'Brilliant idea,' Bronson said. Linking arms, they walked down Chain Street towards the Church of John the Baptist and the ancient, tortured heart of that most ancient of cities.
THE END
James Becker writes
about the presence of the past
in THE MOSES STONE
This is a work of fiction, but I've tried to ensure that the book is firmly grounded in fact wherever possible. The places I've described are real, and most of the events I've written about which occurred in the first century AD are also in the historical record.
Masada
The description of the fall of Masada is as accurate as it is possible to be, almost two millennia after the event. The siege ended precisely the way I described it, with the Sicarii defenders effectively committing mass suicide rather than surrender to the hated Roman army. Two women did survive the siege, and they later told the historian Josephus what had occurred. Their account is generally accepted as being an accurate and certainly contemporary description of the events of the last hours before the fortress fell.
Between 1963 and 1965 the Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin carried out excavations on the site, during which eleven ostraca – small pieces of pottery or stone – were found in front of the northern palace. One of them bore the name 'Ben Ya'ir', the leader of the Sicarii, and each of the others bore a single different name. It's not known for certain, but it seems at least likely that these were the names of the ten men who carried out the executions of the Sicarii defenders prior to the breaching of the wall of the citadel.
Hezekiah's Tunnel and the Pool of Siloam
Nearly three thousand years old, this tunnel remains a significant feat of engineering.
Jerusalem is situated on a hill, and was fairly easy to defend against attackers because of its elevation. The one problem the defenders had was that their principal source of water was located out in the Qidron Valley and lay some distance outside the walls of Jerusalem. So a prolonged and determined siege, which was the commonest way of taking most military objectives in those days, would always result in the capture of the city because eventually the stored water supplies would run out.
In about 700 BC, King Hezekiah was very concerned that the Assyrians led by Sennacherib would besiege Jerusalem and decided the water supply problem had to be solved, though there's now some doubt about whether he really deserves all the credit.
In 1838 an American scholar named Edward Robinson discovered what's now known as Hezekiah's Tunnel. It's also called the Siloam Tunnel because it runs from the Gihon Spring to the Pool of Siloam. The tunnel was obviously intended to function as an aqueduct and channel water to the city. It's more or less S-shaped, about a third of a mile long, and there's a slope of a little under one degree all the way down, which would ensure that the water would flow in the right direction.
Building it would have been a massive undertaking given the tools the inhabitants of the city were known to possess, and current theories suggest that the tunnel was actually partly formed from a cave that already ran most of the way. An inscription was found at one end of the tunnel which suggested that it was constructed by two teams of workmen, starting at opposite ends. The spring was then blocked and the diverted water allowed to flow to Jerusalem itself. That's basically the legend and more or less what the Bible claims.
But in 1867, Charles Warren, a British army officer, was exploring Hezekiah's Tunnel and discovered another, much older, shaft system now called Warren's Shaft. This consisted of a short system of tunnels which began inside the city walls and ended in a vertical shaft directly above Hezekiah's Tunnel near the Gihon Spring. It allowed the inhabitants to lower buckets into the water in the tunnel without exposing themselves outside the walls. Dating it accurately has proved difficult, but the consensus is that it was probably built in about the tenth century BC.
And if that wasn't enough, a few years later, in 1899, yet another and very much older tunnel was discovered that also ran directly from the Gihon Spring to the Siloam Pool.
This is now known as the Middle Bronze Age Channel, and is estimated to date from about 1800 BC, almost four thousand years ago. It was a simple ditch dug deep into the ground, and was then covered with large slabs of rock, themselves hidden by foliage. Obviously the fact that it was a surface channel as opposed to an underground tunnel was a potential weak point in a siege.
So from today's research it looks as if Hezekiah simply looked at the existing water channels, saw their weaknesses and decided to improve on them, rather than having the inspiration himself to create the aqueduct and then organize the work. It could be argued that his tunnel was really just a bigger and better version of the Middle Bronze Age Channel.
Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls
The settlement of Qumran is located on a dry plateau, about a mile inland from the north-west bank of the Dead Sea and near the Israeli kibbutz of Kalia. It's probable that the first structures there were built during the early part of the first century BC, and the site was finally destroyed in AD 70 by Titus and troops of the X Fretensis Roman legion.
Most accounts agree that the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered accidentally by a Bedu goat-herder named Mohammed Ahmad el-Hamed, who was nicknamed 'edh-Dhib', meaning 'the wolf'. Early in 1947, he either went into one of the caves near Qumran looking for a lost animal or perhaps threw a stone into a cave to drive out one of his goats, and heard the sound of something shattering. The result was that he found a collection of very old pottery jars containing ancient scrolls wrapped in linen cloth.
Recognizing that the scrolls were old and perhaps valuable, el-Hamed and his fellow Bedu removed some – most accounts state only three scrolls were taken from the cave at first – and offered to sell them to an antiques dealer in Bethlehem, but this man declined to buy them, believing they might have been stolen from a synagogue. These scrolls passed through various hands, including those of a man named Khalil Eskander Shahin, colloquially known as 'Kando', an antiques dealer. He apparently encouraged the Bedu to recover more of the scrolls, or possibly visited Qumran himself and removed some of them – whatever happened, Kando eventually personally possessed at least four of the scrolls.
Whilst arrangements for the sale of the relics were being made, they were entrusted to a third party for safe keeping, a man named George Isha'ya, who was a member of the Syrian Orthodox Church. Recognizing the importance of the scrolls, Isha'ya took some of them to St Mark's Monastery in Jerusalem – a Syrian Orthodox establishment – to try to have the texts appraised. Mar Athanasius Yeshue Samuel, the Metropolitan of Palestine and Transjordan – a 'metropolitan' is a rank between a bishop and a patriarch, more or less equivalent to an archbishop – heard about the scrolls. He examined them and managed to buy four of them.
More of the scrolls started appearing in the murky Middle Eastern antiquities trade, and three were purchased by Professor Eleazer Sukenik, an Israeli archaeologist. Shortly afterwards, Sukenik heard about the scrolls Mar Samuel had acquired, and tried to buy them from him, but couldn't reach an agreement.
Then a man called John Trever became involved. He was employed at the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR), and was an enthusiastic photographer, which turned out to be a significant hobby. In February 1948 he met Mar Samuel and photographed all the scrolls the Metropolitan owned. Over the years, the scrolls have steadily deteriorated, but his album of pictures has since allowed scholars to see them as they were at that time, and has facilitated their study and permitted translations of the texts to be made.