Adam Palmer - The Boudicca Parchments

“But what is that we took so long to figure out? The possible confusion between the Essenes and the Ikeni?”

“It’s more than possible confusion Professor Klein. That’s really what this is all about. You see archaeology has always been divided into two camps. The people who crave knowledge and the people who want to make a quick buck.”

“And where do you stand?” asked Daniel.

“We stand apart from all that. Our only interest is in the purity of the Jewish people. But you’re right. There are people who like to steal ancient artefacts and then sell them on the black market. Yigael Yadin once implied that Moshe Dayan fell into that category.”

Yigael Yadin was a former soldier who went on to become one of Israel’s leading archaeologists. Moshe Dayan, was the legendary former soldier and Defence Minister, who was an amateur archaeologist whom Yadin implied was also a private collector with a less than ethical approach.

“But why does all this bother you so much?” asked Daniel. “To the point of killing people who have done you know harm.”

“You have done us immense hard, Professor Klein. Even if you don’t realize it.”

“But how?”

“You know about the Dead Sea Scrolls — dozens of ancient manuscripts found in the caves of Qumran over the course of a decade, starting in 1946 when an Arab shepherd boy made the initial find?”

It was more of a rhetorical question really. Of course Daniel knew about the finds of nearly a thousand ancient scrolls from the first century, some books of the Bible, some part of the post-Biblical record of the Second Temple period and some a contemporary record of the life and times of the people who kept them.

Daniel nodded.

“Well in addition to the known finds, Professor Klein, there were also some finds that were… shall we say… removed from the scene and sold privately. Does that surprise you?”

“I know that there have been cases of theft of archaeological finds Israel. So I suppose the answer is no, it doesn’t surprise me.”

“Well would it surprise you then to know that one of those documents was some surviving parts of Josephus’s original Aramaic manuscript of the Wars of the Jews?”

Now that did surprise Daniel. And from the look on Ted’s face it left him surprised too. In fact it left them both feeling like they’d been kicked in the ribs.

Sarit just missed the cable car and had to wait for the next one to arrive a minute or so later. She wanted to get in but the operator tried to stop her, saying that it wouldn’t be leaving for a few minutes. But Sarit had no intention of waiting. She flashed her badge and ordered the operator to take her up right away. The cable car arrived and not a minute too soon. Sarit got in first and waited while the others filed in. The operator complied and let her in.

As he closed the door, he noticed a man running towards it, from the ticket office. He looked at Sarit as if to ask whether he should wait for the man. But the implacable look on Sarit’s face made it clear that she wasn’t in the mood for waiting.

As the cable car rose into the air, she turned and saw the man who had caught the operator’s intention.

Well saw was perhaps not the right word. For as Sarit turned towards the man, he for his part turned away.

“It was sold to us by a corrupt Jordanian official — for a large sum of money, I might add. We spent many months studying it. We knew that it was the work of a Jewish traitor, but we wanted to know how much truth — or how little — there was in it.”

“And?”

“What it told us was a horror story. It was not just Boudicca’s daughter who came here from Britain, but a whole host of her people. Maybe not a vast army, but certainly more than just a small party. She came with a large entourage of handmaids and ladies in waiting. There were some men to — or at least boys who soon grew into men, cutting their teeth in a guerrilla war in Rome, culminating in the Great Fire of 1964. They weren’t just a small band of followers. Many of the women were the widows of the warrior leaders of the uprising of the Icheni.”

“You knew that they were called Icheni?” Ted intervened.

“Oh yes! And we also realized that it had been misread when translated. Josephus’s handwriting had a peculiarity that caused him to almost completely close off the Kaf, making it look like a Samech. He didn’t just do it once; he did throughout the manuscript, or at least the portions that we found. Thus the myth of the Essenes was born. Until then, the stories about the Essaoi by Philo and Pliny — written and pronounced differently — had been legends about ascetics. Josephus’s Icheni became confused and conflated with them.”

“But there were some ascetics amongst the Judeans,” said Daniel. “Josephus even travelled around Judea in the company of one for about three years.”

“Yes, that is true. There were such people amongst the Judeans, but they were few and far between. However with Josephus’s manuscript being misread by the Greek translator and apparently referring to the Esseni , the floodgates to a new myth were opened.”

Ted was confused by this line of reasoning.

“But why would a few misunderstood references to a relatively small number of refugees from Roman Britain, give rise to such a powerful and sweeping legend?”

“To understand that, you must understand what really happened. The vanquished peoples of Britain didn’t just come here and keep themselves to themselves. They intermarried with some of the Jewish rebels, following the depraved corrupt example of Simon Bar Giora. And this was the cause of the great division among our people that set brother against brother!”

“How so?” asked Ted, still far from convinced.”

“Although our religion permits conversion and receives sincere converts, it must be based on true belief, not just a desire for marriage, And it must be done in a proper way, according to Halacha — Jewish law.”

“And these conversions didn’t?”

“In some cases, there were no conversions. Just impure marriages. But others were against it, even at the time.”

“That’s why they kidnapped his wife,” said Ted. “That’s why the Jerusalem rebels didn’t want to elevate him as a leader of the rebellion — because he was married to a stranger.”

“Exactly,” said HaTzadik. “Just as his followers were married to others in her entourage. They were deemed to be a poison in our system, a leprosy in the camp, a cancer in our midst. And the other rebels wanted to destroy them, to render our people pure again. But Bar Giora used the violent methods that he had learned from a woman — who had learned them in turn from her mother — to force the righteous among us to release the vile woman and her entourage unharmed. And it didn’t end there.”

“What do you mean?” asked Daniel, sensing from HaTzadik’s tone that something terrible and new was coming.

“As I said, many of the entourage married and intermingled. But a DNA study in 2006 showed that forty percent of Ashkenazi Jews are descended from just four women dating back to the first century of the Common Era — four women with a genotype that is more common in Europe than the Middle East. Based on Josephus’s manuscript, we believe that we know the names of those four women. Boudicca’s daughter and three other women in her entourage.”

“But that’s an incredible finding!” Ted blurted out, not quite realizing how Shalom Tikva’s mind was working. “That’s a major discovery that sheds new light on your people.