The Copper Scroll (3Q15)

Reflection

The Copper Scroll — 3Q15 — is the strangest manuscript in the Dead Sea corpus: not parchment or papyrus but two plaques of nearly pure copper, originally rolled, recovered from Cave 3 at Qumran in 1952. The copper had oxidized brittle in the eighteen centuries since deposit, and the scroll could not simply be unrolled. The Manchester College of Technology cut it lengthwise into twenty-three strips in 1955-56, a destructive but necessary procedure that revealed sixty-four engraved Hebrew paragraphs listing the burial locations of an immense treasure: tons of silver and gold, vessels, and tithed materials, hidden across the wilderness from Jericho to the Wadi Kidron. The Hebrew is closer to Mishnaic than the literary Hebrew of the other Qumran scrolls, suggesting a more popular register. Scholars are divided on what the inventory describes. Józef Milik treated it as folklore — fictional treasure of the kind that appears in late Jewish legend. Bargil Pixner, John Allegro, and more recently P. Kyle McCarter Jr. have argued for partial historicity, perhaps the inventory of the Jerusalem Temple treasury hidden ahead of the Roman siege of AD 70. The treasure has never been recovered. The Copper Scroll remains the only known late Second Temple document inscribed on metal and one of the great unsolved puzzles of biblical archaeology.

Sources: Józef T. Milik, Le Rouleau de cuivre (Oxford, 1962); P. Kyle McCarter Jr., "The Mysterious Copper Scroll," Bible Review (1992); Judah K. Lefkovits, The Copper Scroll 3Q15: A Reevaluation (Brill, 2000).