Sam Bourne - The Last Testament

Regardless of what it said, the importance of this object, no more than four inches high, less than three inches wide and barely half an inch thick, could not be overestimated. It would be the first significant archaeological evidence of the Bible ever discovered. Sure, there was the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, on display among the pharaohs and mummies of the British Museum. One of the five scenes shown in the obelisk’s sculptured relief depicted the Israelite king Jehu, paying tribute to the Assyrian monarch. Jehu appeared in the Bible and this obelisk, found by Henry Layard in the nineteenth century, corroborated it.

But Jehu was a minor character in the great Bible story. Of the lead players, from the patriarchs to Moses to Joshua, the archaeological record had yielded nothing. Until now. Here it was: physical confirmation of the great forefather himself.

Surely it was too good to be true. What if it was a fake? Guttman thought back to the scandal that had spooked scholars and historians the world over. He and his friends had followed it with a mixture of Schadenfreude and fascination. In 1983 the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper had declared the Hitler diaries genuine and had paid for it with his reputation. His mistake was simple. He had wanted to believe they were real. Now, sitting in his Jerusalem home, Shimon Guttman knew how Trevor-Roper must have felt: he wanted so desperately for this tablet to be what it seemed.

He looked at its reddish-brown clay, precisely the shade any expert would expect from Iraq in that period. It was craggy and weathered, the way pieces of this vintage always looked. Guttman brought the tablet closer to his eyes: the angle of each line of the cuneiform script, each syllabic character, was entirely as it should be. And the wording. Every phrase, every formulation, was idiomatically and historically fitting: in front of the judges have attested thus …There were only about half a dozen people in the world who could fake an item as well as this-and he, Guttman, was one of them.

But a fake made no sense. Trevor-Roper had got the Hitler diaries wrong because he had overlooked a crucial fact. Someone had brought them to him, wanting his validation. A vast fortune rested on his verdict. There was always a risk of a con.

This was not like that. No one had come to Guttman, trying to pass off this tablet as the last will of Abraham. On the contrary, he had found it. If it hadn’t been for his impulse visit to Aweida it would still be in that marketplace now, sitting in a tray, ready to be sold off to some know-nothing collector. A smile spread across Shimon Guttman’s face. Logic was on his side.

To believe this was a fake, you would have to believe a series of wildly unlikely propositions. That someone had gone to painstaking and expensive trouble to inscribe a clay tablet that could pass as a four-millennia-old Mesopotamian relic. That this trickster had then, without mentioning it, dumped his handiwork in the hands of an East Jerusalem market trader, in the hope that fate would bring one of the world’s few cuneiform experts into the trader’s shop. That this expert would see this item in particular, picking it out from everything else in the shop, that he would translate it and comprehend its profound significance. The faker would be gambling that all those circumstances would materialize, and for what? What would this con artist have earned from his trick? Certainly not money, since Guttman had paid nothing to a trader who had no idea what he was giving away. No, if this was a fake, the trickster would surely have brought it to Guttman demanding millions of dollars.

The cold, rational truth was that it made more sense to believe this tablet was genuine than to believe it was phoney. The logical leap entailed by the latter was greater than the former. It had to be real.

His mind was racing. How on earth had it got here? It had come to Jerusalem from Iraq, part of the huge outflow of antiquities since the fall of Saddam: that much was obvious. Whether it had come via Beirut, Amman, Damascus, it hardly mattered. How it had been found in Iraq, whether it had been in the ground until recently or plundered from a collection, perhaps even a museum, was unknowable. Maybe the authorities under Saddam had found it and hidden it from view; perhaps they had never realized its significance.

What fascinated Shimon Guttman was its earlier journey. The tablet was written in Hebron, the place where Abraham was buried, the place so holy in Judaism that Guttman and his fellow radicals had been determined to restore a Jewish presence there as soon as they could after 1967. Did this mean that Abraham had lived his last days in Hebron, then? His two sons had been involved in his burial, but did this discovery mean there was some kind of final deathbed scene, involving the father and his two heirs? Had there been a dispute the aged patriarch had to resolve?

Guttman wondered how the tablet would then have got back to the land of Abraham’s birth, Mesopotamia. Perhaps one of the sons had taken it there. There was no mention in the Bible of Isaac returning to Ur, but perhaps Ishmael had gone back, to see for himself the town where it had all begun.

This, he realized, could be his life’s work. Translating this tablet, decoding its history, displaying it in the great museums of the world. It would make his name forever-it would be known as the Guttman tablet-he would be on television, hailed at the British Museum, toasted at the Smithsonian. Scholars would tell and retell the story of how he had stumbled across the founding document of human civilization in a street market on a hot afternoon in Jerusalem.

This small, silent object had taught him something he had not expected to discover about himself. He realized that he was, despite his recent decades of activism, an archaeologist first and foremost. The mere discovery of this tablet, whatever its ultimate meaning, thrilled him as a scholar. It was the connection with Abraham, the sense that he had, like those telescopes in New Mexico, made contact with a faraway world, that delighted him more than he could say.

But the other voice in his head, that of the political campaigner, would not be stilled. It had been nagging away throughout, desperate to know the exact meaning and significance of this document, and now its impatience boiled over. Guttman duly reached for the three or four key volumes required in the deciphering of cuneiform and got to work.

I Abraham, son of Terach, in front of the judges have attested thus. The land where I took my son, there to make a sacrifice of him to the Mighty Name, the Mountain of Moriah, this land has become a source of dissension between my two sons; let their names here be recorded as Isaac and Ishmael. So have I thus declared in front of the judges that the Mount shall be bequeathed as follows…

Guttman couldn’t help it. He was overwhelmed all over again. Here was Abraham referring to one of the defining episodes in world culture, the akeda , when the great patriarch led his son up Mount Moriah, there to sacrifice him to the god in whom he had become the first believer. For centuries, Jews had struggled to understand what kind of father could slay his own child and what kind of God would ask him to do it. And, make no mistake, Abraham had been ready to do it, raising his blade, only staying his hand when an angel descended to announce that God did not demand this act of child sacrifice after all. It was a moment that would bind Abraham and Isaac and their children to God for ever more, sealing them into the covenant between God and the Jews.

Now here was textual proof of that event. But that was not what made Shimon Guttman giddy. He read the words again, syllable by syllable, in case he had made a mistake.