Copper Scroll

The scroll was found on 14 March 1952 in Cave 3, lying in two rolls against the cave wall, and it is unique among the roughly nine hundred manuscripts from the caves: three thin sheets of nearly pure copper, riveted together and inscribed by punching the letters through from the front, so that the text is legible in relief on the reverse.

Its contents are an inventory in twelve columns. Each entry gives a location and what is buried there, in a fixed and terse pattern: a place, a direction and distance, a depth in cubits, and a quantity of talents or a description of the vessels. Sixty-four locations are listed, sixty-three of them holding gold, silver, coined money, priestly vestments or cultic vessels; the last entry points to a duplicate document with fuller particulars, which has never been found.

The places named are real Judaean topography, cisterns, aqueducts, tomb entrances, terraces, the Valley of Achor, a place in the vicinity of the temple mount, but they are given as a person already familiar with the ground would give them, without the fixed reference points a stranger would need.

The language is not the literary Hebrew of the other scrolls. It is close to the Mishnaic Hebrew of a later period, with vocabulary from administration and building trades, which is part of why the scroll sits oddly in the Qumran corpus. Seven of the entries are followed by groups of two or three Greek letters whose purpose is unknown; suggestions have included abbreviations of names, indexing marks and cross-references to the missing duplicate, and none has been established.

The scroll could not be read when it was found. Copper corrodes to brittle oxide, and the rolls had become rigid; unrolling them would have shattered the sheets and destroyed the text. Only a few letters were legible along the exposed edges, enough to show that there was writing and to make the problem urgent.

The solution was destructive and deliberate. In 1955 and 1956 the scroll was sent to the College of Technology at Manchester, where Professor H. Wright Baker cut it lengthwise into twenty-three curved strips using a purpose-built saw with a very fine blade, mounted so that each cut passed between lines of text. The strips could then be read individually. The operation is still cited in conservation literature as a justified irreversible intervention: the alternative was an unread document.

John Allegro, who was present at the cutting and worked on the transcription, published his own edition in 1960 ahead of the official one, which appeared under Jozef Milik in 1962 in the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series. The two men read the object in opposite ways, Allegro treating the list as a genuine record of hidden wealth and Milik as a folk legend, and the personal quarrel that followed coloured the scholarship for years.

The reading itself remains difficult. The punched script is irregular, several letters are ambiguous, and measurements and totals depend on decisions about individual characters. Later editions, including Emile Puech's re-edition after cleaning and conservation in the 1990s, have altered readings. The scroll is now held at the Jordan Museum in Amman.

The dispute turns on the totals. Read at face value the scroll lists thousands of talents of gold and silver, an amount that on any plausible value of the talent runs to tons of precious metal and exceeds what a small desert community could conceivably have owned. That is the fact every interpretation has to accommodate.

Four positions have been argued. The first is that the treasure belonged to the Qumran community, which struggles against the quantities. The second, the most widely held among those who take the list as genuine, is that it records the wealth of the Second Temple, concealed by priests or officials during the revolt against Rome before the destruction of 70 CE; the priestly vestments and cultic vessels in the list support this, as does the administrative Hebrew, and on this reading the scroll's presence in Cave 3 is a matter of where it was hidden rather than who wrote it. A third view attaches it to First Temple treasure through later tradition. The fourth, argued by Milik and by others since, is that the list is folklore, a written form of the legend that the temple treasure was hidden and awaits recovery, a legend that certainly existed in Jewish tradition.

The evidence has not resolved it. Copper is an expensive and laborious medium for a fiction, and the terse administrative style reads like a record rather than a tale, which are the strongest arguments for authenticity. Against that stand the implausible totals and the complete absence of results.

That absence is the hard fact. John Allegro led an expedition in 1962 to excavate at identified sites and found nothing. Later searches have done no better. No location in the scroll has been securely identified with a modern site, no item on the list has been recovered, and after seven decades the question of whether anything was ever buried remains open.