Wednesday, March 18, 2015

The Copper Scroll

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Column: Scroll: Treasure map or ancient hoax? (Don Knebel, Current in Westfield)
A pretty good, brief, popular account of the Copper Scroll. Excerpt:
Scholars are divided about who made the Copper Scroll and what, if any, treasures it describes. Some believe the scroll identifies items from the Second Temple in Jerusalem, hidden before the Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D. Others argue the items were accumulated by first century Essenes living in Qumran, near where the scroll was found. Still others claim the treasures came from the First Temple, destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 B.C. Finally, some scholars believe the Copper Scroll repeated an ancient fable. Fable or not, explorers from around the world have sought fame and fortune using the ambiguous descriptions in the Copper Scroll, so far digging up only dirt.
As far as I know, no scholars think that the Copper Scroll describes treasures from the First Temple, although a legendary list of such treasures and their hiding places does survive in The Treatise of the Vessels. There is no confirmed case of any of the Copper Scroll treasures actually being found, although one site at Nahal Hever, excavated by archaeologists, does have at least a superficial similarity to one of the treasures described in the document. In any case, few, if any, specialists now think that the treasures listed in the Copper Scroll are just legendary.

Lots more on the Copper Scroll etc. is here and links.