The Copper Scroll, Qumran and the "Road Map to Peace"

During a completely unrelated search, I happened to stumble upon an Indiana Jonesish, modern-day quest for treasure. It involves a scroll found at the Qumran, where the Dead Sea scrolls were found, Copper Scroll 3Q15, which is currently in Jordan. (I found references to it being resident in the Amman Museum, and a later one that suggests it may be in the possession of the Princess of Jordan.)

Information on the Copper Scroll

A bit of further digging turned up a different take on the Scroll: Unfolding the Secrets of the Copper Scroll

And finally, a more or less up-to-date chronicle of the actual search for the treasures listed in the Scroll, with information that may be of great interest to Jews, Christians and the amateur archaeologist in all of us: The Copper Scroll and the Excavations at Qumran (Guess what? A real Dr. Jones is on the case! )

The reason I put this in the Conspiracies in Religion section is, with the very real possibility of actually locating the treasure, perhaps Israel's recently renewed reluctance to let go of the "Occupied Territories" (which includes the Qumran) has something to do with all of this. It would certainly be a point of pique if the treasure was discovered on Palestinian land instead of that of Israel!

And perhaps I'm reading this wrong, but am I picking up some indication that the Temple is really supposed to be somewhere other than the Dome of the Rock? I leave that for other scholars to answer.


[edit on 17-6-2004 by Hecate100]

The highly corroded Copper "Treasure" Scroll (3Q15) was found in Cave #3 at Qumran broken in two parts in 1952. (it was found all by its lonesome in 2 separate pieces in Qumran Cave #3 near a collapsed wall).

It was written in quite a different script than normal, often mixing Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek letters and numbers together. Some kind of Code was certainly used as well to judge by its weird and highly abbreviated language.

The Two Halves of the Scroll were later cut up into strips and unravelled in order to be read, having been taken to in Manchester England in the 1950s under the auspices of the Aramaic linguist Mr John Allegro, of The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross fame.

It was the only "Dead Sea Scroll" found in any of the caves that to be engraved and stamped with a special metal stylus on Copper Sheets (although it made reference to another sister-text).

The Scroll mentions various caches of GOLD, SILVER and ancient/valuable Cultic Implements used in the Temple taken and hidden in various places all around Palestine by the Saduccees (Tsadokite priests in the Temple of YHWH in Jerusalem in AD 70): here's an example

"In the Valley of Achor where there is a Fortress : 40 cubits from the Steps entering to the east is a chest, its contents: 17 talents of silver."

This Copper Scroll was apparently missed by earlier robbers of the Cave 3 in Antiquity (in AD 217 and possibly again in AD 790)

Cave #3 had long been picked clean (probably back in the cave's original discovery way back in AD 217, which was described by Origen) and the Cave originally must have housed at least 30 scrolls in jars in antiquity (to judge from the number of jar fragments, indendations in the bat dung and fragmetns of tiny scroll title tabs laying around.

Here is how the AD 217 "discovery" of Cave 3 goes which mentions that documents were taken out of the caves:

"...Toward the middle of the year 225 AD the learned church father Origen had made use of a Greek LXX translation of the Old Testament that had been found 'together with other Hebrew and Greek books in a jar in a ROCK CAVE near Jericho'.

Origen wrote that this find had been made during the reign of Antoninus Severus (i.e., Caracalla) who ruled from A.D. 211 to 217."


- Norman Golb, Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?, (1995) p. 101

Nearby caves (probably Cave #2 and Caves #5-9) were later cleaned out, having been discovered to contain Dead Sea Scrolls as early as 790AD

"The dog of a hunting Arab...entered a cave and did not come out. His master followed him and found a dwelling within the rocks, in which were many books. The hunter went to Jerusalem and informed the Jews. They came in throngs and found books of the Old Testament and others in Hebrew script."

- Nestorian Patriarch Timotheus I of Seleucia in a letter mentioning an incident 'near Jericho' (aprox. 800 C.E.)

Presumably the Romans back during the Jewish Revolt (AD 66-AD 72) got ahold of a similar copy of a Treasure List and (under torture?) the Levitical priestly-hiders of the Treasury of Jersualem eventually coughed up where these stashes of gold and silver were buried: we can surmise that the Romans got a hold of a great deal of the stuff from the fact that the VALUE OF GOLD in Syria suddenly plummettted 40% in AD 72-73 after the Jewish War against Rome was finally over, and Jerusalem was virtually levelled to powder.

If you can believe what you read in the Copper scroll, there was a lot of precious metal being hoarded in Jerusalem during the 2nd temple period (BC 250 to AD 70). Foregin countries,m it was said, used the Temple of Jerusalem as their Central Bank as a "safe place" to make gold and silver deposits. No wonder the Temple Treasury was the favourite spot for R. Yeshoshua bar Yosef the Galilean ("Jeeezzuzz") to sit across from when he was giving moral lessons on Mammonah to his disciples !

Who knows if a few of these buried caches of Temple Treasure are still hidden somewhere?