Adam Palmer: The Moses Legacy

A malicious smile graced Goliath’s lips as he prepared to dive on to Daniel, crushing him beneath his weight. But Daniel had one last trick up his sleeve. His hand groped on the ground for the rock that he had seen nearby. Finally he found it and just as Goliath realized what was happening, Daniel’s hand shot out sending the rock smashing into Goliath’s face with a velocity that Daniel did not think possible.

The big man let out a cry of pain that sounded like thunder in the night and then fell backward, unconscious.

Seconds later, Daniel got to his feet, holding the shroud and praying that it had not got damp during the incident. Sarit and two of the soldiers came running over.

Ignoring the potential danger from the shroud, Sarit approached him.

‘You got it wrong, Daniel. It’s supposed to be David who uses a stone to defeat Goliath, not Daniel.’

He smiled.

‘I guess we’ll have to rewrite the Bible.’

A couple of weeks later, on the morning of 19 May, Daniel was in the Old City of Jerusalem at the Western Wall, celebrating Shavuot, the Jewish festival that commemorates Moses receiving the Torah.

There were several congregations there, each with their own rabbi. The Wall was not a synagogue, but a place where individuals or groups could pray. Anyone can visit the Wall, but once he had put a kippa on his head and a talis round his shoulders, he had effectively identified himself as a Jew and was promptly invited to complete a minyan or quorum of ten men required by Jewish religious law for group prayers.

Sixty feet above them, on what Jews call the Temple Mount and Muslims call Haram ash-Sharif, devout Muslims were praying in the Dome of the Rock and al-Aksa Mosque as well as kneeling on their prayer mats in collective worship all over the site. And in other parts of the Old City, Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians were going to church for the matins. The churches were not quite as busy as they had been six days ago on Ascension Thursday, but they would be busy again next Sunday for Whitsun.

But Daniel – ever the academic – had other things on his mind, such as his forthcoming paper on The Book of the Wars of the Lord as well as his efforts to secure publication of Harrison Carmichael’s paper on The Book of the Straight, a copy of which Audrey Milne had managed to find in Senator Morris’s home. He had been careful in his own paper to acknowledge Carmichael’s prior claim to the decipherment of Proto-Sinaitic script.

The Israelis were still engaged in some delicate negotiations with the Jordanians over ownership of the Book of the Wars of the Lord. There had been threats of official diplomatic complaints and there was even a possibility that the Israelis would return the tablets to Jordan. In a way that would be better for Daniel as he might otherwise find himself persona non grata in a number of Arab countries, not to mention a target for arrest on an international warrant for stealing historical artefacts.

One of the things that pleased him was that Akil Mansoor still wanted to work with him on the paper about the finding of the Mosaic tablets. The self-styled ‘crusty old Egyptian’ had explained to the authorities in his own country how Daniel had tried to help him and nearly got killed because of a big misunderstanding. He knew that he would be going back to Egypt soon, but he felt a tinge of regret about Gabrielle who was now in an Israeli jail.

The health scare had finally abated as Israeli doctors had been able to use the shroud to breed the bacteria en masse from the spores and then irradiate them to produce a vaccine.

Goliath had survived, but Daniel was unable to give them much information other than what they already knew about Senator Morris. All Dov Shamir would tell him was that the conspiracy reached all the way up to the ‘top of the administration.’

Daniel was snapped out of these thoughts by the sound of revelry as a man he didn’t know, but with whom he shared a common bond, raised an open Torah scroll high into the air showing three columns of text. The singing of the congregation had a familiar ring to it.

‘And this is the Torah that Moses placed before the Children of Israel…’

All of a sudden, Daniel’s childhood memories came flooding back to him as he remembered the Hebrew words and added his voice to those of his brothers.

‘From the mouth of the Lord and the hand of Moses.’