26 Tons of Gold and 65 Tons of Silver: Too Much To Believe? - The BAS Library
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Home > Magazines > BAR > November/December 1993

26 Tons of Gold and 65 Tons of Silver: Too Much To Believe?

By James E. Harper

The Copper Scroll is one piece that doesn’t fit the Dead Sea Scroll puzzle. Inscribed on metal and consisting simply of a list of 64 locations where huge amounts of treasure are said to be buried, the Copper Scroll has divided scholarly opinion for decades: Is it a list of something real or is it merely some fantasy, to be taken no more seriously than a child’s map of buried pirate treasure? Most of the scholars who first studied the scroll in the 1950s were not taken in by its fantastical aspects. J. T. Milik, the scholar entrusted with […]

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Footnotes

1.

See P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., “The Mysterious Copper Scroll: Clues to Hidden Temple Treasure?” Bible Review, August 1992, p. 39. A ton is equal to 2,000 pounds.

Endnotes

1.

The Times (London), June 1, 1956, p. 12.

2.

Geza Vermes, The Dead Sea Scrolls in English, 3rd ed. (London: Penguin, 1987) p. 309.

3.

Maurice Baillet, J. T. Milik and Roland de Vaux, eds., Les “Petites Grottes” de Qumrân, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert 3 (Oxford: Clarendon 1962), p. 282.

4.

Vermes, Dead Sea Scrolls in English, p. 308.

5.

Suetonius, Julius Caesar 54.2, in Lives of the Caesars; M. A. Frederickson, “Caesar, Cicero and the Problem of Debt,” Journal of Roman Studies 56 (1966), p. 132. In practice the value of gold some times fell to 1:10 and in the late empire rose to 1:18, but for our purposes a single figure is good enough.