Copper Scroll

Two rolls of almost pure copper, engraved rather than written, listing sixty-four places where gold, silver and priestly goods were said to be buried. Nothing on the list has ever been found.

Siglum: 3Q15
Type: Two rolls of sheet copper, about 99 per cent copper and 1 per cent tin, the letters punched through from the front. Now twenty-three curved sections, cut apart in 1955-56
Language: Hebrew, an early form of the Mishnaic dialect, with Greek loanwords and unexplained sequences of Greek letters
Contents: Twelve columns listing sixty-four deposits, each with a location, a depth and a content — talents of silver, bars of gold, tithe vessels and priestly garments. It is an inventory and nothing else: no narrative, no prayer, no law
Written: Disputed. Frank M. Cross put it in the mid first century AD, W. F. Albright between AD 70 and 135, and J. E. Taylor argues for the period after the Bar Kokhba revolt Disputed dating
Origin: Judea
Found at: Qumran, Cave 3
Found in: March 1952. Accounts differ over the day; 14 and 20 March are both given
Found by: The team led by Henri de Contenson, in the joint expedition of the American Schools of Oriental Research, the École Biblique and the Palestine Archaeological Museum with the Jordanian Department of Antiquities
Now held at: The Jordan Archaeological Museum, Amman. No published inventory number could be confirmed

The One Scroll That Is Not a Scroll

Everything else from the Judean Desert is leather or papyrus. This is metal: two rolls of about ninety-nine per cent copper with a little tin, roughly two and a half metres of sheet in all, with the letters hammered through from the front so that the text stands out on the back. It carries twelve columns in an early form of Mishnaic Hebrew, sprinkled with Greek loanwords and with sequences of Greek letters at the ends of some entries that nobody has explained. Its contents are an inventory of deposits — sixty-four of them — each entry naming a place, a depth, and what lies there: talents of silver, bars of gold, tithe vessels, priestly vestments.

Unusually for this material, it was found by archaeologists rather than bought from a dealer. It came out of what J. E. Taylor calls "the cave explorations done jointly by the American Schools of Oriental Research, the Palestine Archaeological Museum and the École Biblique" in March 1952, and "was found by a team headed by Henri de Contenson" in a cave north of the Qumran ruin. Accounts of the day differ — 14 and 20 March are both given — so the honest date is the month.

Cutting It Open in Manchester

Copper that has lain in a cave for nineteen centuries does not unroll; it is a brittle oxide shell that would shatter. The rolls were sent to Manchester, where H. Wright Baker of the Manchester College of Technology built a rig to saw them into strips with a very fine circular blade. The work ran through 1955 and into 1956 and produced twenty-three curved sections, which is how the object exists today; J. M. Allegro, who had arranged the transfer, filmed part of it. Baker wrote his own account of the operation into the official edition.

The strips were read and the text published in 1962 by J. T. Milik, in the third volume of Discoveries in the Judaean Desert; a second critical edition followed after French conservators had cleaned and stabilised the metal. The scroll is now in Amman: J. E. Taylor writes that "it now exists in the Jordan Archaeological Museum in Amman ... cut into 23 sections", and the Israel Museum, listing where the Judean Desert manuscripts ended up, names the same institution. The École Biblique, which co-excavated it, says the original "belongs to the Amman Museum" and keeps a replica in Jerusalem. No published inventory number for it could be confirmed.

Whether Any of It Was There

The quantities are enormous — on any reading, more precious metal than a small sect by the Dead Sea is likely to have owned — and that is the crux. J. T. Milik, who edited it, held that the list was not a record of an actual hoard. J. M. Allegro took the opposite view, published a popular book on it in 1960, two years before the official edition appeared, and went looking. The position that has since prevailed is closer to Allegro's on the narrow point and to nobody's on the wider one: the publisher's description of Al Wolters's edition puts the shift plainly — the scroll was "once dismissed as a fictional composition" and "is now generally held to indicate the hiding places of a genuine hoard" — while leaving the obvious question open, "Are the treasures those of the Jerusalem temple? Or of the Essenes? Or are they Zealot booty?" Those are a publisher's words rather than Wolters's own, and they are quoted here as a description of where the field sits rather than as his argument.

Steven Weitzman's summary of where the argument stands is the fairest one available, and it is not a verdict: some scholars judged the amounts too large to be real, others found them plausible and connected to the Temple, and "the scroll itself, however, revealed nothing that might settle the issue in one direction or the other." To that, one fact should always be attached, in Joan E. Taylor's words: "not a single piece of treasure from the Copper Scroll has ever been located." The date is unsettled too — Frank M. Cross put it in the mid first century AD, W. F. Albright after AD 70, and Taylor argues for the aftermath of the Bar Kokhba revolt — and the date matters, because a list made before AD 70 and a list made after it are records of different things. What the object certainly is is evidence that somebody, in Roman Judea, thought there was enough at stake to engrave an inventory into metal.

Scripture references

1 Kings 7:45-47 — Temple vessels of bronze, uncounted for their number
2 Kings 25:13-17 — What the Babylonians took, and what the Copper Scroll's entries sound like
Jeremiah 32:9-15 — A deed of purchase put in an earthenware jar to last many days
Matthew 6:19-21 — Treasure hidden where moth and rust destroy

Sources

ScholarshipJoan E. Taylor, "Secrets of the Copper Scroll" — Joan E. Taylor, King's College London · Biblical Archaeology Review 45:4 (2019); the author's accepted manuscript is freely readable in King's College London's repository. Source, in her own words, for "the cave explorations done jointly by the American Schools of Oriental Research, the Palestine Archaeological Museum and the École Biblique"; for "It was found by a team headed by Henri de Contenson"; for "two copper rolls, about 8 feet long"; for "It now exists in the Jordan Archaeological Museum in Amman ... cut into 23 sections"; for the range of proposed dates; and for "not a single piece of treasure from the Copper Scroll has ever been located." Note that the accepted manuscript misprints the Manchester opening as 1953; the contemporary record and the archive both give 1955Supports: The excavators, the physical state, the dating debate, and that nothing on the list has been found
Holding institutionIsrael Antiquities Authority, Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library: 3Q Copper Scroll (3Q15) — Israel Antiquities Authority · The authority's own record: site "Qumran, Cave 3", material "Copper", period "Roman", script square Hebrew, official publication "Milik 1962. DJD 3". The library carries no images of it, because the object is not in Israel. The authority's discovery-sites page adds that Cave 3 was "Discovered and excavated by archaeologists in 1952" and describes the scroll as "listing what may be sites of the Temple's buried treasure"Supports: The manuscript number, material, period, publication, and that Cave 3 was an excavation rather than a purchase
ScholarshipSteven Weitzman, "Absent but Accounted for: A New Approach to the Copper Scroll" — Steven Weitzman, University of Pennsylvania · Harvard Theological Review 108:3 (2015), 423-447. States the impasse: some scholars "felt that the treasure was too large to be real", others "believed the treasure to be quite plausible, probably connected to the Temple in some way", and "The scroll itself, however, revealed nothing that might settle the issue in one direction or the other" · paywalledSupports: The state of the argument over whether the treasure was real
ScholarshipJ. T. Milik, "Le rouleau de cuivre provenant de la grotte 3Q (3Q15)" — Józef T. Milik · In M. Baillet, J. T. Milik and R. de Vaux, Les "petites grottes" de Qumran, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), with a contribution by H. W. Baker on the opening of the scroll — the official edition, and the source of the view that the list does not record a real hoard. Milik's preliminary account is "The Copper Document from Cave III, Qumran", The Biblical Archaeologist 19:3 (1956), 60-64, DOI 10.2307/3209219. Print onlySupports: The editio princeps, Baker's technical account, and Milik's own position on the treasure
ReferenceJ. M. Allegro, The Treasure of the Copper Scroll — John Marco Allegro, University of Manchester · Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960 — published two years before the official edition and written for a general readership. The book in which Allegro argued the deposits were real and went looking for them. Print onlySupports: Allegro's own position in section three
ReferenceAl Wolters, The Copper Scroll: Overview, Text and Translation — Al Wolters, Redeemer University College · Sheffield Academic Press, 1996 (JSOT Supplement Series 228). The publisher's own description: the scroll was "Once dismissed as a fictional composition" and "is now generally held to indicate the hiding places of a genuine hoard", leaving open "Are the treasures those of the Jerusalem temple? Or of the Essenes? Or are they Zealot booty?"Supports: Where the majority view now sits, and what it still does not answer
EncyclopediaWikipedia: Copper Scroll

Reflect

Someone went to the trouble of engraving this list into metal so it would outlast them, and the things it points to are gone. What are you preserving, and for whom?