 talents of silver.

Speaker 1 Now a talent was an ancient weighing system for weighing the amount of gold and silver and it was particularly prevalent in the Hebrew culture.

Speaker 1 Now a talent, it was a lot and so 40 talents was a lot of gold and silver. So these are instructions of where to find parts of this great treasure.

Speaker 1 In total, this adds up to some 120 tons of gold and silver. But what do we know about the treasure itself?

Speaker 1 Well, sadly, barely anything, because although attempts have been made to try and locate parts of this treasure from what's been said on the scroll, no one has ever been able to find it.

Speaker 1 There have been various theories as to what this treasure refers to.

Speaker 1 One theory is that it's talking about the treasure that was taken from the great temple of Jerusalem before it was sacked and burned to the ground by the Romans at the end of the Jewish revolt.

Speaker 1 However, many people contest that and there is no solid proof to show that because this treasure has never been found.

Speaker 1 And there are some that even believe that actually the treasure that this scroll is referring to never actually existed and in fact that this copper scroll is a fake.

Speaker 1 Regardless, it is an extraordinary artefact. It's unique, the only copper scroll in existence from the Dead Sea Scrolls and an ancient treasure map that talks about undiscovered riches.

Speaker 1 It all feels very Indiana Jonesy. Perhaps it will be discovered one day.
Perhaps more likely it never will.

Speaker 18 It's the Ancients on History Hit.

Speaker 1 I'm Tristan Hughes, your host.

Speaker 19 And today we're covering, yep, you guessed it, the amazing artifact that is the Copper Scroll, this ancient treasure map very different to the rest of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Speaker 19 Now, following that introduction from me, seeing the many strips that make up the Copper Scroll in the Jordan Museum today, we now have an interview with one of the leading experts on the Copper Scroll and its contents, none other than Dr.

Speaker 19 Joan Taylor from King's College London. Joan, she's been on the podcast twice before as the expert for an episode about Mary Magdalene and then for another one about Bethlehem in antiquity.

Speaker 18 Now Joan's back to talk through the story of the Copper Scroll, a story that has quickly become one of my favourites. Enjoy.

Speaker 1 Joan, it is a pleasure to have you back on the podcast and to do it in person.

Speaker 16 We are together in the same room. This is amazing.
Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1 The copper scroll. It's an extraordinary story.
It's such a mystifying object, the copper scroll.

Speaker 16 It is a mystifying object and people still don't quite understand it.

Speaker 16 It's one of those objects that have been found and everyone hailed as absolutely fantastic, a brilliant archaeological discovery, and no one really knows what to do with it and no one knows what it relates to exactly.

Speaker 1 Always associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls. But Joan, what exactly is the copper scroll?

Speaker 16 So the copper scroll is a scroll made of copper, which is a simple answer.

Speaker 16 However, the other Dead Sea scrolls are not made of copper, they're largely made of a kind of very fine leather, sort of a manuscript, a parchment manuscript, or papyrus found in caves by the Dead Sea, very momentous discovery from 1949 onwards, these incredible scrolls, largely biblical, all sorts of other bits and pieces, Second Temple Judaism, really revealed by these little fragments of text that we knew very little about.

Speaker 16 So the Dead Sea Scrolls overall are a fantastic discovery. It's a library that illuminates the first century BCE and the first century CE and how people thought at that time.
But the copper scroll

Speaker 16 is nothing like that. Even though it was found in one of the caves where other Dead Sea Scrolls were found, it's just a list of finding places of treasure.

Speaker 1 You've given it away there, but this is one thing to highlight straight away.

Speaker 1 Although it's always associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls, it is so different to the rest of these scrolls that we have, but and also discovered alongside those others in these caves, isn't it?

Speaker 1 The site of Qumran, isn't it? So it's such a It's a weird story in that it's so different to the rest, and yet it's discovered in a very similar location.

Speaker 16 It's discovered in exactly the same location in Cave 3Q, as it's called.

Speaker 16 And this is a cave about two kilometers north of Qumran, this ancient archaeological site, this site that seems to have been first constructed by Jewish priest-kings in the early first century BCE and then taken over by a particular group called the Essenes.

Speaker 16 I subscribe to that hypothesis. So who are the Essenes?

Speaker 16 The Essenes are a kind of legal school of Second Temple Judaism and they had a particular interpretation of Bible and how to do law and philosophy really.

Speaker 16 And they had a lifestyle, a distinctive lifestyle that was more concerned with purity. than other Jews of their time.

Speaker 16 So the Essenes were particular and it seems that they were living at the site of Qumran and it seems that they were were responsible for putting all of these amazing scrolls in caves around the site of Qumran.

Speaker 16 I think personally, they were putting them in caves over many years. They were almost burying them for longevity.

Speaker 16 They were thinking about preserving them for the end time when all would be revealed, because they had the name of God on them, and they didn't want to destroy the name of God.

Speaker 16 So they were carefully burying these sacred scriptures. So there's an attitude of reverence in putting these scrolls in these caves.
And we've got 11 caves for sure.

Speaker 16 We know that there were scrolls placed in. There were probably all sorts of other caves as well where scrolls were placed.
We just don't have the scrolls from those caves.

Speaker 16 We have maybe bits of pottery or textile, but not the scrolls.

Speaker 16 But in amongst those caves, in cave three,

Speaker 16 they discovered not only the typical scrolls of the Dead Sea Scrolls, fragments of different biblical books and some other unidentified fragments, but they found this copper scroll.

Speaker 16 And the amazing thing is that this was found by archaeologists. It was one of the few caves where archaeologists went into a cave and found what was inside it.

Speaker 16 Most of the Dead Sea Scrolls have been found by Bedouin.

Speaker 1 Because this was the story, wasn't it? That's the story we've done in the previous podcast about the other Dead Sea Scrolls.

Speaker 1 As you say, they're kind of found by chance in following World War II, isn't it? It's around that time. But this one is actually done with the proper excavation.

Speaker 16 Exactly. So that should make it fantastic because you've got archaeologists actually going in and doing a proper archaeological excavation.
The problem was

Speaker 16 that in 1952 when the cave was discovered, there was a certain amount of haste about the archaeological excavation, and it was never fully published.

Speaker 16 So the team that went into Cave 3Q was led by an archaeologist, Henri de Contenson, a very eminent archaeologist. He had a group with him.

Speaker 16 They went into the cave and they did some excavation and they took the things out of the cave.

Speaker 16 But he never fully published a really proper archaeological report with plans and stratigraphy and where exactly each find was located within the cave.

Speaker 16 And that was partly because

Speaker 16 people were interested in the contents of the cave.

Speaker 16 They were interested in what the scrolls were about, but they weren't so interested in all the archaeology and all the kind of information that we now know can be gained from archaeology.

Speaker 16 So it's rather frustrating in that you have different reports about where exactly the copper scroll was found within the cave. And that adds to its mystery because some people,

Speaker 16 like myself, I wonder whether the copper scroll was placed in the cave sometime after

Speaker 16 the parchment, the Dead Sea Scrolls proper, if you want to call them that, were placed in the cave. because there's a question about the dating of the copper scroll.

Speaker 1 Which we're going to get to.

Speaker 16 Yes. So it would be so nice to know if it was in a position where you could have put it in some at some point later on in the cave.

Speaker 1 Because the cave, let's say cave three, where the copper scroll is found, I mean, can you kind of paint a picture of what this cave looks like?

Speaker 1 Are we thinking a big open cave or is this in the middle of an arid landscape? I mean were there many different chambers?

Speaker 16 Well, I visited the cave for the first time only a few years ago and it was really great to go there.

Speaker 16 I went with the archaeologist Shimon Gibson and we explored there with my husband Paul as well and of course when you go to an archaeological site like that you have to be very careful you don't move anything.

Speaker 16 It's not widely known where it is because you don't want just any old visitor turning up. So you don't get a sign saying this is Cave 3Q, follow the track.
It's not open to the public.

Speaker 16 But if you do your homework you can find out where exactly it is. But you have to be very, very respectful of going to a site like this.

Speaker 16 It's been excavated again quite recently by the École Biblique and other archaeologists who are now putting out a new book, really trying to pull together all of the archaeology of the cave.

Speaker 16 And I was really following in their footsteps to just check out. you know what it looked like now the the form of the cave now has changed a lot since its early excavation.

Speaker 1 Since 50 years ago, wow.

Speaker 16 It has been, it was re-excavated in the 1990s.

Speaker 16 So various people have gone to the cave and done stuff to it. So it's certainly not pristine.
It's not as it was left in 1952.

Speaker 16 But from what we gather, and I've met Henri de Courtenson in Paris and talked to him about the excavation. As far as we know,

Speaker 16 it was not immediately visible.

Speaker 16 They managed to break through a small opening and then a cave opened up to them.

Speaker 16 And

Speaker 16 what they saw inside was

Speaker 16 a pile of pots in the middle of the cave. And

Speaker 16 there was rats' nests. And it had clearly been entered by vermin that had eaten the parchment, which was why there was not much left of the parchment.

Speaker 16 But they didn't immediately find the copper scroll because the copper scroll was in a niche and it was it was hidden by soil it was covered up by soil so as they excavated as they dug around then the copper scroll came to light in this little niche but what is not clear and henri de cottenson indicated this is where the original entrance for the cave was So was the copper scroll near the front of the cave or around the middle of the cave or at the back of the cave?

Speaker 16 That just depends on how you reconstruct the cave as it was at the time that the scrolls were placed in it.

Speaker 1 And that's also

Speaker 1 an important point to try and understand where and the context in which it was placed, which as you've hinted at and we'll get to later leads to the whole dating question of the copper scroll.

Speaker 1 With the discovery of the copper scroll in that particular cave, this might initially seem like an easy question, but actually this is a mind-blowing question in itself.

Speaker 1 Copper, it's been there for some 2,000 years, just under 2,000 years. When it's discovered, what did it look like?

Speaker 1 I remember it looked very different.

Speaker 16 Well, exactly. It was green and it was broken into two rolls.
So that in itself is kind of interesting that they didn't roll it up in one.

Speaker 16 It would have originally been

Speaker 16 a long copper scroll made of really beautiful, high-quality copper.

Speaker 1 So it was like 99% copper.

Speaker 16 99% copper, natural copper with only 1% of tin in it. So most copper today, and I've actually got a piece of copper over there that I was going to show you.
Oh, as you do. Yes, absolutely.

Speaker 16 We'll do a social video at the end, absolutely.

Speaker 16 But that has got more tin mixed into it and it's not so pliable that's the kind of copper that you can buy now but pure copper is a treasure in itself so when you think about the treasure of the copper scroll and what the copper scroll means you've got to remember that the copper scroll itself is a treasure to have this much copper so whoever had the copper scroll who who

Speaker 16 who wanted to to put it in the cave and wrote on it they would have had resources to buy this really, really beautiful copper. Now,

Speaker 16 in order to make it pliable it would have been annealed, it would have been heated.

Speaker 1 So what do you mean by annealed?

Speaker 16 It has to be dealt with by someone who is a metal specialist. You can't just get a whole lot of copper and think that everything is going to be fine and you can just write on it.

Speaker 1 Just hammer it out and see it.

Speaker 16 Yeah, you have to be careful about it.

Speaker 16 I don't know all of the different details of managing copper, but I have read enough to know that you have to have a specialist in how to deal with copper. It's in three sheets.

Speaker 16 The total length is 2.4 meters so it's very very long.

Speaker 1 2.3 meters.

Speaker 16 About 2.4 meters. 2.4 meters, my apologies.
So that's very long and the three sheets, the reason why it was rolled up in two is that one of the sheets broke so they had these joins.

Speaker 16 They meant to roll it up altogether, but instead they were so hasty as they rolled it up. One broke off.
What's interesting is they didn't go, oh, let's take some time to put it back together again.

Speaker 16 Let's make sure everything is neat and tidy. They went, fine, it's okay, just roll it up, we'll just deal with it as it is, we'll stick it in the cave.
You know, so that indicates something about

Speaker 16 people doing this in a hurry, which again ties in with the fact that there is treasure indicated in the scroll, that they are hiding treasure in the face of some kind of threat.

Speaker 16 There's a calamity, a future calamity that's quite near to them. They're hiding this treasure.
They're putting the place they've hidden it on this copper scroll, but they're hiding it in a hurry.

Speaker 16 They're not rolling it up and making it all neat and tidy. When it was found, as I said, it was green, it was also oxidized and totally, totally hard.

Speaker 16 So when it was found in 1952, people could see on the outside of the scroll that there were Hebrew letters and the original scholars looking at it were trying to read sort of mirror writing from the outside of the scroll to see what the contents were because they were pressed through the copper and you could see the writing on the other side.

Speaker 16 But they couldn't read the inside of the scroll.

Speaker 1 Oh, because you say oxidized and that is why because I was seeing footage from the 1950s and we'll get to that. You've also entered up the treasure which we will get to.

Speaker 1 We're nearing there but first we need to talk about the unraveling.

Speaker 1 The oxidized, so originally more than two meters long, but because of that oxidization, is that why it looked so cylinder-like, quite crumpled when it was discovered?

Speaker 16 Yeah, absolutely. It did look like two cylinders, completely rolled up, absolutely as hard as anything.
The idea that you could actually open up the copper scroll and read what was inside seemed to be

Speaker 16 like, how would you do this in the 1950s? Now we have, of course, AI and all sorts of wonderful things. We could probably have done it rather differently.

Speaker 16 But then they just thought, we've got to read what's inside this. But they thought about it, they talked about it.
And it wasn't immediate.

Speaker 16 It certainly wasn't an immediate thing that they thought, right, let's chop it open.

Speaker 1 You've got to give them the game away, Joan. So, what do they ultimately decide and where? What's the story of how the copper scroll is, well, metallically unraveled?

Speaker 16 So it was really John Allegro, who was the Jordanian advisor on the Dead Sea Scrolls at that time, very close to the Hashemite royal family. He was based at the University of Manchester.

Speaker 16 He knew people in Manchester and he knew Henry Wright-Baker at the Manchester Institute of Technology. And basically Wright-Baker and John Allegro worked out what needed to be done.

Speaker 16 And Wright-Baker said, I have a plan

Speaker 16 and I can cut the scroll open, the two rolls open, very carefully, with a very fine instrument, a cutting instrument, and I will do it and everything will be well.

Speaker 16 And John Allegro took wonderful documentary photographs and a video, a video, I should say, a film, a cine film, of the opening of the first roll. Baker, I think, looks quite calm.

Speaker 1 That man's got some confidence, doesn't he?

Speaker 1 If he's literally soaring in to this, I always don't like using the word unique, but it feels this very special object unlike any others found in the caves and to try and open it you're bringing a saw to it i mean yeah he's got some confidence that guy i think he must have he must have had nerves of steel to cut through the copper

Speaker 16 the first role in 1955 the jordanians would have hung back a bit on the second role just in case it didn't work out too well And then the second role was done in 1956.

Speaker 16 And you can see in the photographs this careful slicing through the roll from outside to the inside

Speaker 16 and of course when he did that he had no idea what he was slicing through. He had to slice through letters.
There was no other alternative.

Speaker 16 He did it very carefully and then all the roles were laid out and finally Don Allegro and others could read them.

Speaker 1 And that is why today if you type in the copper scroll or as I've been very fortunate to do quite recently go to the new Jordan Museum in Amman and you go to the room where the copper scroll is laid out it is literally just in strip after strip after strip because of how it was very specially unraveled and you can see points where you know it was bound to happen that sometimes with the stripping it's gone through the middle of a particular of a particular letter on the scroll but that is why it is such a an interesting artifact is how it's laid out as well in that strip fashion.

Speaker 16 Yes, yeah. It's quite beautiful, I I think when you see all the strips together the way it's displayed 23 strips now, some wider, some smaller, the ones inside are smaller.
It is readable.

Speaker 16 I think anyone who can read Hebrew can make out letters, can make out a few words, you scrutinize it and you can read it. But the trouble is you can read it in various different ways

Speaker 16 because the script is strange. So everything about the cop scroll is strange.

Speaker 1 How do you mean strange? Is it a particular type of Hebrew?

Speaker 16 It's a particular kind of Hebrew. It's a later form of Hebrew than the rest of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which is also an issue in terms of its dating.
It's a Mishnaic type of Hebrew.

Speaker 16 It's got distinctive features of the language and it's got Greek in it, which is distinctive of later Hebrew as well. But that's the actual content.

Speaker 16 But the letters are very hard to even though you can read Hebrew, it's difficult to know the difference between, say, the letter H,

Speaker 16 a hey and a het

Speaker 16 is basically the same. They're two types of sound.

Speaker 16 Or a B and an R

Speaker 16 look very much the same in the Hebrew. And various other letters look almost identical.
A yod and a wow, so that's a Y and a W or U, They look the same.

Speaker 16 And there's distinctive spellings as well to add to it. Almost as if someone wasn't that adept in terms of literacy, this idiosyncratic ways of spelling.
So

Speaker 16 what is going on?

Speaker 16 Who wrote it?

Speaker 16 Was it a scribe who just really couldn't do letters properly on

Speaker 16 copper and just thought, oh, you know, I'll do my best?

Speaker 16 Or was it someone who who had a master copy and was trying to copy that onto a replicate copper um who had it already written out on parchment or bits of parchment where they're trying to combine different things together in a in copper writing it's not usually with a a parchment scroll

Speaker 16 you would write it with ink of course this is all pressed with three different instruments, two that are straight and one that is curved and someone was pressing the letters in with these instruments onto the soft copper.

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Speaker 1 When this was being deciphered, when you have all of these strips and you're looking at, I said sometimes quite enigmatic words, you say can be interpreted in different ways.

Speaker 1 It's not very easy to see, but it can be interpreted.

Speaker 1 For those people who are deciphering it, who are looking at it, was it a case of just laying out those strips in a line and seeing if it's kind of almost lined up?

Speaker 1 Because I'm guessing if it was originally kind of a two-meter long strip, that it's not just one strip will reveal one part of it.

Speaker 1 the one strip will reveal the beginning of the first line, the second line, the third line, and then you need the next strip and the next strip to read more along the line, the top line, then the second line, and so on.

Speaker 16 That's right. The strips don't correspond to the columns, all right? So there's 12 columns of the copper scroll and the cuts are made in the middle of the columns.

Speaker 16 So in that way, you know, having the scroll written in columns replicates how things are written in parchment.

Speaker 16 So the columns of the Isaiah scroll, for example, the great Isaiah scroll you can see in the Israel Museum.

Speaker 16 You have a long strip rolled up, but then people would unroll and read a column and then roll a little bit further and read the next column so they're replicating that but in copper because that's kind of their template this is how things are written so generally I can imagine it differs in places but is it roughly two strips equals one column of writing almost it depends on the width

Speaker 1 because it really because of course when they're when they were putting the saw to the copper scroll they wouldn't have known that but it's interesting so it isn't just that that's clarified clarified something in my mind straight away.

Speaker 1 It's not just one line along the top, all the way along the top below two meters.

Speaker 1 Exactly. It is dividing itself into almost subsections of column after column after column, replicating what it's shown and said in the Dead Sea Scrolls and stuff like that.

Speaker 16 Exactly, yes, but they're always cut into. There's always a cut through the columns.
Sometimes two cuts through one column.

Speaker 16 So, and then weirdly, there's a bit of space at the very end. So whoever was writing it

Speaker 16 tries to mash together a lot of letters as they're getting near the end and then only to find that there's a lot there's more space

Speaker 16 used.

Speaker 16 So there was a clear idea about what was going to be in it but just not necessarily a clear idea of how much space there was right at the very end and again that indicates haste.

Speaker 16 No one's doing this in a very, very careful way. So there's this weird mismatch

Speaker 16 between extremely expensive material of copper and idiosyncratic, not very good writing that isn't done exceptionally well, neatly. So what's going on there?

Speaker 1 What is going on? Well, we'll get to that answer because, well, the theories to that in this next part. But first of all, I feel we need to mention, as you've hinted at already, the treasure.

Speaker 1 So it talks about treasure, doesn't it?

Speaker 16 So, I mean, first of all, Joan, give us an overview of, I mean, what types of treasure does this scroller talk about and then we can focus in on a particular example a particular column well there are 64 probably 64 fine spots but there is some discussion about how many fine spots there are and they are very much fine spots because the instructions are given to someone who is going to find treasure.

Speaker 1 So this is almost like X marks the spot.

Speaker 16 It totally is. So go here, dig four qubits down, you will find this.

Speaker 16 It's designed for someone to uncover something that has been hidden, that is very valuable.

Speaker 16 And what has been hidden seems to be a large amount of silver,

Speaker 16 but a lot of gold as well.

Speaker 16 And most likely, these...

Speaker 16 this is in the form of coins which was the the usual form of silver and gold but you could get ingots as well and sometimes we get indications that there are vessels.

Speaker 16 Sometimes mention of clay, some kind of clay receptacle, which ties in with what we know from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the scrolls themselves and Cave 1, Q were put in clay vessels. So that's nice.

Speaker 16 We know that that's the same mentality of the people who were burying the treasure to the people that were burying the scrolls.

Speaker 1 Is that the version almost of a treasure chest kind of thing back in the time?

Speaker 16 Sometimes they mention chests. They mention chests.

Speaker 16 We do have actually a chest of treasure.

Speaker 16 But there's also references to tithe vessels or donations of tithes. And tithes were temple taxes.
They were what you gave to the temple, the administrative centre of Judea in...

Speaker 16 the first century BCE, first century CE.

Speaker 16 Everyone who lived in Judea was expected to give a certain amount of money to to the temple. So we've immediately got this tie-in between the temple and the treasure.

Speaker 16 The temple was like a gigantic bank. A lot of temples in the ancient world were also banks.
We don't think of them as banks.

Speaker 1 Well, Jesus of Nazareth, isn't it?

Speaker 1 Hence why he goes to the temple and kind of

Speaker 1 throws that stuff away because it was the tax collecting, wasn't it?

Speaker 16 Well, he knew that this was a place where people gave money. He talks about the widow, the widow's might, giving a very small coin to the temple funds.
Everyone would go to the temple and give money.

Speaker 16 That was where money was held, that belonged to the nation. It would be

Speaker 16 used for certain things that would be beneficial to people. There was temple charity that was dispersed.

Speaker 16 So it was the economic system of the nation of Judea, the temple and its administrative functions were a lot about just looking after the nation.

Speaker 16 It would also sometimes need to fund other things and it could be used badly by various different rulers to do all sorts of things that they shouldn't do.

Speaker 16 But yeah, it was the treasury of the nation.

Speaker 16 So if you've got a reference to temple treasure, temple tithes, we're clearly in this world of temple administration, whoever is is writing the copper scroll has access to that and has the resources to buy the copper so we've got some link in with the jerusalem temple and yet they're being quite hasty when they're writing it you say well it seems like they are always put it seems like so of course you can't say absolutely for certain but let's focus on one particular point of treasure or at least treasures mentioned as a particular column because i know you wanted to talk in detail and it's great talking especially in parts focus in parts on the story of the copper scroll and we go to column one if I'm correct Joan column one because this has got some interesting examples on it well I think yes nothing beats actually looking at it in detail you have got one here what I've got not that not column one I must clarify you haven't got the copper scroll

Speaker 16 here with us unfortunately there is a replica of it in Manchester in the Manchester University Museum in their storeroom they've got a lovely replica that they made before it was opened.

Speaker 16 So if you want to see it the way it was before it was opened, it's there. It's not on display at the moment because they're doing renovation works.

Speaker 16 But I have seen that replica and held that replica and they really try and make it exactly as it was. But yeah, so imagine you've opened up the copper scroll.
Finally, you've got...

Speaker 16 the column one of the copper scroll and you're reading it and you're managing to read it. What you see is these lines of Hebrew letters.
There's no spaces between them.

Speaker 16 There's a couple of cuts in the column. You've joined them together.
And you read up off from the top, from the right-hand side, the first words.

Speaker 1 So is it right to left?

Speaker 16 It's right to left, the first column of the cover scroll. You read from the right to the left and go down through it.

Speaker 16 And what you read is in, and I won't read up the Hebrew, in the ruin, which is in the valley of Akor,

Speaker 16 under the steps leading to the east, at 40 half-brick cubits, there is a chest of silver and its vessels, a weight of 17 talents, followed by the Greek letters

Speaker 16 in English, K-E-N,

Speaker 16 Ken, Kappa, Epsilon, and nun.

Speaker 16 Yes.

Speaker 16 So that is how the copper scroll begins. It doesn't have any introduction.
It assumes whoever has found the copper scroll and is finding the spots knows what this is about

Speaker 16 and also knows where the valley of Akor is

Speaker 16 and can identify the ruin. So I'm reading out from Emile Puash's translation of 2015, which has now become the standard translation of the copper scroll.

Speaker 16 And it seems to be pretty well agreed upon that this is how it reads. But this in itself is such a mystery.
You just,

Speaker 16 okay, in the ruin which is in the valley of Akor.

Speaker 1 Is that not a name that is known today?

Speaker 1 Is it a mystery as in we don't know what the valley of Akor is?

Speaker 16 Well, unfortunately, after 2,000 years,

Speaker 16 it would be so lovely if we could go, oh, yes, the valley of Akor, there it is.

Speaker 16 But even though it's mentioned in the Bible and other

Speaker 16 people later on, like Eusebius in the fourth century, mentions the valley of Akor. They do mention the valley of Arabia.
They do mention the valley of Akor.

Speaker 16 It's not clear exactly which of the valleys somewhere near Jericho it actually refers to. So we have a range of valleys that the ruin could relate to.

Speaker 16 One of the things that is quite interesting though is there is mention of steps in a valley. And if you've got steps in a valley, you would think actually of a bridge.

Speaker 16 So archaeologists might be well served thinking about which valleys going into Jericho, because we are in the environment of Jericho.

Speaker 16 through the clues of different bits and pieces of the copper scroll, might have had a bridge.

Speaker 1 Forgive me, it might be a silly question, but why do you think of a bridge with steps rather than, let's say, steps ascending up

Speaker 1 a side of the mountain on the cliffside or one of the valleys kind of thing?

Speaker 16 Good question. Now, one of the things about valleys in Judea, in Palestine generally, is that they fill with water.
Right, okay.

Speaker 16 Their flood waters really from rainfall up in the hills, and then they go down through these wadis, as they're called, into the main valleys like the Jordan Valley or the Dead Sea.

Speaker 16 So if you've got a valley, you don't build a structure at the bottom of a valley. So it's definitely not a building with steps going up to it.

Speaker 16 It will be a bridge over a valley with steps going up on some sides.

Speaker 16 So there's little clues there. The more you go into every part of the copper scroll, you can think, okay, what are they really referring to? How can we visualize what they're seeing?

Speaker 16 But certainly, there's lots of indications that the person who was expected to find this treasure is part of the same milieu as the person who has written this and knows where a lot of sites are that we do not know.

Speaker 1 Because I must admit, Joan, as we're also listening to that one, and I'll ask if it's similar with other columns. It seems it's a very methodical approach.

Speaker 1 It lays out the general area, as you say, an area that the person who was reading it or expected to read it would know, the value of Accor.

Speaker 1 Then it goes on to highlight a particular area there, and then it gives you almost the specific instructions of where to dig X-Marks a spot and what you would find. Exactly.

Speaker 1 Is that repeated again and again?

Speaker 16 Yes, that is the formula that is repeated over and over and over. It's here you are, this is what you're seeing.
Look at that ruin, count a certain amount of cubits.

Speaker 16 A cubit was about 40 centimetres or half cubit or, you know, this is a half brick cubit.

Speaker 16 And then you have to go somewhere. It's not necessarily digging.
I think people with the copper scroll sometimes think, oh, we just have to dig.

Speaker 16 Sometimes it seems to be along a water course and you find a particular stone and you go under the stone. It seems to be from the position of the person.

Speaker 16 So are you looking sometimes up rather than thinking about digging down? If you're in a ruin, it might be you look at a particular part of the ruin upwards.

Speaker 16 So there's no clue about whether we're looking up or down, but somehow it's supposed to be obvious to the person standing in a particular location that the copper scroll writer has indicated.

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Speaker 1 Once again, such a special document because of all of that information and, you know, so much wealth being talked about in such a pretty strange way in how it's written.

Speaker 1 I must admit, given that translation and given how you've explained how people who know the area and archaeologists who've examined this work can start, even though the areas are not known today, get more of a hint as to what they're talking about.

Speaker 1 Have archaeologists in particular, have any of them gone and tried to look for this treasure?

Speaker 16 Indeed, they have.

Speaker 16 Not Indiana Jones, but John Allegro himself, he was absolutely fascinated by the copper scroll.

Speaker 16 You can imagine, as a scholar, to discover this and for him to be so connected with the Jordanian royal family. They helped him.

Speaker 16 There was a British expedition, the Dead Sea Scrolls expedition, that he ran over several years, in fact, going out and trying to identify the places. And he was in.

Speaker 16 Allegro was enormously knowledgeable about the Bible and Bible places. He had resources.

Speaker 16 He had immense expertise in terms of reading Hebrew and other languages. And he went from one place to the next and he didn't find anything.

Speaker 16 He really thought that he was on the trail of where these places were. But other places, other people have gone out.

Speaker 16 There was

Speaker 16 a particular location, the cave of the column, that was exciting to a certain group at one time. And they excavated in that cave and they found various things, but not the treasure.

Speaker 16 And it's just one of those things that it's not as clear as you wish it would be.

Speaker 16 It's possible that all of the locations are actually in quite a small area. Sometimes people have been looking around Jerusalem because it seems like there's a reference to the Kidron at one point.

Speaker 1 Sorry, the Kidron is?

Speaker 16 The Kidron is a valley that goes all the way from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea.

Speaker 16 So

Speaker 16 which side of the Kidron are you supposed to be looking at? If it's the Dead Sea side, you're some way south of Qumran. So maybe we've got locations

Speaker 16 in between the Kidron and Jericho, because Jericho is a location that's clearly mentioned in the Copper Scroll, but anything in relation to Jericho is hard to identify.

Speaker 1 And is it largely believed by archaeologists that, even though it hasn't been discovered yet, that the treasures that this scroll is referring to, that they were real?

Speaker 16 Unfortunately, not everyone thinks they are real.

Speaker 16 In fact, when Joseph Millick published the first official edition of the Copper Scroll in the DJD series, The Discoveries in the Judean Desert, and wrote about it, he said, it's probably not real.

Speaker 16 And the reason was

Speaker 16 Partly because at that time they thought of the Essenes, the people who lived at Qumran, as very much a breakaway sect who had nothing to do with the temple, who were not in line with the thinking of the people who were in charge of the temple, and they had their own sort of alternative ways of doing things away from the temple.

Speaker 16 But now I think that view isn't quite so secure.

Speaker 16 The people who were at Qumran, even if you don't think of them as Essenes, they seem to have an awful lot of stuff in the Dead Sea Scrolls that is very concerned with the temple.

Speaker 16 If you do think of them as the Essenes, I, for example, example think of the Essenes as being quite connected with the temple but they just had a higher standard of purity when they went to the temple in terms of how they operated at the temple.

Speaker 16 So it doesn't mean that you're totally out of step with the temple if you're in Essene. But still, why have you got the temple treasure?

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, you've kind of, well, I guess this is the theory that we should go on to now before we kind of delve more into that, Joan, is where is it theorised as to where this treasure came from because I know you want to talk about a column 1.9 as well and this all seems to link together at this time.

Speaker 16 Right yeah so in the a little bit further down on column one it's the fourth find spot this is Puesh's edition as well in the mound of Kochlit which is a site that repeats in the copper scroll, there are tithe vessels consisting of flasks and ephods.

Speaker 16 Ephods are priestly aprons, so they are connected with what priests wore when they went about their business in the temple. The total of the tithe

Speaker 16 and the treasury of the sabbatical year and a second disqualified tithe. This is very, very technical stuff in terms of what temple operations were about.

Speaker 16 You know, the sabbatical year, you're getting tithes from

Speaker 16 the sabbatical year. Second disqualified tithe, they're no good.
You've transferred the tithe of actual products into money.

Speaker 16 Its opening is on the northern edge of the channel, six cubits in the direction of the frigidarium of the bath, and then further Greek letters.

Speaker 16 Well, my goodness, there's so much in that one fine spot that indicates that it was connected with the temple, it was treasure stored in the temple, and yet there's also treasure from the temple that's missing if it was just hiding everything that was valuable in the temple?

Speaker 1 If it is from the temple, give us a bit of the historical context. Why might it be that they are now deciding to hide treasures from the temple in Jerusalem? Right.

Speaker 16 So, the temple treasure contained a lot of money, but it also had all sorts of golden vessels. And there's nothing about the golden vessels of the sanctuary that has been hidden here.

Speaker 16 So, I think that whoever had this treasure either didn't have all of the paraphernalia of the sanctuary or decided not to hide it. And that's curious to me.

Speaker 16 But they're hiding all sorts of little bits and pieces of the second disqualified tithe. You know, they've labeled it, they know what it is, and they're putting it in

Speaker 16 this hiding place.

Speaker 16 So if we're looking through the history of Judea, there are actually all sorts of times when people in Jerusalem might have wanted to hide some of the treasure from the temple, even if not all of it, or didn't have access to all of it.

Speaker 16 So from 63 BCE, when the Roman general Pompey comes into Jerusalem, Pompey the Great, yes, Pompey the Great,

Speaker 16 friend or not friend of Julius Caesar.

Speaker 16 He was basically invited as a great Western power to sort out a civil war

Speaker 16 in Judea. There were two rival high priests and they were fighting it out and one of them wanted Pompey to come in and support him.

Speaker 16 Pompey came through and actually laid siege to Jerusalem and destroyed various forts in his path, destroyed a couple of places close to Jericho.

Speaker 16 And you could have imagined that people, some people supporting this particular high priest, wanted to save some of the treasure from Jerusalem and hid it at that point.

Speaker 16 Then in 40 BCE another rival high priest comes and wants to dislodge the high priest in Jerusalem.

Speaker 16 This particular high priest was supported by the Parthians, the Iranians, and goes into Jerusalem and actually takes the high priest there off to Parthian lands.

Speaker 1 This capture Jerusalem is also the one where Herod the Great goes to Cleopatra and then Rome, isn't it?

Speaker 16 Exactly. So this is 40 BCE.
Herod flees and it's Matathius Antigonus. So he comes in and takes over.
So at that point too, there's a crisis in Jerusalem.

Speaker 16 You can imagine people trying to save treasure from Jerusalem if they could get out. They were saving treasure.
Then all sorts of things happened when Herod died in 4 BCE.

Speaker 16 There was revolution in Judea. There were people who took over the temple at that time.
The Judean rebels took over the temple. Herod's son Archelaus really couldn't handle it and went to Rome and

Speaker 16 there had to be

Speaker 16 Roman legionaries come down from Syria and quash the rebellion for Rome. So temple treasures could have been taken out of the temple at that point in 4 BCE.

Speaker 16 In 70, the Romans came in again. This is the big one.
This is the one that everyone knows about. And so people get locked into that idea.
It was all about 70.

Speaker 16 In 70 there was a siege vespasian's army titus laid siege to jerusalem the the roman army came through in 68 destroyed things in jericho destroyed qumran then went on to jerusalem laid siege but at that point josephus the historian who talks about that particular episode He says people couldn't get their treasure out of Jerusalem.

Speaker 16 The siege was so fierce that not even their own people couldn't escape and they couldn't escape with their treasure and they buried it in their houses. And actually,

Speaker 16 in terms of Roman propaganda, they very much claim to have got all of the temple treasure. They took it to Rome and you can see it in the Arch of Titus in Rome.

Speaker 16 To this day, the Romans parading the temple treasure, including now the golden artifacts, the menorah, the golden candlestick, and various other sacred artifacts from the sanctuary.

Speaker 16 So they have got that treasure. So it's unlikely it was the treasure of 70 CE.

Speaker 1 But I guess there's that one big theory that some people are saying because they get hooked on the great Jewish revolt and the fall of that temple that they think that, oh, maybe some treasure escaped, maybe some people escaped.

Speaker 1 that siege and the the Romans didn't take it all and then that becomes part of the treasure the copper scroll is talking about. But as you've highlighted there,

Speaker 1 what maybe people have overlooked is that there are events earlier in the timeline when treasure could have been taken out of the Great Temple, if it refers to treasure from the temple in the copper scroll.

Speaker 16 It could be earlier and that would fit in better with the dating of the actual Dead Sea Scrolls being in the first century BCE largely. But there's also another alternative.
Okay, great, great.

Speaker 16 The other alternative is to push it further in time into the second century. And I have written an article saying that that is quite a likely scenario.

Speaker 16 I'm not absolutely 100% fixed on it, but if we're going to think about a scenario where people are gathering together temple tithes and temple money, and yet are in this location sort of around the Dead Sea, Jericho, and not in Jerusalem, because you kind of expect temple treasure to be hidden closer to Jerusalem.

Speaker 16 Sorry, that's,

Speaker 16 I just, it bothers me that it is around Jericho.

Speaker 1 So how far away from that, from Jerusalem is that then, roughly?

Speaker 16 Is it 25 kilometers?

Speaker 1 Some of that. It's a bit of a distance, yeah.

Speaker 16 But Jericho is not Jerusalem.

Speaker 16 So if you're hiding quickly from Jerusalem, I would imagine that you'd go to places around Jerusalem, Bethlehem, for example, or, you know, there's lots of caves around about Jerusalem you could have hid.

Speaker 16 treasure in. But this is quite a distance away.
Dead Sea is quite a distance away. Jericho is quite a distance away.
We know that there were priests in Jericho that continued on.

Speaker 16 It was a priestly city. So priests having something to do with making sure that treasure was put away would make sense.

Speaker 16 But one of the things that's been pointed out actually by Jesper Hohenheirn, who's done another edition of the Copper Scroll, is that the landscape of the scroll is very deserted, ruined landscape.

Speaker 16 If you're just reading it for landscape, it's ruin after ruin after ruin. It's not occupied towns.
And that seems to indicate that there was a devastation.

Speaker 16 Again, a devastation you could maybe link up with the Parthians or maybe link up with what Pompeii did.

Speaker 16 But we know that the Romans, when they came in to put down the second revolt in the year 130 to 136.

Speaker 1 Where's the Bar Kokhpa revolt, isn't it?

Speaker 16 The Bar Kokhpa revolt.

Speaker 16 That was a major Judean revolt against Rome. They wanted to rebuild the temple.
They clearly had the funds to rebuild the temple.

Speaker 16 They were likely still doing things in terms of temple cultic operations. They issued a coin which talks about a high priest called Eliezer in the Bar Kokhba period.

Speaker 16 So they still have the temple mentality. They issue coins showing the temple that they are going to rebuild in Jerusalem, but they don't actually do it.

Speaker 16 And ultimately, the Romans come in and utterly devastate Judea. They destroy every single village and town in Judea.
It's such a destruction.

Speaker 16 They kill hundreds of thousands of people and enslave others.

Speaker 16 It is one of the most atrocious things that happened in the ancient world, what the Romans did to destroy Judea as a concept in the middle of the second century. And they talk about it.

Speaker 16 Diocassius talks about it in this way. The devastation was huge.

Speaker 16 So if you've got that kind of event happening and you can see the Romans coming and destroying everything in their path as they put down the revolt, the priestly class in Jericho who were still hanging on to the temple treasures, hopeful of the rebuilding of the temple, would then want to hide them away and hope that someone would would find them in the future of their own ilk and then rebuild the temple.

Speaker 1 So basically of all those theories, so you would argue that the copper scroll is created in a hurry almost as the Romans are approaching.

Speaker 1 They're in Jericho or somewhere near there and they decide to hide the treasure in that area and hopefully come back, retrieve it in time, retrieve the treasure and continue it once this

Speaker 1 almost this sweeping Armageddon has passed.

Speaker 16 It's rebuilding the nation. It's the hope of rebuilding the nation.
There's a lot of hope in the copper scroll, but there's also a pragmatism, I think, in that it is made of copper.

Speaker 16 And the reason I think it's made of copper is for longevity. It will survive a cataclysm.
Copper will not melt at a low temperature. It will be okay for years to come.
So it's a long-range.

Speaker 16 thinking in terms of the the copper scroll. They're thinking of the future, of rebuilding in the future, of having this money for rebuilding.

Speaker 1 I mean, it is such an intriguing object. I guess my last kind of question is, should we call it a Dead Sea Scroll then?

Speaker 16 It is a Dead Sea Scroll in that it is found by the Dead Sea in a cave by the Dead Sea. So yes, it is a Dead Sea Scroll.
It's just a very unusual one.

Speaker 1 Joan, this has been fantastic. It's been wonderful to do this episode in person.
And it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast today.

Speaker 16 Thank you very much for having me.

Speaker 19 Well there you go. There was Dr.
Joan Taylor talking you through the story of the Copper Scroll, this amazing artifact and part, although an anomaly, but still part, of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

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