The mysteries of the Copper Scroll, found in one of the Dead Sea caves, have never really been solved. The Copper Scroll seems to contain a list of treasure—and is the kind of find that Indiana Jones could have used to track down vast amounts of gold and silver ingots. Its very substance—fine copper—indicates that the people who hid this text were wealthy. But not a single piece of treasure from the Copper Scroll has ever been located.
Scholars ask many questions: Was this treasure ever hidden, or is it a kind of fantasy? If treasure was hidden, when did this hiding take place? And what kind of treasure was it?
The Copper Scroll was discovered in the cave explorations done jointly by the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR), the Palestine Archaeological Museum, and the École Biblique et Archéologique Français in March 1952. It was found by a team headed by French archaeologist Henri de Contenson in a cave about 1 mile north of the site of Qumran, in the northwestern region of the Dead Sea. Known as 3Q (the third cave found with manuscripts in it [3], close to the site of Qumran [Q]), this cave otherwise contained fragments of parchment and papyrus manuscripts, textiles, more than 30 broken cylindrical jars, more than 20 lids, two jugs, and a lamp.1
However, it is the Copper Scroll that is the most extraordinary find. It was actually not one intact scroll, but two rolls, which were found one on top of the other at the back of the cave’s front chamber. This is because one of the three parts of the scroll had broken off when it was rolled; it was supposed to be whole. In 1955–1956, it was cut into 23 pieces in the Manchester Institute of Technology, by Henry Wright Baker, through the agency of Dead Sea Scroll scholar John Marco Allegro. Finally, it could be read. And it was immediately sensational—in that it appears to be a list of buried treasure.
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The treasure is vast, far beyond what we could imagine would be the property of an individual or even a group, unless they were the rulers of a nation. It is no wonder that a scholar such as Allegro invested much effort trying to understand the precise locations of the treasure, even searching for it.2 If we look at the Copper Scroll closely in terms of its contents, this treasure seems to come from a temple—perhaps the Temple in Jerusalem—and was secreted away in 64 (or perhaps 61) locations, most of which are close to Jericho. The enormous size of the treasure, as well as the presence of cultic terminology (e.g., references to tithes, priestly vestments) included in the text, indicates the treasure’s sacred origin.
Some scholars, however, doubt that this could possibly be the Jerusalem Temple treasure, arguing instead that it relates to an Essene community that lived at Qumran. Logistically, it is hard to imagine how the Temple’s treasure could have been buried in this area around the time of the First Revolt, before the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. It is also hard to imagine how the ancient Jewish legal school of the Essenes—as envisaged—could have played a part in hiding it. Therefore, it has even been suggested that the treasure described in the Copper Scroll is not a real treasure.3
I would like to look not so much at the difficulties of the scroll’s reading and interpretation, but rather at its archaeology and historical context.
To begin with, the artifact’s actual substance is high-quality and expensive copper (99 percent 074copper and 1 percent tin), rather than the usual fine leather (parchment) of the other Dead Sea Scrolls. This writing surface is extremely unusual and costly, well beyond the means of most people. If we look to comparative examples of writing on high-quality copper in antiquity, we have only tiny pieces, largely in the form of amulets, called lamellae. Writing was incised on these thin metal sheets, which were then rolled up, placed in containers, and worn around the neck.a By contrast, the Copper Scroll was about 8 feet long, 1 foot wide, and 0.9 millimeter thick. While the inscriptions on lamellae are designed to protect the wearer, the Copper Scroll’s contents are prescriptive: This is a list of hiding places with no apparent prophylactic value.
The material of the scroll should be a major consideration in its interpretation. Why was copper preferable to parchment or papyrus? The most obvious answer is that writing on copper was intended to last. It could not be damaged by water, and its high melting point (1,083 degrees Celsius or 1,981 Fahrenheit) ensured it could also survive some fires. So the substance of the writing material coheres with the contents of the work—in that it is a valuable treasure in itself, built to last and containing evidence of a treasure’s hiding places. This implies that whatever crisis caused the hiding of the treasure, those who hid it had a fairly dismal view of their own survival. The Copper Scroll is like a time capsule, made for the future.
As for its dating, the orthography (style of writing) is distinctive, and the language is generally identified as an early form of Mishnaic Hebrew (mid to late second century C.E.) with a number of Greek loanwords and even mysterious Greek letter sequences that may, indeed, be designed to be protective in some way. Despite the Mishnaic style, the majority of scholars date the scroll to the mid-first century, with many suggesting the Copper 076Scroll comes from just before the Second Temple was destroyed in 70 C.E.
However, other scholars have suggested dates after this period. Notably French archaeologist Ernest-Marie Laperrousaz, historian Ben-Zion Luria, and scroll scholar Manfred Lehmannb argued that the Copper Scroll must connect to the treasures relating to cultic activity in the Bar-Kokhba period or the Temple tax collected between the years 70 and 135 C.E.4 It is these latter suggestions about the Copper Scroll that are most intriguing to me.
Bar-Kokhba—rightly Shimon Bar-Kosiba—is himself a mystery. Little is known about him, but he led a Judean revolt against the Romans from c. 132–135 C.E. His rebellion was quashed with enormous force. For this revolt, we have little evidence to form a historical narrative.
It seems that unrest was sparked by the Roman emperor Hadrian. Roman historian and statesman Dio Cassius states that when Hadrian visited Judea en route from Egypt to Syria c. 129–130 C.E., he ordered that a new temple to Jupiter Capitolinus be constructed on the Temple Mount and that Jerusalem be rebuilt as a Roman colony, Aelia Capitolina, Latin for the “City of the Capitoline Gods” (Roman History 69.12–14). The resulting Judean revolt was widespread—and the results catastrophic. Dio Cassius records that the Romans sent their best generals and massive numbers of troops, and soon 50 of the rebels’ secret outposts were destroyed, almost a thousand towns and villages were razed, 580,000 Judean men were killed in battle, and countless numbers of people died from starvation, disease, and displacement. In short, “almost all of Judea was turned into a wilderness” (Dio Cassius, Roman History 69.14.2).
Refugees fled to caves in the area of the western Dead Sea coast, where well-preserved archaeological artifacts have been discovered.c In my view, the Copper Scroll coheres with what we know of the last phase of the Bar-Kokhba revolt, when those in charge of the ongoing Jewish cult—the high priest and the chief priests—would have sought to hide what was in reality as much the state treasury as Judean cultic funds, assuming rightly that horrendous circumstances would prevail.
But was there a functioning Temple at the time of Bar-Kokhba? In view of evidence we have, it is unlikely that Bar-Kokhba restored the Temple proper in Jerusalem. However, a deep love of the Temple—and the desire to rebuild it—is clearly advertised in the Bar-Kokhba coinage that shows the façade of the Temple’s sanctuary. From coins, we also learn that a Temple administration existed under a high priest named Eleazar.
It is not necessary to have a functioning temple in Jerusalem for there to be Temple treasure, because some form of cult could continue without a building. If your synagogue or church is destroyed, it doesn’t mean you give up on worship and religious practice. As Lehmann argued, this treasure may 077never have been in Jerusalem, but rather stored up in various safe localities over time. Josephus describes everything to do with the Temple cult and Jewish law as still functioning through the end of the first century C.E., even though the Temple was destroyed in 70 C.E.d While always referring in the past tense to the Temple as a building, Josephus refers to the continuation of sacrifices in the present (e.g., Against Apion 2.193–198).
Historically, there have always been problems in ascribing the Copper Scroll to the time of the First Jewish Revolt and the Jerusalem Temple. It is often thought that all of the Dead Sea Scrolls were taken from a library in or around Qumran itself and placed in caves along the mountain ridge in order to hide them in advance of a threat, namely the arrival of the Roman army in Jericho and its surroundings in 68 C.E. (Josephus, Jewish War 4.483–450). Qumran was destroyed at this time, as verified by Roman arrowheads and burning at the site.
Qumran was then turned into a Roman garrison station, surrounded by a trench. It continued like this until the early years of the second century, probably until the neighboring Nabatean kingdom was safely incorporated into the Empire in 106 C.E. After this, the site was abandoned.
Whatever the case, Qumran and the region of Jericho fell to the Romans prior to the Temple’s destruction in 70 C.E., then the area would have been held by the Romans at the very time the Temple treasure of the Copper Scroll was supposedly hidden. The city of Jerusalem, held by revolutionaries, was under siege by the Romans, who apparently carried off and exhibited in an extravagant public procession what they understood to be the Temple treasure (Josephus, Jewish War 6.282; 7.148), some of which is displayed on the Arch of Titus in Rome. The treasure seized by the Romans from the Temple was so vast that it furnished the Temple of Peace in Rome and continued to be known (and transferred) for centuries to come.e
If part of the Temple treasure was secreted away before the siege, we would have to imagine a situation in which people journeyed a long way with a heavy load of extremely valuable goods—up to 900 talents—on very dangerous roads to then hide these goods, sadly, in the path of an oncoming army. Furthermore, no one responsible for any of our literary sources (most importantly, Josephus) knew about this! Josephus states that the wealthy people of Jerusalem could not get their own personal valuables out of the city and that, after the war, Roman soldiers and Jewish captives managed to dig up gold, silver, and precious furniture that desperate owners had buried in the city (Jewish War 7.114–115).
In terms of the archaeological assemblage of Cave 3Q, the pottery, small pieces of inscribed parchment, and other findings suggested a date prior to 70 C.E.
But do we know for sure that the Copper Scroll should be dated by its association with the other artifacts in the cave? Sequences of deposits in caves are often difficult to understand because caves do not usually have much of a stratigraphy; the floor of 2,000 years ago can be the same floor today. However, earthquake falls do provide some perspectives.
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Cave 3Q was a large cave, but its main chamber had collapsed, leaving only a cavity 10 feet long and 6.5 feet wide, prolonged by a bifurcated ascending passage at the back. According to the excavators, the two rolls of the Copper Scroll were found lying without a container, one on top of the other in a natural shelf, behind a large stone at the back of the main chamber of the cave. The ceiling had suffered collapse, smashing surrounding jars, with the sherds and their contents buried in a foot of debris; the Copper Scroll was isolated in a kind of niche. Ultimately, collapse also destroyed the cave’s original entrance and the front part of its main chamber, but it was accessible for some time to rats: Rat nests found in the back passage testify to their healthy appetite for ancient manuscripts. Given ongoing access after the collapse, we simply do not know whether the Copper Scroll and the jars, lids, and manuscripts were deposited at exactly the same time.
In 1986, a team headed by Joseph Patrich of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem re-excavated Cave 3Q. He noted that the cave had suffered collapse even before anything was placed in it.5 Patrich’s team moved stones and boulders to check if any sherds were located under these in the inner passage, and they found none. However, when the explorers of 1952 found Cave 3Q, the way into the cave was sealed shut with blocks of stone, though potsherds outside offered clues to the archaeological team that they should break through these fallen stones to enter the cave.6 The initial team found sherds under the outer blocks from pottery that would originally have been well within the cave. They did not think of their entry point as the original entrance, which had collapsed away. It is impossible then to know how open it was at different times in the past; only the rats’ access gives us a clue.
So, there were at least two rockfalls: one before anything was deposited (in the back part of the cave) and at least one after, which broke the pottery and threw down debris. But earthquakes can open and close entrances to caves over the centuries many times, and in this earthquake zone we can’t really know how many times the entrance could have been blocked up—by humans or earthquakes—and opened again. There must have been cave collapse after the Copper Scroll was deposited as stone dust was pushed deep inside the interstices of the rolls.
If manuscripts (in jars, with lids) were placed in 3Q before 68 C.E., we can also imagine a scenario in which the cave partially collapsed soon after, but there was still a way to wriggle in to place the Copper Scroll safely on the rock shelf behind this collapse. For example, there was a strong earthquake recorded as happening c. 113–115 C.E. Two decades later, Bar-Kokhba refugees in 135 C.E. were looking for caves here. We know of many other caves in the vicinity where Bar-Kokhba refugees hid from the Romans; they even encamped at the abandoned site of Qumran and dropped coins.
Strangely, a New York Times report on Tuesday, April 1, 1952 (based on the report by a Religious News Service from Jerusalem, March 31, 1952), tantalizingly stated that the Copper Scroll was found with Bar-Kokhba coins, but these were never mentioned again. Roland de Vaux, Qumran’s excavator, later stated that no coins were discovered in any of the caves.
Whatever the case, if we consider the Copper Scroll as an artifact and look at the historical context and the archaeology together, it would be reasonable to suggest that the Temple treasure might very well derive from the end of the Bar-Kokhba revolt. The Copper Scroll would then be associated with the people who briefly occupied Qumran and the region c. 135 C.E.—after the site was left derelict.
What became of them and their treasure may forever be unknown.
The mysteries of the Copper Scroll, found in one of the Dead Sea caves, have never really been solved. The Copper Scroll seems to contain a list of treasure—and is the kind of find that Indiana Jones could have used to track down vast amounts of gold and silver ingots. Its very substance—fine copper—indicates that the people who hid this text were wealthy. But not a single piece of treasure from the Copper Scroll has ever been located. Scholars ask many questions: Was this treasure ever hidden, or is it a kind of fantasy? If treasure was hidden, when […]
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4. See Joan E. Taylor, “Parting in Palestine,” in Hershel Shanks, ed., Partings: How Judaism and Christianity Became Two (Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 2013), pp. 87-104.
1. Roland De Vaux, “Exploration de la Région de Qumran,” Revue Biblique 60 (1953), pp. 540-561; Maurice Baillet, Józef T. Milik, and Roland de Vaux, Les “Petites Grottes” de Qumrân, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert 3 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), pp. 7-8, 201; William L. Reed, “The Qumran Caves Expedition of March, 1952,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 135 (October 1954), pp. 8-13.
2. John Allegro, The Treasure of the Copper Scroll (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960).
3. Although many scholars associate the scroll with the Essene community, some doubt it was a real treasure, e.g., Jozef T. Milik, “The Copper Document from Cave III, Qumran,” The Biblical Archaeologist 19.3 (1956), pp. 60-64. For further, see Stephen Goranson, “Sectarianism, Geography and the Copper Scroll,” Journal of Jewish Studies 43 (1992), pp. 282-287; Al Wolters, “Literary Analysis and the Copper Scroll,” in Z.J. Kapera, ed., Intertestamental Essays in Honour of Jozef Tadeusz Milik (Krakόw: Enigma Press, 1992), pp. 239-252; Bargil Pixner, “Unravelling the Copper Scroll Case: A Study on the Topography of 3Q15,” Revue de Qumran 11 (1983), pp. 323-366; Émile Puech, The Copper Scroll Revisited (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 1-17.
4. Ernest-Marie Laperrousaz, “Remarques sur l’origine des rouleaux de cuivre decouverts dans la grotte 3 de Qumran,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 159 (1961), pp. 157-172; Ben-Zion Luria, The Copper Scroll from the Desert of Judah (Jerusalem: Kiryath Sepher, 1963; Hebrew); Manfred R. Lehmann, “Identification of the Copper Scroll Based on Its Technical Terms,” Revue de Qumrân 5 (1964), pp. 97-105.
5. Joseph Patrich, “Khirbet Qumran in Light of New Archaeological Explorations in the Qumran Caves,” in Michael O. Wise, Norman Golb, John J. Collins, and Dennis G. Pardee, eds., Methods of Investigation of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Khirbet Qumran Site: Present Realities and Future Prospects, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 722 (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1994), pp. 73-95.