BOOK NOTE: I recently read Richard A. Freund, Secrets of the Cave of Letters: Rediscovering a Dead Sea Mystery (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2004). This is an exciting book that describes the recent re-excavation of the so-called Cave of the Letters in the Nahal Hever. Freund's archaeological team used some new technologies to locate and get at material that was unreachable when Aharoni and Yadin excavated the cave in the 1950s and 1960s, respectively. Some of the newly located artifacts remain inaccessible until still-better technologies allow us to recover them. The book also makes the case that the cave was used not just by refugees during the Bar Kokhba Revolt in the early 130s CE, but also by others after the first Jewish Revolt in 66-70 CE. Most controversial of all, Freund argues that the Cave of the Letters is mentioned in treasure #25 of the Copper Scroll, that that treasure was unknowingly excavated by Yadin, and that it included implements that came from the Jerusalem Temple.

The main weakness of the book is its very popular style, which does not allow it to make a detailed case for any of the above which would be satisfying to an archaeologist or textual scholar. For that we must wait for forthcoming scholarly volumes. On the basis of the Nova program last year, Ed Cook raised some doubts about the proposed identification of the Cave of the Letters with the Cave of the Column in Copper Scroll treasure #25. One of his objections, that the weight of the Copper Scroll treasure is too great, is debatable. The scroll refers to 42 kk (??). This has widely been taken as an abbreviation for kkr (???), "talent" (about 75 pounds) which would indeed be far too much. But if Judah K. Lefkovits is right in taking kk as standing for keseph karsh/karshin (??? ???/?????), "silver karsh" (a Persian measurement equaling 10 shekels or about 71 grams), the amount listed is at least within the same order of magnitude as the weight of the bronze implements in the Cave of the Letters. (See Lefkovits, The Copper Scroll: 3Q15: A Reevaluation [STDJ 25 Leiden: Brill, 2000], 481-82 and Freund, 175-77.) I don't know whether this new interpretation of ?? will stand up, but it certainly makes the hitherto implausibly enormous amounts of precious metal in the Copper Scroll sound more believable.

Ed's second objection was to the identifying of the small limestone vessel found in the Cave of the Letters with the qalal(???)-vessel mentioned in the Copper Scroll. In the book Freund states confidently that this vessel "is usually a ritual limestone vessel well known in Jerusalem during the time of the Temple, but apparently in use by pious Jews elsewhere as well" (p. 171). I can find no evidence for it ever being a limestone vessel. I've checked most of his rabbinic references and this is not stated in any of the ones I checked. Rashi, who is very late, says there was such a copper vessel (see Lefkovits, p. 207), but I wonder if this isn't just a guess based on its graphic similarity to the Hebrew word that means "burnished" (also ???). Otherwise, there is no indication that we are dealing with anything but a ceramic vessel. Indeed, the Mishnah, our earliest evidence apart from the Copper Scroll, makes it clear that it was not a stone vessel. Ed mentions Parah 3.3, but Parah 10.3-4 and Eduyyot 7.5, the only other Mishnaic passages that mention the vessel, are quite important as well. These passages discuss the circumstances under which a qalal-vessel can become ritually impure. Stone vessels are not susceptible to ritual impurity, so the qalal-vessels of the Mishnah must have been ceramic. True, the word could have referred to a limestone vessel in the first century -- we just don't know -- but I can't find any positive evidence for such a meaning ever at any period, and if it's there, it should be front and center in Freund's presentation, popular though it may be.

In short, as I said, the book is exciting. But where I can test its claims, they are overstated. I remain to be convinced and will be watching with interest for publication of the scholarly defenses of Freund's theories.

UPDATE: Obviously, I still don't get this Unicode font thing. Sorry for all the question marks above. The Hebrew worked fine when I was typing up the post, but it's been lost in the posting for reasons unknown to me.

UPDATE (15 June): Ed Cook e-mails to ask if karsh is attested after the Persian period. The answer is possibly, but possibly not. It's used in the fifth-century BCE Aramaic Elephantine papyri. A Phoenician inscription from Lapethos, Cyprus uses the abbreviation kr for a measure of weight. This may well be for karsh. And Murabba'at document 9:3 (early second century CE?) uses the abbreviation k, which could be for keseph ("silver") or karsh. (Lefkovits, pp. 479-80.)

UPDATE (4 July): Hebrew fonts fixed.