The Copper Scroll: A Treasure List Hammered into Metal

Most of the Dead Sea Scrolls (V02) are skins or papyri. In 1952, archaeologists in Qumran Cave 3 found two rolls of something else: copper, corroded so badly that they could not be unrolled. They had once been a single sheet about 2.4 metres long, inscribed by punching letters into the metal. For three years nobody could read them. In 1955–56, at the Manchester College of Science and Technology, the engineer Henry Wright Baker built a device to cut the rolls into 23 curved strips. The philologist John Allegro was involved in the project. When the strips were read, the text turned out to be unlike anything else from Qumran. It was a plain list of places where treasure was hidden.

The object and its text

• Catalogued as 3Q15, the fifteenth item from Cave 3. It is now in the Jordan Museum, Amman.
• The text lists about 64 locations: in ruins, cisterns, tombs, under steps and beside aqueducts. Each gives a depth in cubits and a quantity of silver, gold, vessels or scrolls. The totals run into many tonnes of precious metal.
• The Hebrew is closer to the later Mishnaic language than to the literary Hebrew of most scrolls. The engraving is inexpert, and the text has spelling oddities that complicate reading.
• Seven of the entries are followed by groups of two or three Greek letters, recorded in the editions as ΚΕΝ, ΧΑΓ, ΗΝ, ΘΕ, ΔΙ, ΤΡ, ΣΚ.

The first entry, in a working rendering after the published translations:

In the ruin in the Valley of Achor, under the steps that go eastward, forty cubits: a chest of silver and its vessels, a weight of seventeen talents.

What was it?

Every explanation has serious defenders and serious problems:

• Real treasure of the Jerusalem Temple, hidden before the Roman siege of 70 CE. That would explain the quantities, but the amounts are enormous.
• Treasure connected with the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–135 CE), if the scroll is later than the other Cave 3 finds.
• A folkloric or literary list, along the lines of legends about hidden Temple vessels. The deadpan administrative style makes this seem less likely to many readers.
• Not connected with the Qumran community at all. Its language and material stand apart from the other scrolls.

No treasure from the list has ever been found. Many place-names cannot be identified with confidence, and searches since the 1960s, including Allegro's own expedition, found nothing.

Symbology and encoding

The Greek letter-groups. Seven entries are tagged with Greek letters in an otherwise Hebrew text. They have been read as abbreviations of names, perhaps of the people responsible for each cache (for example ΔΙ for a name like Didymos), as numerals, or as cues for a companion document. The scroll itself refers to "another writing" giving further details. One popular book claimed the letters spell out the name of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten. That reading has no scholarly support. The letter-groups are real and deliberate. Their meaning is unknown.

Metal as permanence. Choosing copper over leather for this one document looks like a deliberate choice of durability. The list was meant to outlast the people who made it.

Connections

The Dead Sea Scrolls (V02), Second Temple Judaism (ch10), the Ark of the Covenant (V07), whose later traditions also imagine hidden Temple treasures.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/copper-scroll.html