May 13, 2025 • 59 mins
Odds are you've heard of the Dead Sea scrolls -- when the first of these ancient texts were discovered in the 1940s, the scrolls revolutionized our understanding of the past, and, in some cases, gave historians and archaeologists more questions than answers. One scroll, discovered in 1952, remains unique in the collection. It doesn't contain religious information, and it doesn't recount earlier stories from the region. Instead, this scroll (the only one written on copper) appears to be a treasure guide. In tonight's Classic episode, Ben, Matt and Noel ask: What happened to the gold, silver and artifacts catalogued on the scroll? Were these caches discovered thousands of years ago... or are these hidden treasures still somewhere out there today, waiting to be discovered?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fellow conspiracy realist. We're returning with an extra classic episode
for you this week. Back in twenty twenty yield D's
of the Pandemic, we got super into hidden history and
we were we were fascinated by the concept of the
Dead Sea Scrolls.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Oh, yes, the scrolls found in the Dead Sea in a.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
Cave creatively named Why isn't a cave part of the name,
it should be the Dead Sea Cave Scrolls.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Yeah, that's true, it's true. I feel like a missed
opportunity there, this one.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
These are ancient biblical artifacts, correct, containing early translations of
biblical material.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
Guys, no, me I am. I might be characterizing it grossly.
It's it's weird because they weren't discovered until the nineteen forties.
They were languishing in historical obscurity until a lucky encounter
by some nerdy splunkers just wanted to say, SPLUNKI. But
there's one scroll amid the collection. It was discovered in
(01:07):
nineteen fifty two, and it's unique. It doesn't have religious information.
It doesn't you know, like you're saying, no, it doesn't
recount earlier stories from the area. Instead, it appears to
be a kind of treasure map. It's also the only
scroll written on copper, which is weird.
Speaker 4 (01:24):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
They call me Ben. We are joined as always with
our super producer Paul Mission control decond. Most importantly, you
are here, and that may this stuff they don't want
you to know. This is this is a bit of
an Indiana Jones episode for us.
Speaker 5 (02:07):
Man.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Oh yeah, come on, I know, especially you and I
love the Indiana Jones stuff.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Oh yes, immensely, immensely. And I believe we may have
talked before. I don't know whether it was on air
off air, about which of the four you know would
be our personal favorites. I gotta say, man, I blame
it on the time in life that I saw it.
But last Crusade, Yeah yeah, head and shoulders above, streets ahead,
(02:37):
as they would say on the former TV show Community.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Yeah exactly. I can see. I can see that argument.
And you know, I generally I would have agreed with
you until I saw the Crystal Skulls. Yeah, that's was like,
this is a masterpiece, right.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Oh man, especially the ninja that.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Up here, the ninjas. For me, it's all about that refrigerator.
I can't. I mean, that's yea. What better piece of
cinema is there? I challenge you to show me a
better piece of American cinema.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Yeah, even spawned the phrase nuking the fridge, Right's right? Yeah.
And you know, one thing I like about that film series,
especially in Crystal Skull, is that they include realistic survival advice.
You know, fridges aren't just for food.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
It's lined with lead sun and plus it's padded, very
very padded.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Yeah, you know what I did overall enjoy it and
we you know, the fascinating thing about the concept of
Indiana Jones, which is far from perfect, of course, is
that it inspired a lot of people to become actual archaeologists.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Absolutely right. It made it seem a whole ton more
exciting than the job actually ends up being.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
Yeah, there are a couple of scenes, very sparsely painted
scenes in which he is ending a class or something, you.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
Know, exactly exactly.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
It's true also that Indiana. Jones was created or inspired
by true life stories people who were adventurous archaeologists, and
the field of archaeology is far from dusty or dead
(04:30):
and very much not static. In fact, many of the
debates in archaeology that began, you know, forty fifty one hundred,
two hundred years ago continue today and people are still
really steamed about it. Yeah, like, it's all still very
(04:50):
relevant to the academy. You know, people have their livelihoods
staked on as something that would seem like a negligible
disagreement to an outsider.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
That's correct, and we do always have to remember here
history is continually being written, even ancient history is being
rewritten as we discover something new or something more. And
that's what today's episode is all about.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
That's right. This may be familiar to those of us
in the audience who watch the stuff they don't want
you to know YouTube series. We are diving into the
story of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but not perhaps you know,
the way you might assume.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
Yeah, not at all.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
Well it's not at all the way you might assume.
But first, these first Dead Sea Scrolls, other than a
cool name, what are they? Here are the facts the
Dead Sea Scrolls.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
They're these amazing discoveries. They're also known as the Kumeran
Cave scrolls, and apologies for my pronunciation there. It's a
collection of these ancient religious documents that were discovered in
late nineteen forty six or early nineteen forty seven. They
are written in versions of Hebrew, like varying versions of Hebrew,
(06:09):
and they were discovered by these two Bedouin shepherds, just
two guys, and their names were forgive me but Huma
or Humah and Mohammed ed Dieb. And they were searching
for this literally, this is what's happening. They're searching for
a lost animal and they find these things.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
As a matter of fact, you know, Paul Massive favorite,
could we get a little bit of kind of Indiana
Jonesy music here just for a second, something from like
the first or second act, something building?
Speaker 2 (06:41):
Yeah, definitely, yeah, Crystal skulls.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
So so picture this. These shepherds are hunting for some
animal that's straight from the flock, and they come to
an outcrop overlooking the Dead Sea, and as they're looking
around for their lost livestock, they see an opening in
the face of the rock, a cave right and caves
(07:04):
are relatively common in this area, not being nincompoops of
any sort, these shepherds say, okay, we need to make
sure it's safe to enter there, and so they throw
some stones into the darkness to make sure that they
don't hear a larger animal or predator of some sort reacting,
(07:24):
and they don't. Instead, they hear the shattering of pottery,
and they're thinking, what huh what, And so they crawl
inside the cave to investigate, and they find that one
of the rocks they had thrown, by chance, hit an
ancient clay pot. And inside this clay pot, which had shattered,
there were scraps of leather, and these were obviously very old.
(07:49):
But the shepherd said, somebody wrote something on this leather.
And then they looked around. This is the cinematic moment
where they look from the broken in pot and they
see behind it as we like focus in.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Like it comes in somehow miraculously.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
And they see that there are a multitude of pots,
and these pots also contain stuff. Some of them are
complete scrolls contained, and others are fragments of previous works.
So imagine you know that, You imagine instead of finding
a book, you find like three pages of chapter four
(08:31):
that kind of stuff.
Speaker 5 (08:32):
Now.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
Now here is where the story takes a bit of
a turn, because it truly is a story that one
must believe the originators of this story to believe it,
that this is actually what happened. But according to what
is known or what is told, these guys collected all
these scrolls up and they kind of held on to
(08:54):
him for a little while. They took him to some
friends and some neighbors. They were like, yo, look at this.
This is pretty crazy, right, what do you think this is?
What could this be? And then they ended up heading
over to Bethlehem. This is the nearest commercial center to
where they were located over there. It's outside of Jerusalem, right,
that's what this is. And they wanted to see if
(09:17):
they can maybe sell these things to somebody who'd be
interested in this. What they believed to be in an
ancient relic or a series of ancient.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Relics, right, And they didn't know how old it was.
They just said, Okay, this seems important, and we live
in a very old part of the world, right, so
let's find an expert. One of the smartest things you
can do in that situation, the shepherds meet a man
named Feedi Salahi. Slahi is an antique stealer, but even
(09:45):
he is not completely sure what the shepherds have found.
So he calls a friend of his, an Armenian who
was also an antique stealer, and says, this is a weird,
crazy story. And then his colleague degrees and reaches out
to an archaeology professor named Eliza Lippa Sukinik, and Sukinik
(10:09):
is Sukinik is interested, right, But we have to remember
that this is the mid nineteen forties in the Middle East,
the mid to late nineteen forties, and these are dangerous, dangerous,
dangerous times. Sukinik risked life and limb as a Jewish
Man traveling to Bethlehem. He made it across the border,
(10:32):
he took possession of the scrolls. He persuaded Salahi to
let them to let him take the scrolls back to
study them. Right, and he is at his home in Jerusalem.
He's fluent in Hebrew. But that's remember what Matt said
earlier at the top, the different versions of Hebrew. Right,
(10:52):
if you are primarily an English speaker, just imagine any
time you had a teacher that may you read Canterbury
Tales in the way it was originally written.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Yeah, exactly, No, sure, and something as simple as like
the articles are a little strange, like and you just
don't understand the flow of the language. But here's the thing.
As he's looking through, it turns out these things they
weren't from the nineteen forties. They weren't from the sixteen
(11:26):
hundreds or the twelve hundreds. They were much much older. Right.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
Yes, the scrolls have all been ascribed to a rough
period of time, the Hellenistic Roman period, somewhere between the
third century BCE to the first century CE, meaning especially
for people who are devoted to Christianity, meaning that these
(11:57):
were written during the time of the historical figure Jesus Christ.
This is this would be contemporaneous or some of this would.
Many of these works correspond to the known Biblical text,
like the different Bibles you can find in hotels or
(12:19):
in the bookstores or you know, in your house or
friend's house today, and they correspond to parts of the
Hebrew Bible as well, the Torah.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
That's incredible to find something like that. That then becomes
not necessarily these texts, these specific physical texts, but the
contents in them ends up becoming what the Bible is.
That's incredible. And here's the thing. There's all kinds of
other religious writings that are included in there. There are,
(12:50):
you know, copies of the scriptures, other non canonical books
that we've talked about, and I believe we've mentioned this
before when we talk we talked about apocryphal texts and
some of that, so things that aren't included in the
official canon of the Holy Bible. And in total, there
are hundreds of documents found in twelve caves around Kumran
(13:10):
around that area, and the last cave that contained some
of these scrolls or pieces of these scrolls was only
discovered on it's crazy February of twenty seventeen.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
Right, not that long ago. And that's surprising because even now,
if you read a bunch of fairly authoritative information about
the Dead Sea Scrolls, you'll see the number quoted as eleven.
So this is very much a case of history in
the making. But who wrote them?
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (13:42):
See, that's the thing. Yeah, remember how we said earlier
that in the realm of history and archaeology, there are
there are details that might seem minor to some people,
but seem incredibly, incredibly crucial to to insiders in a community.
We're in a discipline. So the question of the providence
(14:06):
of the scrolls, or the question rather the original authors
is still going to cause debate in the academic community
even today. We know that many of the scrolls were
likely written by a Jewish sect known as the Esscenes,
who are scenes who controlled the area from the second
(14:26):
century BCE to the first century. See, they're real people.
They're mentioned by plenty the elder who locates them or
cites them living in the same area. So we do
you know, we do have proof that they were there.
They were real, they were known to be ascetic in
(14:49):
nature their practices. There are some who may have alleged,
you know, mysticism or something in their beliefs. But at
the problem with a lot of those ideas throwing them
m word around is that it's off. It's often coming
from another group and they're they're othering or they're they're
attempting to make these people seem i don't know, mysterious
(15:13):
or dangerous or off kilter or something like that, something
that is not of us.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
Well, yeah, if you have a rigid belief system, as
soon as you veer off just slightly, then you become othered, right,
I mean that it tends to occur, and you know,
you put mystic on there because maybe they slightly disagree
on one thing that is a bit esoteric or a
bit of a slightly different belief about something really big
(15:39):
within a religion.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
Or it would seem to be from an outsider's perspective.
For this reason, you'll you'll hear scholars occasionally refer to
the Dead Sea Scrolls as the library of this group.
The this is this is an interesting way to look
at it because we see some strong evidence that this
(16:01):
could happen. Not everything is written in the type of
Hebrew that this group was believed to have used, you know,
Aramaic is in their Greek, Latin and so on. But
if you look at a substantial library at your local
school or something, you're going to local college or whatever,
you're going to find multiple books in different languages, right,
(16:24):
I mean they were just acquired by the institution. But
then you'll hear other people say, well, there are this
is the result of multiple contributing authors across the course
of centuries. There's no one group that wrote these and
that's that's a debate that continues today.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
I just have to say that makes sense to me.
But you know, I'm not a scholar.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
That it'd be, that would be a library.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
It's a you know, it's there were different authors from
possibly different regions throughout you know, I don't know who
knows decades.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
It's a long time. So while scholars still go back
and forth about the identity of all the authors of
the scrolls, it's pretty easy to agree on the content. Luckily,
since since shortly after nineteen forty six, we have literally
had members of our species working around the clock to
(17:24):
figure out what on earth these things actually say.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
Yeah, as we mentioned, there's a lot of it's written
in versions of Hebrew. There's also some writing in Aramaic,
some in Greek, some in Latin. And the scrolls themselves
can be divided up into three rough sections, let's say
three sections. There's stuff from content at least from the
Old Testament. There's all kinds of information in there that
(17:48):
would match up, and it matches up pretty well with
the Old Testament, the Bible. There's also slightly alternative versions
of existing Biblical writings in there, especially Old Testaments.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Of conversations that may not have made it into what
is sorder of the canonical version of those religious works exactly.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
And there's also some a little more mundane things like
texts that's relating to everyday life stuff that is occurring
in that area with the people who live there, traditional
practices of those peoples. And a lot of this stuff
is written in Greek and in Latin, which again like
kind of painting a picture of Okay, well, maybe these
(18:30):
different authors are interested in recording different things here. It's
almost like an historian and like you've gotten a religious
studies sect writing those first, you know, the first set there,
and then you've got well, I don't know, historians writing
the second the second set there, and then the next
(18:52):
one is where it gets really fun. This is where
it's like the Revelation scrolls, but they've got a different.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
Name, right the so called Sectarian scrolls, also known as
the War Rule or the War scroll. This definitely came
from the scene sect. It's called the War of the
Suns of Light against the suns of darkness. Right now,
(19:19):
this sect believed themselves to be sort of the Holy elect,
the Kreme de la Creme of Israel, and they call
themselves the suns of Light, and at sometime at the
end of time, specifically, they would have a catastrophic war
with the enemies of Israel, who were called the sons
of Darkness. This scroll is an instructional an instructional piece.
(19:41):
It's a manual for organization and strategy. It talks about
battle gear, It gets down into the nitty gritty of signals.
It portrays a forty year holy war, and it says
this will be between the forces of good and evil,
involving divine as well as earthly soldiers. Yeah, and you know,
(20:04):
of course infernal assistance on the other side. So this
is fascinating because it's prophetic and apocalyptic. The scenes themselves
by the way to flesh this out. One of the
reasons that they were looked at askance is because they
(20:24):
were generally going to be found in monastic communities, and
in most cases these excluded women. So these were people
living specifically for the purpose of their faith or their
their spiritual values.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
And a lot of that entilled writing things down.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
Yes, yes, and we're going to explore some more of
that after a quick word from our sponsor. Right, they
wrote things down, and since a lot of the stuff
they wrote down predates the Bible. We can look back.
(21:04):
We could do this side by side. There are projects
to digitize this information. You can look side by side
and see the evolution of beliefs and concepts from the
time the scrolls were actually written, all the way to
the current translations of Bibles or other religious texts that
you see used today in twenty twenty. For example, you
(21:27):
can see depictions of narratives like what you would find
in modern day Exodus or Genesis. But here's the thing,
these are the earlier versions. They're different.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
Oh yes, And then we mentioned apocrypha before, because there's
all kinds of stuff in there about that, stories of
these giants, these ancient giants from before, these things called watchers,
these fallen watchers, and there's all kinds of other imagery
in there, and characters that you probably wouldn't if you
(22:00):
open and cracked a Bible.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
Yeah, I was thinking of I was thinking of, what's
what's the strange comparison we can make to this experience
in the modern day.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
Okay, all right?
Speaker 1 (22:11):
Uh do you remember Fresh Prince of bel Air.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
I've heard of it, Yes, I've seen every episode.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
Right, Okay, so Aunt Viv in Fresh Prince of bel
Air is actually two different actors, right, what Yeah, one
of them gets replaced in nineteen ninety three, right, I remember,
I know Matt clearly knows all of this. Intimately, you're
like the biggest fresh prints.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
I remember the episode and it changed. I was like,
that is not on viv Get out of here. Who
are you collitch.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
In the matrix?
Speaker 2 (22:43):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (22:44):
So for some people reading this is sort of like
that experience, because we grow up thinking that religious texts
are all poor choice of words here carved in stone,
that they do not change, you know what I mean?
And now there is clear evidence that at some point,
yeah dude, they did. They still have you know, a
(23:04):
lot in common, right, And there is also a fascinating
case to be made that this stuff remains remarkably consistent. Right,
But especially when you look at the modern Christian versions,
there are a lot of differences. There are things that
(23:24):
were cut out, and that has been the root of
a great deal of research. The fast spanning the spectrum
of plausibility and credibility, I would say, because you get
a lot of pseudo historians.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
In there, you know, oh yeah exactly.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
And there is so much to explore in the story
of the Dead Sea scrolls, but we want to hone
in on a specific story. We want to hone in
on a single scroll, and we may to be completely clear,
we may return in the future to other parts of
the Dead Sea story.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
I would love that.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
The Dead Sea itself, man, it's a crazy place.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
It really is.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
Thirty three percent salinity. It's nuts. They also recently scientists
found life at the bottom of the Dead Sea.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
You're saying, there's life in the bottom of the Dead Sea.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
Yeah, yeah, maybe we were a little too uh click
to pull the trigger on the name.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
For an update.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
Mostly dead sea, the live bottom sea. That's you know,
that's not gonna.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Have probiotics at the bottom there we go.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
Yeah, and and underwater whole foods because of course. But
also the Dead Sea is a receding at a precipitous rate.
It's sad.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
Great, thanks, thanks Ben, You're welcome in Australia's on fire.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
Yeah. Also still and then as we're recording this, there
were a series of earthquakes and an and.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
You know, some attacks. Yeah, yeah, it's fine, Everything's going
to be fine.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
I was talking to an old professor of mine recently
regarding geopolitical tensions in the modern world, and asked him,
you know what he thought was going to happen off
the record and stuff. And his answer was, you know,
he said, I envy you young folks out there because
you know you could make a choice and you might
(25:21):
not ever have to deal with the consequences. And he said,
you think about it, which you want, wreck a car,
tell someone you'll marry them, It doesn't matter.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
Now he's saying, we're not going to live, yes, yes,
for long.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
It was his way of saying that you can make
the most ridiculous choices because you really don't know if
you know, if you were going to do something that
would have killed you in your eighties, is that a
moot concern at this point?
Speaker 2 (25:50):
Oh my god, we can really live like there's no tomorrow.
Tonight's the night. That's why all the pop songs are
telling me Tonight's the night.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
I want to also point out, I'm not going to
give this professor's name. They are retired. Also want to
point out I think they're eighty percent joking. I would
like to think that. And if they're not, and if
you're listening, that is a horrible take on this on
this situation anyhow. Yeah, yes, we are focusing on one
(26:20):
one specific scroll because there was a scroll discovered on
March fourteenth, nineteen fifty two, and out of all of
the nine hundred something Dead Sea scrolls, this one is
unique for a number of reasons.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
Well, firstly, it's not written on papyrus or you know,
leather or any of these other mediums that where the
other ones were written or how they're what they were
written on. This one was written on a thin sheet
of rolled up copper. That's crazy, a thin sheet of
rolled up metal. And this thing is really really interesting.
(27:00):
There are several different estimates here. A lot of these
scholars believe that the probable range for the Copper scrolls
creation was somewhere in the period of twenty five to
seventy five CE, and that's just looking at the handwriting itself.
When you're analyzing that it's called from a paleographical perspective.
While there's this person in WF. Albright who suggests it
(27:22):
was probably written somewhere between seventy and one hundred and
thirty five CE, so a little bit after that range
at least when you're looking at it from a different perspective.
It's really really interesting because this thing is unlike the
other scrolls in way more ways than just the medium
on which it's written.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
Right, this scroll eschewed the trend of religious content entirely
focus on something else, something that has haunted amateurs and
archaeologists alike since the fifties. The copper scroll you see
is not a guide to day to day life. It
(28:04):
is not an early version of Exodus or Genesis. It's
not apocrypha. It is best described as a treasure map.
Here's where it gets crazy.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
A treasure map, Ben, a treasure map, Matt, No, you're right,
that's exactly what this thing is. It's about as Indiana
Jones as you can get. If you were to pick
this up and if you were able to read it immediately,
you would you would just in my mind, you would
grab a big stick or a shovel or something and
you would just start digging all over the place. It's
(28:41):
intense stuff.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
And it's not just one treasure, No, it's one treasure
across what it's all the treasure sixty four locations. Yeah.
The treasures are are precious metals, gold and silver, and
the text of the copper scroll is entirely an inventory
of these locations and coins, right, and coins, Yeah, sorry,
(29:06):
sixty three locations are, according to the scroll, holding gold
and silver, and there's a sixty fourth location that's a
little bit different. But they're talking, you know, they're making
money moves here. These these are not little burlap sacks
of like five to ten pieces of silver.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
No, not at all. You're talking talents, all kinds of talents,
sometimes fifty, sometimes ten, sometimes way more than that. There's
one location, like according to this copper scroll that it
holds nine hundred talents and or roughly eight hundred and
sixty eight thousand troy ounces of buried gold. That's a
(29:46):
lot of gold, my friends. Yes, And it is just
buried in one place. But then there's gold and silver
buried throughout this entire region somewhere out there, and we're
going to get into where that is. But it's not
just precious metals, it's not just talent or gold coins
and silver coins. It's got it's got religious accouterment too,
(30:08):
that's just buried out there somewhere.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Yeah. Yeah, tithing vessels, other other vessels that would be
used in religious ceremonies, right, also priestly vestments.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
Yeah, but I want to get back to the vessels.
The vessels were really fun for me because I'm going
to read you a quote from one of these, just
so everybody can hear. Is that okay?
Speaker 1 (30:33):
That's perfect? I forgot this was coming.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
Oh yes, just really quick.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
No, no, please, let's do it.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
Just speaking of vessels. So this is officially column three.
You can find this online if you want to. You
can see it in there, and this is just me
reading it in from an English translation. Dig down nine
cubits into the southern corner of the courtyard. There will
be silver and gold vessels given as offerings, bowls, cups,
(30:59):
sprinkling basins, libation tubes, and pictures. All together, they will
total six hundred and nine pieces.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
Libation tubes, Hey, Matt, what what's a libation tube?
Speaker 2 (31:13):
A libation tube is anything that you pour some drinking
to my friend. It could be wine, it could be
any other libation, as long as you're having fun and
hopefully doing it in sacrament to some higher deity.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
Libate right, librate to your heart's content. Would you call
that libyan? What would you call that? Tubin?
Speaker 2 (31:35):
Or leban?
Speaker 4 (31:36):
Liban?
Speaker 1 (31:37):
Tuban Ananberg. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they also these The name
sounds a bit funny in English, but libation tubes did
serve an important purpose, right, yeah, absolutely, They were connecting
the living with the dead and so on. So this
is incredibly important to point out. Though again, not all
(32:01):
of the treasure was gold and silver. There were things
that the community truly believed you could not put a
price on, right, these priceless objects, and they must be
hidden from invading forces such as the Romans, who of
course will show up later. There's another interesting part though,
(32:22):
that it's towards the very end of the Copper Scroll
it says there's another scroll out there that has more details.
It's as if they knew people would complain about the
directions in the scroll, which we'll get to by the way,
they're laughable. But that other document, whatever it is, has
(32:44):
yet to be found. They are experts of plenty in
this field, like a Theodore H. Gaster. He studied the
Copper Scroll extensively, and he believed that it was in
fact alluding to a real treasure, and that this treasure
could come from one of three sources.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
The first of those would be treasure that was acquired
by the Kumaran community or the Essenes that we discussed before.
It would kind of make sense. Just you know, when
you're thinking about all the religious accouterment that was buried
in all of these things, you can imagine that if
it is a religious community, perhaps a lot of this
the wealth of the gold and everything came through the
(33:28):
form of some kind of tithing or donation or some
you know, you can imagine it was gathered in some
way like that. It kind of makes sense. The next
possible source of this treasure would be from the Second
Temple in Jerusalem. However, we do have to kind of
point out here that the historical record suggests that a
lot of the main or the a large amount of
(33:50):
the main treasure that was inside that Second Temple was
in the building when Rome came through and sacked all
of Jerusalem after they breached all the walls. And it's
a there's a great there's a great article on HowStuffWorks
dot Com that goes kind of it paints a really
great picture of what occurred when the Romans sec Jerusalem
(34:11):
that time. It does not rule out this possibility, though
there's a significant portion of the treasures that may have
possibly at least you know. This is it's a belief, right,
This is where we're talking about. This is a suggestion.
A significant portion of the treasures may have been taken
away from the temple because it was known that the
(34:32):
Romans were coming through for days, right, so there was
probably preparation to get a lot of this treasure out
and hide it somewhere before they actually breached the walls.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
And the third idea is that this treasure came from
the First Temple, which was destroyed by the king of Babylon,
Nebuchadnezzar in five eighty six BCE. There's one problem with
that though. The scroll has been dated to as you said,
earlier man like twenty five at the earliest. So it's
(35:03):
unlikely that somebody went back and made a treasure map
centuries later, especially when you see how it's written. You know.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
Yeah, But here's the thing I would point out when
I was reading that too. This is my suggestion, and
this is there's no weight behind this suggestion. But if
the treasures were secreted away from either of the temples
and kept somewhere, right, perhaps this burying them across the
(35:36):
land and all these varying places that you'd need to
dig to find them very much buried treasure. It could
be an interesting strategy for hiding them a second time,
or maybe a third time, or you know, however, many
iterations these treasures had been hidden away from popular view
or from the authorities view.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
Yeah, I mean, that's the tantalizing thing about this, right.
We we have solid, concrete, tangible proof of something, and
now it's a herculean mental exercise to try to plausibly
and realistically connect these dots. You know. But when we
(36:20):
talk about connecting dots, we're also talking about decoding the
manuscript itself, because it was written in Hebrew, but it
was written in a different kind of Hebrew, and the
chronology makes us assume that this was deposited later was
possibly from a different group of people. We'll explore more
(36:41):
of the conundrum of the copper scroll after word from
our sponsor.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
All right, and we're back. Now. We've been talking about,
you know, the origin a lot of this copper scroll,
but we really really want to answer the question, is
there actual treasure out there that if let's say we
got on a plane and ended up there in that area,
could we find some talents underneath the ground somewhere Troy ounces.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
Well, what do you think, Ben, It's possible, But to
do that we would have to Indiana Jones style decipher
the manuscript. So, for instance, we set a talent we
had the equivalent there for Troy ounce. But unsurprisingly, directions
(37:38):
are not given in kilometers, nor were they in miles.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
Oh yes, oh sure, yes, absolutely. We mentioned this when
I read column three. It says dig down nine cubits.
So if you were to dig down nine cubits, what
the heck would that look like. Well, let's talk about
it really, really quickly. A cubit is ancient and handy measurement,
and that is a pun and we'll get to it.
(38:04):
So let's do something fun together. Right now, Paul, you
do this too, just so I can see if I'm
telling it correctly. Please take your dominant hand and stretch
it directly out in front of you, right, Okay. Now,
let's bend your elbow so it's ninety degrees facing upwards. Okay, okay, excellent.
Now the length from your elbow to the middle finger,
(38:27):
your middle finger, which is stretched out, by the way,
I forgot to mention that that is a cubit, not
a Cubert no, a cubebit. And here's there's a bit
of a problem here because my cubit is not exactly
the same length as your cubit. It's going to be
close ish, yeah, but it's not exactly the same. It's
roughly eighteen inches somewhere around that length, or about forty
(38:52):
six centimeters. But this is the measurement that was used
in throughout ancient history for a long long time. And
just think about how helpful this measurement is for someone
anyone who's working on either a huge project or just
something maybe in their home. You can measure something out,
be like, I want this table to be about four
(39:13):
cubits across, and you could measure that as you're going,
and you know, cut cut wood to an exact measurement
orright close to exact measurement. And then you could also
talk with your you know, colleagues, or if you want
to sell it, you can say this thing is it's
about three four cubits. Yeah, it's pretty cool to me.
I didn't know that. I'm just excited to have that knowledge.
Speaker 1 (39:35):
It's a measuring tool that you carry with you at
all times.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
Yeah, you don't, you don't need a tool right, or
anything else. You got your arm.
Speaker 1 (39:41):
You are the tool.
Speaker 2 (39:41):
Yeah, you're the tool.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
Tell yourself that, say I am the tool in the mirror.
So this is just one example of the the different
phrases or concepts that have to be translated to ciphered
for us to launch an actual treasure hunt based on
the information we find in the copper scroll. Spoiler alert.
(40:07):
For some people, what you're about to hear may be
very disappointing. For others in the audience today, it may
be quite inspiring. And it is this the treasure which
was almost definitely real, by which we mean real gold,
real silver, you know what I mean, the mollah, the
good stuff, stuff you could trade on a market today.
(40:28):
This is not like a treasure like oh, the friends
we made along the way, or you know, ah, this
is a child's doll that was really important to a
person who died.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
Yeah, just to point out here, it doesn't make sense
for someone anyone to take the time and effort and
resources to inscribe in that copper scroll all of the
information that is on there, if it's just some mythical
thing that there's no actual treasure all, Like, why would
you do that?
Speaker 1 (40:58):
So that's the spoiler alert. This treasure, which again is
overwhelmingly likely to be a real thing, it has never
been found, not as far as we know, a single
piece of it, not even the like, not even the
idea of a single piece of gold or silver, Not
a single piece of one of those vessels that was mentioned,
(41:21):
No libation tube, et cetera.
Speaker 2 (41:23):
Yeah, there's a there's a guy who allegedly found some tiny,
little couple of small pieces, but it was not like, well.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
He found a rock, right, I think? So there they
said it was man made.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
Yeah, people, this hasn't stopped people from searching, of course,
But why hasn't it been found? That's that's the craziest question. First,
which you think we mentioned earlier when we were talking
about the possible origin of the treasure. We have to
think of the sheer passage of time. It is plausible
that sometime between modern day exploration and excavation and the
(42:02):
time that these things were originally written, at the time
this treasure was originally buried, it's completely possible that any
number of people looted the Bejesus out of the thing,
you know.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
Yeah, but why would you leave the copper scroll behind well,
the scroll clearly wasn't next to the treasure.
Speaker 1 (42:20):
It's supposed to tell you where to go.
Speaker 2 (42:22):
Yeah, but you'd use the treasure, you'd have to take
it with you.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
Right, Well, what if you just found the treasure and
you never found the scroll. Oh you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
But this stuff is like nine cubits. You have to
dig like nine cubits.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
Well, we also have to remember, for instance, that our
prime suspect for a contemporaneous looting operation would have been
the Roman community, and the Romans at the time standard
operating procedure was to torture people to get information so
they could have found one. I mean, that's also why
the treasure was not put in one location. Yes, right,
(43:00):
so maybe it was a situation where outside of the
authors of the Copper Scroll, most people didn't know. You know,
they probably have pretty good operational security. Most people didn't
know where the other sixty four or excuse me, sixty
three things were.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
That is really smart to split it up as much
as they did.
Speaker 1 (43:16):
Yeah. Well, if this was, if this was a treasure
from the Second Temple, it was very much not the
first rodeo, you know what I mean. Theo lessons learned.
So the other idea is that there may have been
a cover up of some sort that was successful, and
that the people responsible for hiding the gold and silver
(43:37):
did a great job. But outside of the copper scroll
and this other unidentified or undiscovered document, they just never
shared the information with others, or they passed away, or
the people they told the secret to at some point
communication between generations failed. Add to that, the vagueness of
this scroll can be maddening. This is, if I may,
(44:00):
I'm gonna read just the excerpt from the instructions to
one of the treasure locations. We want to see what
you think. I'm just gonna read it without other than
saying it's vague. In the salt pit that is under
the steps, forty one talents of silver, in the cave
of the old Washer's chamber on the third terrace, sixty
(44:22):
five ingots of gold. What's the old washer's chamber?
Speaker 2 (44:26):
Huh? You know what I mean, dude, I'm telling you,
I have such a feeling about this. It was an
internal document, Yeah, it was. This is what I'm feeling,
and I remember as I was reading through. You can
find a couple of places online where you can read
translations of the full scroll, and it really does go
on like that, like that's pretty much what Ben just read.
(44:47):
It's like twelve columns of that. And it feels like
somebody within a group of people recording with places like that,
like the old washers whatever, this specific cave that doesn't
have an exact you know, the name is a little strange.
(45:08):
It doesn't match up historically with any other. Sure, everybody
in that insular group knows all these places intimately, and
they know exactly where to go and where to dig
and everything. But they're just keeping a record of it,
or somebody within it is the record keeper of it. Sure, yeah,
you could it just totally. It totally makes sense.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
I mean that makes yeah, it does make sense. I
agree with you. The first thing this made me think
of through analogy was the experience that you have if
you have ever given or received directions in very small towns.
Speaker 2 (45:41):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (45:42):
You know, you may have something that sounds really clear,
like take Main Street and then take a left on
Colquit at the corner of the Arby's, why the Arby's
or something, but you may also have something like go
about I don't go a mile till you get to
where the old mill burn down. Yes, and then you
know there should be a post office box.
Speaker 4 (46:05):
Yeah, and then.
Speaker 1 (46:07):
You go, I think you go for about three miles
until you get where the Tillmans used to live, and
then you take a right there.
Speaker 2 (46:16):
See for us, just we're been and Nolan, Paul and
I live. It's so much easier to give directions to
anyone because you can just pinpoint different waffle houses and
you can just once you know where the waffle houses are,
then you can tell anybody how to get anywhere.
Speaker 1 (46:30):
It's very convenient reference point. But our point is who
can guess if it is indeed an internal document? Who
has the foresight to say, thousands of years ago the
old washer's chamber. I mean, clearly where else would you
put a washer's chamber?
Speaker 2 (46:49):
But in you know, in what I was saying this
last thing, yes, you'd have to prove that the old
washer's chamber existed somewhere near where the scroll was discovered,
rather than maybe where the scroll was written or originally
you know, the area that it's speaking to.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
It still may you know? It still makes me think, though,
of modern English has ruined my understanding of these sorts
of translations yeah, because in American English, whenever somebody throws
the phrase the old in front of something, it sounds
like a euphemism, the old washer's chamber, You know what
(47:27):
I mean? Is this some sort of strange metaphor for
the old washer's chamber? Is that like a move? People?
Speaker 2 (47:37):
Do I think it is the old washer?
Speaker 1 (47:41):
Well, it sounds it does sound.
Speaker 2 (47:42):
Like a place. Well, maybe it was just written by
an old prospector maybe.
Speaker 1 (47:45):
It was written by the original foghorn Leghorn. But despite
this vagueness, people have insisted on searching. Why would you not?
You know, you could be a part of one of
the greatest discoveries in history scrolls. Right in nineteen sixty
two we saw one of the largest, most extensive hunts
(48:07):
for the treasures of the Copper Scroll was led by
a man named John Allegro. He followed some of the
places listed in the scroll and did their best. He
and his team did their best to figure out where
they would be in the modern day. They excavated a
ton of potential burial places, but eventually they gave up
(48:30):
and they returned empty handed. There was a more recent
excavation or exploration attempt by a man named Jim Barfield.
And Jim Barfield is interesting because he doesn't he believes
that the treasure was not actually gold and silver. He
believes that the primary quote unquote loot of the treasure
(48:53):
would be the vessels and utensils of the Lost Temple.
And so he did something interesting. He applied triangulation techniques. Right,
He was kind of cross referencing these ancient texts and
the references that the copper scroll made in different locations
because they're all kind of in the same area.
Speaker 2 (49:14):
So smart, right, yeah, absolutely, it's very smart, and it's
the way that I would do it. And the reason
why it's interesting that this guy, Jim Barfield did it
is because he doesn't speak Hebrew, he's not Jewish. He's
just a guy who's essentially like a treasure hunter or
you know, someone with an interest in this who had
some time and resources and just used a technique that
(49:38):
like an investigator would use. Basically really really cool stuff.
And so he thinks he actually found some of these
locations in the surrounding area in Kumran. And there's this
breaking news Israel.
Speaker 1 (49:51):
Report that which is not the best source.
Speaker 2 (49:54):
It's not I will give you that, but Let's just
give a quote from that article about his investigation. It says, quote,
in two thousand and seven, he Barfield went to Kumaran
and actually found those locations. In one case, the scroll
describes steps forty cubits long heading east. Barfield did indeed
(50:16):
find stares conforming to the description. He also discovered the
remains of a pool precisely forty cubits long, exactly where
the scroll said it would be. However, there is always
a twist here or reason why we couldn't fulfill what
was going to occur finding all this treasure quote, but
lacking government permission, he could go no further.
Speaker 1 (50:39):
Yeah, yep. So those are the two most prominent expeditions,
and they both didn't produce anything that was universally agreed
to be the treasure. That's the best way to say it.
Speaker 2 (50:52):
Well. Yeah, and we humanity, at least to our knowledge
that has been recorded, has not recovered anything material right
from any of these Right.
Speaker 1 (51:02):
I believe in one of Barfield's investigations he found a
rock that was provably man made. So at his at
this point, he's focusing on matching up physical locations and
structures or ruins, yes, right, And so he's not immediately
(51:23):
going after Golds because again he thinks the treasure quote unquote,
is a different thing. But all this together, as do listeners,
you'll notice that the last line from Barfield was he
could go no further because he lacked government permission. This
brings us to the possibility or the proposed possibility of
(51:44):
a cover up, because you see, there is no secret
that there is a war over history in the Middle East.
Given the historical tension and volatility of the region, the
government has been very careful about who they allow to
search this area and when and how. You know what
I mean, like, if you bring in a potentially damaging equipment,
(52:09):
you could lose humanity's one shot to figure out some
of the mysteries here.
Speaker 2 (52:14):
Now. And imagine that you're a treasure hunter who doesn't
live in the area, and you find a treasure and
you want to take it out of that area, and
you're going to go through customs or something, or you know,
you're going to claim that it is a treasure, and
you have to claim that it's a treasure in order
to establish where you found it, when you found it,
(52:36):
that you're the one that found it. How important it
is that it's real and authentic. You have to say that.
You have to raise your hand and say, hey, I
found treasure.
Speaker 1 (52:43):
Unless you want to go into the illegal.
Speaker 2 (52:47):
Yeah, I know, which is something you can do. However,
it's it's difficult because then you're getting things verified, you know,
after the fact, which is a whole it's a whole
different animal. I'm big in black market antiquities.
Speaker 1 (53:02):
I'm always grateful that you're here when we're doing these
shows because you know, a lot of a lot of
the lessons you've learned, You've learned the hard way.
Speaker 2 (53:11):
I really have, Oh my goodness. But we can't get
into that for legal reasons. So let's okay, let's just
say it would be difficult because if you do find
something in this region, you raise your hand and you say, hey,
I found treasure, then there it's not just going to
be the local authorities, you know, that are going to
(53:31):
play ownership over this.
Speaker 1 (53:32):
Now, it'll be academic institutions in this case, will be
religious institutions as well. Barfield said that he believes he
clearly believes he was on the right track, and he
clearly believes he was being stymied in his search, but
he thought there was a good reason. He said, if
(53:54):
he discovered anything of value, it would lead to what
I would call a real ship show because we're family broadcasts.
And here's what he said. He says he predicted that
Jordan would claim the land used to belong to them
if there was something of value discovered. He said, Palestinians
(54:15):
will claim they were here before this other group, so
that therefore they'll say whatever they found belongs to us,
and then the world will believe them. According to Barfield,
he says, you know, Egypt will come along and say
that there was a treasure that was taken from the
land of Egypt during the Exodus, and he says, ultimately
(54:36):
by keeping it in the ground, the Israeli government is
protecting it. It's a very interesting way to allege a
cover up.
Speaker 5 (54:44):
You know.
Speaker 2 (54:45):
Oh yeah, it's certainly interesting. So I don't know, should
we do we need to get into anything else, Ben,
I just kind of want to talk a little bit about,
like what what you think person about this thing? Can
we get into opinion?
Speaker 1 (55:02):
What I think about the the treasure?
Speaker 2 (55:06):
Yeah, that the scrolls? Like the treasure? What do you
what do you think it might.
Speaker 1 (55:09):
Still be out there? You really think so quite possibly.
I mean, it's it's possible that it was all looted.
It's it's it's not plausible to assume that all of
these different locations survived. It is possible that a few did, yeah,
because the only way they would all they would all
(55:31):
have been found were if they were eventually all sixty
four were. First off, we're assuming all sixty four actually exist,
if all sixty four were found one by one, or
if somebody found that second, more detailed document and then
went through and somehow did all of this in secret
and it was forgotten. You know.
Speaker 2 (55:51):
This is my is what I put to you. I
like what you're saying there. I think I think that
that copper scroll where was was essentially just discarded there
or just left there for record keeping at some point.
Just we've got this collection of scrolls, here's another one.
It's just gonna be there. This is where it lives
(56:11):
now because we've already used it to find everything, we
don't need it anymore. And that second document, like you said,
was kept by the people that recovered all of the
treasure because it was I believe that it was from
probably the Second Temple.
Speaker 1 (56:25):
And you think it was an inside job.
Speaker 2 (56:27):
No, I think I think it was just I think
we essentially got it's a receipt or it's the the
old instructions of like, Okay, we've we've accomplished this, we've
collected everything. We don't need it anymore. We'll just leave
those instructions there. Doesn't matter if anyone finds any of
these by burial places anymore, because we've already recovered everything.
Speaker 1 (56:47):
And then, yeah, I could I could see that. I
could definitely see that. But I do like the idea
that was an inside job and that there were two documents,
two scrolls, and then one person totally betrayed everybody. It
took the second stroll AdPT. I doubt that. I doubt
that's the case, but it would make for it would
(57:08):
make for a compelling narrative. This is also taking We
have to realize too that anything of this age is
it the value we ascribe to it is only partially financial,
and it's only a very small part of it. The
real value becomes an historical value, and that's where we
(57:31):
see the import there. It can prove, confirm or debunk
things that we believe about history today, and it could
also provide evidence of various various stories that have been
traditionally told, and that that treasure, any treasure, if discovered,
would immediately become significant in the in the war over history,
(57:53):
you know, the war over who gets what when? And
this you know this continue across the world, but the
Middle East especially has a it's such an ancient land.
It's been home to immense conflicts over historical claims, religious sites,
who has the right to go where, when and so on.
(58:19):
And that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't
wait to hear your thoughts. It's right let us know
what you think.
Speaker 3 (58:25):
You can reach you to the Hamil Conspiracy Stuff where
we exist on Facebook x and YouTube, on Instagram and
TikTok work Conspiracy Stuff Show.
Speaker 2 (58:33):
If you want to call us dial one eight three
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we can use your name and message on the air.
If you got more to say than can fit in
that voicemail, why not instead send us a good old
fashioned email. We are the.
Speaker 5 (58:52):
Entities to read every single piece of correspondence we receive.
Speaker 1 (58:56):
Be aware, yet not afraid.
Speaker 5 (58:58):
Sometimes the void writes back canspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (59:21):
Stuff they Don't Want you to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Fellow conspiracy realist. We're returning with an extra classic episode
for you this week. Back in twenty twenty yield D's
of the Pandemic, we got super into hidden history and
we were we were fascinated by the concept of the
Dead Sea Scrolls.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Oh, yes, the scrolls found in the Dead Sea in a.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
Cave creatively named Why isn't a cave part of the name,
it should be the Dead Sea Cave Scrolls.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Yeah, that's true, it's true. I feel like a missed
opportunity there, this one.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
These are ancient biblical artifacts, correct, containing early translations of
biblical material.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
Guys, no, me I am. I might be characterizing it grossly.
It's it's weird because they weren't discovered until the nineteen forties.
They were languishing in historical obscurity until a lucky encounter
by some nerdy splunkers just wanted to say, SPLUNKI. But
there's one scroll amid the collection. It was discovered in
(01:07):
nineteen fifty two, and it's unique. It doesn't have religious information.
It doesn't you know, like you're saying, no, it doesn't
recount earlier stories from the area. Instead, it appears to
be a kind of treasure map. It's also the only
scroll written on copper, which is weird.
Speaker 4 (01:24):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
They call me Ben. We are joined as always with
our super producer Paul Mission control decond. Most importantly, you
are here, and that may this stuff they don't want
you to know. This is this is a bit of
an Indiana Jones episode for us.
Speaker 5 (02:07):
Man.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Oh yeah, come on, I know, especially you and I
love the Indiana Jones stuff.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Oh yes, immensely, immensely. And I believe we may have
talked before. I don't know whether it was on air
off air, about which of the four you know would
be our personal favorites. I gotta say, man, I blame
it on the time in life that I saw it.
But last Crusade, Yeah yeah, head and shoulders above, streets ahead,
(02:37):
as they would say on the former TV show Community.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Yeah exactly. I can see. I can see that argument.
And you know, I generally I would have agreed with
you until I saw the Crystal Skulls. Yeah, that's was like,
this is a masterpiece, right.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Oh man, especially the ninja that.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Up here, the ninjas. For me, it's all about that refrigerator.
I can't. I mean, that's yea. What better piece of
cinema is there? I challenge you to show me a
better piece of American cinema.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Yeah, even spawned the phrase nuking the fridge, Right's right? Yeah.
And you know, one thing I like about that film series,
especially in Crystal Skull, is that they include realistic survival advice.
You know, fridges aren't just for food.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
It's lined with lead sun and plus it's padded, very
very padded.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Yeah, you know what I did overall enjoy it and
we you know, the fascinating thing about the concept of
Indiana Jones, which is far from perfect, of course, is
that it inspired a lot of people to become actual archaeologists.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Absolutely right. It made it seem a whole ton more
exciting than the job actually ends up being.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
Yeah, there are a couple of scenes, very sparsely painted
scenes in which he is ending a class or something, you.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
Know, exactly exactly.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
It's true also that Indiana. Jones was created or inspired
by true life stories people who were adventurous archaeologists, and
the field of archaeology is far from dusty or dead
(04:30):
and very much not static. In fact, many of the
debates in archaeology that began, you know, forty fifty one hundred,
two hundred years ago continue today and people are still
really steamed about it. Yeah, like, it's all still very
(04:50):
relevant to the academy. You know, people have their livelihoods
staked on as something that would seem like a negligible
disagreement to an outsider.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
That's correct, and we do always have to remember here
history is continually being written, even ancient history is being
rewritten as we discover something new or something more. And
that's what today's episode is all about.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
That's right. This may be familiar to those of us
in the audience who watch the stuff they don't want
you to know YouTube series. We are diving into the
story of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but not perhaps you know,
the way you might assume.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
Yeah, not at all.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
Well it's not at all the way you might assume.
But first, these first Dead Sea Scrolls, other than a
cool name, what are they? Here are the facts the
Dead Sea Scrolls.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
They're these amazing discoveries. They're also known as the Kumeran
Cave scrolls, and apologies for my pronunciation there. It's a
collection of these ancient religious documents that were discovered in
late nineteen forty six or early nineteen forty seven. They
are written in versions of Hebrew, like varying versions of Hebrew,
(06:09):
and they were discovered by these two Bedouin shepherds, just
two guys, and their names were forgive me but Huma
or Humah and Mohammed ed Dieb. And they were searching
for this literally, this is what's happening. They're searching for
a lost animal and they find these things.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
As a matter of fact, you know, Paul Massive favorite,
could we get a little bit of kind of Indiana
Jonesy music here just for a second, something from like
the first or second act, something building?
Speaker 2 (06:41):
Yeah, definitely, yeah, Crystal skulls.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
So so picture this. These shepherds are hunting for some
animal that's straight from the flock, and they come to
an outcrop overlooking the Dead Sea, and as they're looking
around for their lost livestock, they see an opening in
the face of the rock, a cave right and caves
(07:04):
are relatively common in this area, not being nincompoops of
any sort, these shepherds say, okay, we need to make
sure it's safe to enter there, and so they throw
some stones into the darkness to make sure that they
don't hear a larger animal or predator of some sort reacting,
(07:24):
and they don't. Instead, they hear the shattering of pottery,
and they're thinking, what huh what, And so they crawl
inside the cave to investigate, and they find that one
of the rocks they had thrown, by chance, hit an
ancient clay pot. And inside this clay pot, which had shattered,
there were scraps of leather, and these were obviously very old.
(07:49):
But the shepherd said, somebody wrote something on this leather.
And then they looked around. This is the cinematic moment
where they look from the broken in pot and they
see behind it as we like focus in.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Like it comes in somehow miraculously.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
And they see that there are a multitude of pots,
and these pots also contain stuff. Some of them are
complete scrolls contained, and others are fragments of previous works.
So imagine you know that, You imagine instead of finding
a book, you find like three pages of chapter four
(08:31):
that kind of stuff.
Speaker 5 (08:32):
Now.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
Now here is where the story takes a bit of
a turn, because it truly is a story that one
must believe the originators of this story to believe it,
that this is actually what happened. But according to what
is known or what is told, these guys collected all
these scrolls up and they kind of held on to
(08:54):
him for a little while. They took him to some
friends and some neighbors. They were like, yo, look at this.
This is pretty crazy, right, what do you think this is?
What could this be? And then they ended up heading
over to Bethlehem. This is the nearest commercial center to
where they were located over there. It's outside of Jerusalem, right,
that's what this is. And they wanted to see if
(09:17):
they can maybe sell these things to somebody who'd be
interested in this. What they believed to be in an
ancient relic or a series of ancient.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Relics, right, And they didn't know how old it was.
They just said, Okay, this seems important, and we live
in a very old part of the world, right, so
let's find an expert. One of the smartest things you
can do in that situation, the shepherds meet a man
named Feedi Salahi. Slahi is an antique stealer, but even
(09:45):
he is not completely sure what the shepherds have found.
So he calls a friend of his, an Armenian who
was also an antique stealer, and says, this is a weird,
crazy story. And then his colleague degrees and reaches out
to an archaeology professor named Eliza Lippa Sukinik, and Sukinik
(10:09):
is Sukinik is interested, right, But we have to remember
that this is the mid nineteen forties in the Middle East,
the mid to late nineteen forties, and these are dangerous, dangerous,
dangerous times. Sukinik risked life and limb as a Jewish
Man traveling to Bethlehem. He made it across the border,
(10:32):
he took possession of the scrolls. He persuaded Salahi to
let them to let him take the scrolls back to
study them. Right, and he is at his home in Jerusalem.
He's fluent in Hebrew. But that's remember what Matt said
earlier at the top, the different versions of Hebrew. Right,
(10:52):
if you are primarily an English speaker, just imagine any
time you had a teacher that may you read Canterbury
Tales in the way it was originally written.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Yeah, exactly, No, sure, and something as simple as like
the articles are a little strange, like and you just
don't understand the flow of the language. But here's the thing.
As he's looking through, it turns out these things they
weren't from the nineteen forties. They weren't from the sixteen
(11:26):
hundreds or the twelve hundreds. They were much much older. Right.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
Yes, the scrolls have all been ascribed to a rough
period of time, the Hellenistic Roman period, somewhere between the
third century BCE to the first century CE, meaning especially
for people who are devoted to Christianity, meaning that these
(11:57):
were written during the time of the historical figure Jesus Christ.
This is this would be contemporaneous or some of this would.
Many of these works correspond to the known Biblical text,
like the different Bibles you can find in hotels or
(12:19):
in the bookstores or you know, in your house or
friend's house today, and they correspond to parts of the
Hebrew Bible as well, the Torah.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
That's incredible to find something like that. That then becomes
not necessarily these texts, these specific physical texts, but the
contents in them ends up becoming what the Bible is.
That's incredible. And here's the thing. There's all kinds of
other religious writings that are included in there. There are,
(12:50):
you know, copies of the scriptures, other non canonical books
that we've talked about, and I believe we've mentioned this
before when we talk we talked about apocryphal texts and
some of that, so things that aren't included in the
official canon of the Holy Bible. And in total, there
are hundreds of documents found in twelve caves around Kumran
(13:10):
around that area, and the last cave that contained some
of these scrolls or pieces of these scrolls was only
discovered on it's crazy February of twenty seventeen.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
Right, not that long ago. And that's surprising because even now,
if you read a bunch of fairly authoritative information about
the Dead Sea Scrolls, you'll see the number quoted as eleven.
So this is very much a case of history in
the making. But who wrote them?
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (13:42):
See, that's the thing. Yeah, remember how we said earlier
that in the realm of history and archaeology, there are
there are details that might seem minor to some people,
but seem incredibly, incredibly crucial to to insiders in a community.
We're in a discipline. So the question of the providence
(14:06):
of the scrolls, or the question rather the original authors
is still going to cause debate in the academic community
even today. We know that many of the scrolls were
likely written by a Jewish sect known as the Esscenes,
who are scenes who controlled the area from the second
(14:26):
century BCE to the first century. See, they're real people.
They're mentioned by plenty the elder who locates them or
cites them living in the same area. So we do
you know, we do have proof that they were there.
They were real, they were known to be ascetic in
(14:49):
nature their practices. There are some who may have alleged,
you know, mysticism or something in their beliefs. But at
the problem with a lot of those ideas throwing them
m word around is that it's off. It's often coming
from another group and they're they're othering or they're they're
attempting to make these people seem i don't know, mysterious
(15:13):
or dangerous or off kilter or something like that, something
that is not of us.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
Well, yeah, if you have a rigid belief system, as
soon as you veer off just slightly, then you become othered, right,
I mean that it tends to occur, and you know,
you put mystic on there because maybe they slightly disagree
on one thing that is a bit esoteric or a
bit of a slightly different belief about something really big
(15:39):
within a religion.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
Or it would seem to be from an outsider's perspective.
For this reason, you'll you'll hear scholars occasionally refer to
the Dead Sea Scrolls as the library of this group.
The this is this is an interesting way to look
at it because we see some strong evidence that this
(16:01):
could happen. Not everything is written in the type of
Hebrew that this group was believed to have used, you know,
Aramaic is in their Greek, Latin and so on. But
if you look at a substantial library at your local
school or something, you're going to local college or whatever,
you're going to find multiple books in different languages, right,
(16:24):
I mean they were just acquired by the institution. But
then you'll hear other people say, well, there are this
is the result of multiple contributing authors across the course
of centuries. There's no one group that wrote these and
that's that's a debate that continues today.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
I just have to say that makes sense to me.
But you know, I'm not a scholar.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
That it'd be, that would be a library.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
It's a you know, it's there were different authors from
possibly different regions throughout you know, I don't know who
knows decades.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
It's a long time. So while scholars still go back
and forth about the identity of all the authors of
the scrolls, it's pretty easy to agree on the content. Luckily,
since since shortly after nineteen forty six, we have literally
had members of our species working around the clock to
(17:24):
figure out what on earth these things actually say.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
Yeah, as we mentioned, there's a lot of it's written
in versions of Hebrew. There's also some writing in Aramaic,
some in Greek, some in Latin. And the scrolls themselves
can be divided up into three rough sections, let's say
three sections. There's stuff from content at least from the
Old Testament. There's all kinds of information in there that
(17:48):
would match up, and it matches up pretty well with
the Old Testament, the Bible. There's also slightly alternative versions
of existing Biblical writings in there, especially Old Testaments.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Of conversations that may not have made it into what
is sorder of the canonical version of those religious works exactly.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
And there's also some a little more mundane things like
texts that's relating to everyday life stuff that is occurring
in that area with the people who live there, traditional
practices of those peoples. And a lot of this stuff
is written in Greek and in Latin, which again like
kind of painting a picture of Okay, well, maybe these
(18:30):
different authors are interested in recording different things here. It's
almost like an historian and like you've gotten a religious
studies sect writing those first, you know, the first set there,
and then you've got well, I don't know, historians writing
the second the second set there, and then the next
(18:52):
one is where it gets really fun. This is where
it's like the Revelation scrolls, but they've got a different.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
Name, right the so called Sectarian scrolls, also known as
the War Rule or the War scroll. This definitely came
from the scene sect. It's called the War of the
Suns of Light against the suns of darkness. Right now,
(19:19):
this sect believed themselves to be sort of the Holy elect,
the Kreme de la Creme of Israel, and they call
themselves the suns of Light, and at sometime at the
end of time, specifically, they would have a catastrophic war
with the enemies of Israel, who were called the sons
of Darkness. This scroll is an instructional an instructional piece.
(19:41):
It's a manual for organization and strategy. It talks about
battle gear, It gets down into the nitty gritty of signals.
It portrays a forty year holy war, and it says
this will be between the forces of good and evil,
involving divine as well as earthly soldiers. Yeah, and you know,
(20:04):
of course infernal assistance on the other side. So this
is fascinating because it's prophetic and apocalyptic. The scenes themselves
by the way to flesh this out. One of the
reasons that they were looked at askance is because they
(20:24):
were generally going to be found in monastic communities, and
in most cases these excluded women. So these were people
living specifically for the purpose of their faith or their
their spiritual values.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
And a lot of that entilled writing things down.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
Yes, yes, and we're going to explore some more of
that after a quick word from our sponsor. Right, they
wrote things down, and since a lot of the stuff
they wrote down predates the Bible. We can look back.
(21:04):
We could do this side by side. There are projects
to digitize this information. You can look side by side
and see the evolution of beliefs and concepts from the
time the scrolls were actually written, all the way to
the current translations of Bibles or other religious texts that
you see used today in twenty twenty. For example, you
(21:27):
can see depictions of narratives like what you would find
in modern day Exodus or Genesis. But here's the thing,
these are the earlier versions. They're different.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
Oh yes, And then we mentioned apocrypha before, because there's
all kinds of stuff in there about that, stories of
these giants, these ancient giants from before, these things called watchers,
these fallen watchers, and there's all kinds of other imagery
in there, and characters that you probably wouldn't if you
(22:00):
open and cracked a Bible.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
Yeah, I was thinking of I was thinking of, what's
what's the strange comparison we can make to this experience
in the modern day.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
Okay, all right?
Speaker 1 (22:11):
Uh do you remember Fresh Prince of bel Air.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
I've heard of it, Yes, I've seen every episode.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
Right, Okay, so Aunt Viv in Fresh Prince of bel
Air is actually two different actors, right, what Yeah, one
of them gets replaced in nineteen ninety three, right, I remember,
I know Matt clearly knows all of this. Intimately, you're
like the biggest fresh prints.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
I remember the episode and it changed. I was like,
that is not on viv Get out of here. Who
are you collitch.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
In the matrix?
Speaker 2 (22:43):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (22:44):
So for some people reading this is sort of like
that experience, because we grow up thinking that religious texts
are all poor choice of words here carved in stone,
that they do not change, you know what I mean?
And now there is clear evidence that at some point,
yeah dude, they did. They still have you know, a
(23:04):
lot in common, right, And there is also a fascinating
case to be made that this stuff remains remarkably consistent. Right,
But especially when you look at the modern Christian versions,
there are a lot of differences. There are things that
(23:24):
were cut out, and that has been the root of
a great deal of research. The fast spanning the spectrum
of plausibility and credibility, I would say, because you get
a lot of pseudo historians.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
In there, you know, oh yeah exactly.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
And there is so much to explore in the story
of the Dead Sea scrolls, but we want to hone
in on a specific story. We want to hone in
on a single scroll, and we may to be completely clear,
we may return in the future to other parts of
the Dead Sea story.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
I would love that.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
The Dead Sea itself, man, it's a crazy place.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
It really is.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
Thirty three percent salinity. It's nuts. They also recently scientists
found life at the bottom of the Dead Sea.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
You're saying, there's life in the bottom of the Dead Sea.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
Yeah, yeah, maybe we were a little too uh click
to pull the trigger on the name.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
For an update.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
Mostly dead sea, the live bottom sea. That's you know,
that's not gonna.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Have probiotics at the bottom there we go.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
Yeah, and and underwater whole foods because of course. But
also the Dead Sea is a receding at a precipitous rate.
It's sad.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
Great, thanks, thanks Ben, You're welcome in Australia's on fire.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
Yeah. Also still and then as we're recording this, there
were a series of earthquakes and an and.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
You know, some attacks. Yeah, yeah, it's fine, Everything's going
to be fine.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
I was talking to an old professor of mine recently
regarding geopolitical tensions in the modern world, and asked him,
you know what he thought was going to happen off
the record and stuff. And his answer was, you know,
he said, I envy you young folks out there because
you know you could make a choice and you might
(25:21):
not ever have to deal with the consequences. And he said,
you think about it, which you want, wreck a car,
tell someone you'll marry them, It doesn't matter.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
Now he's saying, we're not going to live, yes, yes,
for long.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
It was his way of saying that you can make
the most ridiculous choices because you really don't know if
you know, if you were going to do something that
would have killed you in your eighties, is that a
moot concern at this point?
Speaker 2 (25:50):
Oh my god, we can really live like there's no tomorrow.
Tonight's the night. That's why all the pop songs are
telling me Tonight's the night.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
I want to also point out, I'm not going to
give this professor's name. They are retired. Also want to
point out I think they're eighty percent joking. I would
like to think that. And if they're not, and if
you're listening, that is a horrible take on this on
this situation anyhow. Yeah, yes, we are focusing on one
(26:20):
one specific scroll because there was a scroll discovered on
March fourteenth, nineteen fifty two, and out of all of
the nine hundred something Dead Sea scrolls, this one is
unique for a number of reasons.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
Well, firstly, it's not written on papyrus or you know,
leather or any of these other mediums that where the
other ones were written or how they're what they were
written on. This one was written on a thin sheet
of rolled up copper. That's crazy, a thin sheet of
rolled up metal. And this thing is really really interesting.
(27:00):
There are several different estimates here. A lot of these
scholars believe that the probable range for the Copper scrolls
creation was somewhere in the period of twenty five to
seventy five CE, and that's just looking at the handwriting itself.
When you're analyzing that it's called from a paleographical perspective.
While there's this person in WF. Albright who suggests it
(27:22):
was probably written somewhere between seventy and one hundred and
thirty five CE, so a little bit after that range
at least when you're looking at it from a different perspective.
It's really really interesting because this thing is unlike the
other scrolls in way more ways than just the medium
on which it's written.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
Right, this scroll eschewed the trend of religious content entirely
focus on something else, something that has haunted amateurs and
archaeologists alike since the fifties. The copper scroll you see
is not a guide to day to day life. It
(28:04):
is not an early version of Exodus or Genesis. It's
not apocrypha. It is best described as a treasure map.
Here's where it gets crazy.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
A treasure map, Ben, a treasure map, Matt, No, you're right,
that's exactly what this thing is. It's about as Indiana
Jones as you can get. If you were to pick
this up and if you were able to read it immediately,
you would you would just in my mind, you would
grab a big stick or a shovel or something and
you would just start digging all over the place. It's
(28:41):
intense stuff.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
And it's not just one treasure, No, it's one treasure
across what it's all the treasure sixty four locations. Yeah.
The treasures are are precious metals, gold and silver, and
the text of the copper scroll is entirely an inventory
of these locations and coins, right, and coins, Yeah, sorry,
(29:06):
sixty three locations are, according to the scroll, holding gold
and silver, and there's a sixty fourth location that's a
little bit different. But they're talking, you know, they're making
money moves here. These these are not little burlap sacks
of like five to ten pieces of silver.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
No, not at all. You're talking talents, all kinds of talents,
sometimes fifty, sometimes ten, sometimes way more than that. There's
one location, like according to this copper scroll that it
holds nine hundred talents and or roughly eight hundred and
sixty eight thousand troy ounces of buried gold. That's a
(29:46):
lot of gold, my friends. Yes, And it is just
buried in one place. But then there's gold and silver
buried throughout this entire region somewhere out there, and we're
going to get into where that is. But it's not
just precious metals, it's not just talent or gold coins
and silver coins. It's got it's got religious accouterment too,
(30:08):
that's just buried out there somewhere.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Yeah. Yeah, tithing vessels, other other vessels that would be
used in religious ceremonies, right, also priestly vestments.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
Yeah, but I want to get back to the vessels.
The vessels were really fun for me because I'm going
to read you a quote from one of these, just
so everybody can hear. Is that okay?
Speaker 1 (30:33):
That's perfect? I forgot this was coming.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
Oh yes, just really quick.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
No, no, please, let's do it.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
Just speaking of vessels. So this is officially column three.
You can find this online if you want to. You
can see it in there, and this is just me
reading it in from an English translation. Dig down nine
cubits into the southern corner of the courtyard. There will
be silver and gold vessels given as offerings, bowls, cups,
(30:59):
sprinkling basins, libation tubes, and pictures. All together, they will
total six hundred and nine pieces.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
Libation tubes, Hey, Matt, what what's a libation tube?
Speaker 2 (31:13):
A libation tube is anything that you pour some drinking
to my friend. It could be wine, it could be
any other libation, as long as you're having fun and
hopefully doing it in sacrament to some higher deity.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
Libate right, librate to your heart's content. Would you call
that libyan? What would you call that? Tubin?
Speaker 2 (31:35):
Or leban?
Speaker 4 (31:36):
Liban?
Speaker 1 (31:37):
Tuban Ananberg. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they also these The name
sounds a bit funny in English, but libation tubes did
serve an important purpose, right, yeah, absolutely, They were connecting
the living with the dead and so on. So this
is incredibly important to point out. Though again, not all
(32:01):
of the treasure was gold and silver. There were things
that the community truly believed you could not put a
price on, right, these priceless objects, and they must be
hidden from invading forces such as the Romans, who of
course will show up later. There's another interesting part though,
(32:22):
that it's towards the very end of the Copper Scroll
it says there's another scroll out there that has more details.
It's as if they knew people would complain about the
directions in the scroll, which we'll get to by the way,
they're laughable. But that other document, whatever it is, has
(32:44):
yet to be found. They are experts of plenty in
this field, like a Theodore H. Gaster. He studied the
Copper Scroll extensively, and he believed that it was in
fact alluding to a real treasure, and that this treasure
could come from one of three sources.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
The first of those would be treasure that was acquired
by the Kumaran community or the Essenes that we discussed before.
It would kind of make sense. Just you know, when
you're thinking about all the religious accouterment that was buried
in all of these things, you can imagine that if
it is a religious community, perhaps a lot of this
the wealth of the gold and everything came through the
(33:28):
form of some kind of tithing or donation or some
you know, you can imagine it was gathered in some
way like that. It kind of makes sense. The next
possible source of this treasure would be from the Second
Temple in Jerusalem. However, we do have to kind of
point out here that the historical record suggests that a
lot of the main or the a large amount of
(33:50):
the main treasure that was inside that Second Temple was
in the building when Rome came through and sacked all
of Jerusalem after they breached all the walls. And it's
a there's a great there's a great article on HowStuffWorks
dot Com that goes kind of it paints a really
great picture of what occurred when the Romans sec Jerusalem
(34:11):
that time. It does not rule out this possibility, though
there's a significant portion of the treasures that may have
possibly at least you know. This is it's a belief, right,
This is where we're talking about. This is a suggestion.
A significant portion of the treasures may have been taken
away from the temple because it was known that the
(34:32):
Romans were coming through for days, right, so there was
probably preparation to get a lot of this treasure out
and hide it somewhere before they actually breached the walls.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
And the third idea is that this treasure came from
the First Temple, which was destroyed by the king of Babylon,
Nebuchadnezzar in five eighty six BCE. There's one problem with
that though. The scroll has been dated to as you said,
earlier man like twenty five at the earliest. So it's
(35:03):
unlikely that somebody went back and made a treasure map
centuries later, especially when you see how it's written. You know.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
Yeah, But here's the thing I would point out when
I was reading that too. This is my suggestion, and
this is there's no weight behind this suggestion. But if
the treasures were secreted away from either of the temples
and kept somewhere, right, perhaps this burying them across the
(35:36):
land and all these varying places that you'd need to
dig to find them very much buried treasure. It could
be an interesting strategy for hiding them a second time,
or maybe a third time, or you know, however, many
iterations these treasures had been hidden away from popular view
or from the authorities view.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
Yeah, I mean, that's the tantalizing thing about this, right.
We we have solid, concrete, tangible proof of something, and
now it's a herculean mental exercise to try to plausibly
and realistically connect these dots. You know. But when we
(36:20):
talk about connecting dots, we're also talking about decoding the
manuscript itself, because it was written in Hebrew, but it
was written in a different kind of Hebrew, and the
chronology makes us assume that this was deposited later was
possibly from a different group of people. We'll explore more
(36:41):
of the conundrum of the copper scroll after word from
our sponsor.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
All right, and we're back. Now. We've been talking about,
you know, the origin a lot of this copper scroll,
but we really really want to answer the question, is
there actual treasure out there that if let's say we
got on a plane and ended up there in that area,
could we find some talents underneath the ground somewhere Troy ounces.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
Well, what do you think, Ben, It's possible, But to
do that we would have to Indiana Jones style decipher
the manuscript. So, for instance, we set a talent we
had the equivalent there for Troy ounce. But unsurprisingly, directions
(37:38):
are not given in kilometers, nor were they in miles.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
Oh yes, oh sure, yes, absolutely. We mentioned this when
I read column three. It says dig down nine cubits.
So if you were to dig down nine cubits, what
the heck would that look like. Well, let's talk about
it really, really quickly. A cubit is ancient and handy measurement,
and that is a pun and we'll get to it.
(38:04):
So let's do something fun together. Right now, Paul, you
do this too, just so I can see if I'm
telling it correctly. Please take your dominant hand and stretch
it directly out in front of you, right, Okay. Now,
let's bend your elbow so it's ninety degrees facing upwards. Okay, okay, excellent.
Now the length from your elbow to the middle finger,
(38:27):
your middle finger, which is stretched out, by the way,
I forgot to mention that that is a cubit, not
a Cubert no, a cubebit. And here's there's a bit
of a problem here because my cubit is not exactly
the same length as your cubit. It's going to be
close ish, yeah, but it's not exactly the same. It's
roughly eighteen inches somewhere around that length, or about forty
(38:52):
six centimeters. But this is the measurement that was used
in throughout ancient history for a long long time. And
just think about how helpful this measurement is for someone
anyone who's working on either a huge project or just
something maybe in their home. You can measure something out,
be like, I want this table to be about four
(39:13):
cubits across, and you could measure that as you're going,
and you know, cut cut wood to an exact measurement
orright close to exact measurement. And then you could also
talk with your you know, colleagues, or if you want
to sell it, you can say this thing is it's
about three four cubits. Yeah, it's pretty cool to me.
I didn't know that. I'm just excited to have that knowledge.
Speaker 1 (39:35):
It's a measuring tool that you carry with you at
all times.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
Yeah, you don't, you don't need a tool right, or
anything else. You got your arm.
Speaker 1 (39:41):
You are the tool.
Speaker 2 (39:41):
Yeah, you're the tool.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
Tell yourself that, say I am the tool in the mirror.
So this is just one example of the the different
phrases or concepts that have to be translated to ciphered
for us to launch an actual treasure hunt based on
the information we find in the copper scroll. Spoiler alert.
(40:07):
For some people, what you're about to hear may be
very disappointing. For others in the audience today, it may
be quite inspiring. And it is this the treasure which
was almost definitely real, by which we mean real gold,
real silver, you know what I mean, the mollah, the
good stuff, stuff you could trade on a market today.
(40:28):
This is not like a treasure like oh, the friends
we made along the way, or you know, ah, this
is a child's doll that was really important to a
person who died.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
Yeah, just to point out here, it doesn't make sense
for someone anyone to take the time and effort and
resources to inscribe in that copper scroll all of the
information that is on there, if it's just some mythical
thing that there's no actual treasure all, Like, why would
you do that?
Speaker 1 (40:58):
So that's the spoiler alert. This treasure, which again is
overwhelmingly likely to be a real thing, it has never
been found, not as far as we know, a single
piece of it, not even the like, not even the
idea of a single piece of gold or silver, Not
a single piece of one of those vessels that was mentioned,
(41:21):
No libation tube, et cetera.
Speaker 2 (41:23):
Yeah, there's a there's a guy who allegedly found some tiny,
little couple of small pieces, but it was not like, well.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
He found a rock, right, I think? So there they
said it was man made.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
Yeah, people, this hasn't stopped people from searching, of course,
But why hasn't it been found? That's that's the craziest question. First,
which you think we mentioned earlier when we were talking
about the possible origin of the treasure. We have to
think of the sheer passage of time. It is plausible
that sometime between modern day exploration and excavation and the
(42:02):
time that these things were originally written, at the time
this treasure was originally buried, it's completely possible that any
number of people looted the Bejesus out of the thing,
you know.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
Yeah, but why would you leave the copper scroll behind well,
the scroll clearly wasn't next to the treasure.
Speaker 1 (42:20):
It's supposed to tell you where to go.
Speaker 2 (42:22):
Yeah, but you'd use the treasure, you'd have to take
it with you.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
Right, Well, what if you just found the treasure and
you never found the scroll. Oh you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
But this stuff is like nine cubits. You have to
dig like nine cubits.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
Well, we also have to remember, for instance, that our
prime suspect for a contemporaneous looting operation would have been
the Roman community, and the Romans at the time standard
operating procedure was to torture people to get information so
they could have found one. I mean, that's also why
the treasure was not put in one location. Yes, right,
(43:00):
so maybe it was a situation where outside of the
authors of the Copper Scroll, most people didn't know. You know,
they probably have pretty good operational security. Most people didn't
know where the other sixty four or excuse me, sixty
three things were.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
That is really smart to split it up as much
as they did.
Speaker 1 (43:16):
Yeah. Well, if this was, if this was a treasure
from the Second Temple, it was very much not the
first rodeo, you know what I mean. Theo lessons learned.
So the other idea is that there may have been
a cover up of some sort that was successful, and
that the people responsible for hiding the gold and silver
(43:37):
did a great job. But outside of the copper scroll
and this other unidentified or undiscovered document, they just never
shared the information with others, or they passed away, or
the people they told the secret to at some point
communication between generations failed. Add to that, the vagueness of
this scroll can be maddening. This is, if I may,
(44:00):
I'm gonna read just the excerpt from the instructions to
one of the treasure locations. We want to see what
you think. I'm just gonna read it without other than
saying it's vague. In the salt pit that is under
the steps, forty one talents of silver, in the cave
of the old Washer's chamber on the third terrace, sixty
(44:22):
five ingots of gold. What's the old washer's chamber?
Speaker 2 (44:26):
Huh? You know what I mean, dude, I'm telling you,
I have such a feeling about this. It was an
internal document, Yeah, it was. This is what I'm feeling,
and I remember as I was reading through. You can
find a couple of places online where you can read
translations of the full scroll, and it really does go
on like that, like that's pretty much what Ben just read.
(44:47):
It's like twelve columns of that. And it feels like
somebody within a group of people recording with places like that,
like the old washers whatever, this specific cave that doesn't
have an exact you know, the name is a little strange.
(45:08):
It doesn't match up historically with any other. Sure, everybody
in that insular group knows all these places intimately, and
they know exactly where to go and where to dig
and everything. But they're just keeping a record of it,
or somebody within it is the record keeper of it. Sure, yeah,
you could it just totally. It totally makes sense.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
I mean that makes yeah, it does make sense. I
agree with you. The first thing this made me think
of through analogy was the experience that you have if
you have ever given or received directions in very small towns.
Speaker 2 (45:41):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (45:42):
You know, you may have something that sounds really clear,
like take Main Street and then take a left on
Colquit at the corner of the Arby's, why the Arby's
or something, but you may also have something like go
about I don't go a mile till you get to
where the old mill burn down. Yes, and then you
know there should be a post office box.
Speaker 4 (46:05):
Yeah, and then.
Speaker 1 (46:07):
You go, I think you go for about three miles
until you get where the Tillmans used to live, and
then you take a right there.
Speaker 2 (46:16):
See for us, just we're been and Nolan, Paul and
I live. It's so much easier to give directions to
anyone because you can just pinpoint different waffle houses and
you can just once you know where the waffle houses are,
then you can tell anybody how to get anywhere.
Speaker 1 (46:30):
It's very convenient reference point. But our point is who
can guess if it is indeed an internal document? Who
has the foresight to say, thousands of years ago the
old washer's chamber. I mean, clearly where else would you
put a washer's chamber?
Speaker 2 (46:49):
But in you know, in what I was saying this
last thing, yes, you'd have to prove that the old
washer's chamber existed somewhere near where the scroll was discovered,
rather than maybe where the scroll was written or originally
you know, the area that it's speaking to.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
It still may you know? It still makes me think, though,
of modern English has ruined my understanding of these sorts
of translations yeah, because in American English, whenever somebody throws
the phrase the old in front of something, it sounds
like a euphemism, the old washer's chamber, You know what
(47:27):
I mean? Is this some sort of strange metaphor for
the old washer's chamber? Is that like a move? People?
Speaker 2 (47:37):
Do I think it is the old washer?
Speaker 1 (47:41):
Well, it sounds it does sound.
Speaker 2 (47:42):
Like a place. Well, maybe it was just written by
an old prospector maybe.
Speaker 1 (47:45):
It was written by the original foghorn Leghorn. But despite
this vagueness, people have insisted on searching. Why would you not?
You know, you could be a part of one of
the greatest discoveries in history scrolls. Right in nineteen sixty
two we saw one of the largest, most extensive hunts
(48:07):
for the treasures of the Copper Scroll was led by
a man named John Allegro. He followed some of the
places listed in the scroll and did their best. He
and his team did their best to figure out where
they would be in the modern day. They excavated a
ton of potential burial places, but eventually they gave up
(48:30):
and they returned empty handed. There was a more recent
excavation or exploration attempt by a man named Jim Barfield.
And Jim Barfield is interesting because he doesn't he believes
that the treasure was not actually gold and silver. He
believes that the primary quote unquote loot of the treasure
(48:53):
would be the vessels and utensils of the Lost Temple.
And so he did something interesting. He applied triangulation techniques. Right,
He was kind of cross referencing these ancient texts and
the references that the copper scroll made in different locations
because they're all kind of in the same area.
Speaker 2 (49:14):
So smart, right, yeah, absolutely, it's very smart, and it's
the way that I would do it. And the reason
why it's interesting that this guy, Jim Barfield did it
is because he doesn't speak Hebrew, he's not Jewish. He's
just a guy who's essentially like a treasure hunter or
you know, someone with an interest in this who had
some time and resources and just used a technique that
(49:38):
like an investigator would use. Basically really really cool stuff.
And so he thinks he actually found some of these
locations in the surrounding area in Kumran. And there's this
breaking news Israel.
Speaker 1 (49:51):
Report that which is not the best source.
Speaker 2 (49:54):
It's not I will give you that, but Let's just
give a quote from that article about his investigation. It says, quote,
in two thousand and seven, he Barfield went to Kumaran
and actually found those locations. In one case, the scroll
describes steps forty cubits long heading east. Barfield did indeed
(50:16):
find stares conforming to the description. He also discovered the
remains of a pool precisely forty cubits long, exactly where
the scroll said it would be. However, there is always
a twist here or reason why we couldn't fulfill what
was going to occur finding all this treasure quote, but
lacking government permission, he could go no further.
Speaker 1 (50:39):
Yeah, yep. So those are the two most prominent expeditions,
and they both didn't produce anything that was universally agreed
to be the treasure. That's the best way to say it.
Speaker 2 (50:52):
Well. Yeah, and we humanity, at least to our knowledge
that has been recorded, has not recovered anything material right
from any of these Right.
Speaker 1 (51:02):
I believe in one of Barfield's investigations he found a
rock that was provably man made. So at his at
this point, he's focusing on matching up physical locations and
structures or ruins, yes, right, And so he's not immediately
(51:23):
going after Golds because again he thinks the treasure quote unquote,
is a different thing. But all this together, as do listeners,
you'll notice that the last line from Barfield was he
could go no further because he lacked government permission. This
brings us to the possibility or the proposed possibility of
(51:44):
a cover up, because you see, there is no secret
that there is a war over history in the Middle East.
Given the historical tension and volatility of the region, the
government has been very careful about who they allow to
search this area and when and how. You know what
I mean, like, if you bring in a potentially damaging equipment,
(52:09):
you could lose humanity's one shot to figure out some
of the mysteries here.
Speaker 2 (52:14):
Now. And imagine that you're a treasure hunter who doesn't
live in the area, and you find a treasure and
you want to take it out of that area, and
you're going to go through customs or something, or you know,
you're going to claim that it is a treasure, and
you have to claim that it's a treasure in order
to establish where you found it, when you found it,
(52:36):
that you're the one that found it. How important it
is that it's real and authentic. You have to say that.
You have to raise your hand and say, hey, I
found treasure.
Speaker 1 (52:43):
Unless you want to go into the illegal.
Speaker 2 (52:47):
Yeah, I know, which is something you can do. However,
it's it's difficult because then you're getting things verified, you know,
after the fact, which is a whole it's a whole
different animal. I'm big in black market antiquities.
Speaker 1 (53:02):
I'm always grateful that you're here when we're doing these
shows because you know, a lot of a lot of
the lessons you've learned, You've learned the hard way.
Speaker 2 (53:11):
I really have, Oh my goodness. But we can't get
into that for legal reasons. So let's okay, let's just
say it would be difficult because if you do find
something in this region, you raise your hand and you say, hey,
I found treasure, then there it's not just going to
be the local authorities, you know, that are going to
(53:31):
play ownership over this.
Speaker 1 (53:32):
Now, it'll be academic institutions in this case, will be
religious institutions as well. Barfield said that he believes he
clearly believes he was on the right track, and he
clearly believes he was being stymied in his search, but
he thought there was a good reason. He said, if
(53:54):
he discovered anything of value, it would lead to what
I would call a real ship show because we're family broadcasts.
And here's what he said. He says he predicted that
Jordan would claim the land used to belong to them
if there was something of value discovered. He said, Palestinians
(54:15):
will claim they were here before this other group, so
that therefore they'll say whatever they found belongs to us,
and then the world will believe them. According to Barfield,
he says, you know, Egypt will come along and say
that there was a treasure that was taken from the
land of Egypt during the Exodus, and he says, ultimately
(54:36):
by keeping it in the ground, the Israeli government is
protecting it. It's a very interesting way to allege a
cover up.
Speaker 5 (54:44):
You know.
Speaker 2 (54:45):
Oh yeah, it's certainly interesting. So I don't know, should
we do we need to get into anything else, Ben,
I just kind of want to talk a little bit about,
like what what you think person about this thing? Can
we get into opinion?
Speaker 1 (55:02):
What I think about the the treasure?
Speaker 2 (55:06):
Yeah, that the scrolls? Like the treasure? What do you
what do you think it might.
Speaker 1 (55:09):
Still be out there? You really think so quite possibly.
I mean, it's it's possible that it was all looted.
It's it's it's not plausible to assume that all of
these different locations survived. It is possible that a few did, yeah,
because the only way they would all they would all
(55:31):
have been found were if they were eventually all sixty
four were. First off, we're assuming all sixty four actually exist,
if all sixty four were found one by one, or
if somebody found that second, more detailed document and then
went through and somehow did all of this in secret
and it was forgotten. You know.
Speaker 2 (55:51):
This is my is what I put to you. I
like what you're saying there. I think I think that
that copper scroll where was was essentially just discarded there
or just left there for record keeping at some point.
Just we've got this collection of scrolls, here's another one.
It's just gonna be there. This is where it lives
(56:11):
now because we've already used it to find everything, we
don't need it anymore. And that second document, like you said,
was kept by the people that recovered all of the
treasure because it was I believe that it was from
probably the Second Temple.
Speaker 1 (56:25):
And you think it was an inside job.
Speaker 2 (56:27):
No, I think I think it was just I think
we essentially got it's a receipt or it's the the
old instructions of like, Okay, we've we've accomplished this, we've
collected everything. We don't need it anymore. We'll just leave
those instructions there. Doesn't matter if anyone finds any of
these by burial places anymore, because we've already recovered everything.
Speaker 1 (56:47):
And then, yeah, I could I could see that. I
could definitely see that. But I do like the idea
that was an inside job and that there were two documents,
two scrolls, and then one person totally betrayed everybody. It
took the second stroll AdPT. I doubt that. I doubt
that's the case, but it would make for it would
(57:08):
make for a compelling narrative. This is also taking We
have to realize too that anything of this age is
it the value we ascribe to it is only partially financial,
and it's only a very small part of it. The
real value becomes an historical value, and that's where we
(57:31):
see the import there. It can prove, confirm or debunk
things that we believe about history today, and it could
also provide evidence of various various stories that have been
traditionally told, and that that treasure, any treasure, if discovered,
would immediately become significant in the in the war over history,
(57:53):
you know, the war over who gets what when? And
this you know this continue across the world, but the
Middle East especially has a it's such an ancient land.
It's been home to immense conflicts over historical claims, religious sites,
who has the right to go where, when and so on.
(58:19):
And that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't
wait to hear your thoughts. It's right let us know
what you think.
Speaker 3 (58:25):
You can reach you to the Hamil Conspiracy Stuff where
we exist on Facebook x and YouTube, on Instagram and
TikTok work Conspiracy Stuff Show.
Speaker 2 (58:33):
If you want to call us dial one eight three
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give yourself a cool nickname and let us know if
we can use your name and message on the air.
If you got more to say than can fit in
that voicemail, why not instead send us a good old
fashioned email. We are the.
Speaker 5 (58:52):
Entities to read every single piece of correspondence we receive.
Speaker 1 (58:56):
Be aware, yet not afraid.
Speaker 5 (58:58):
Sometimes the void writes back canspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (59:21):
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