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Absent but Accounted for: A New Approach to the Copper Scroll
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 July 2015
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Like so much of early Jewish literature, the strange Dead Sea scroll known as the Copper Scroll (3Q15) remains suspended somewhere between reality and fantasy. Even before scholars had fully unrolled its copper plates in 1956, they were able to discern that it recorded a list of treasures, but there soon broke out a dispute over whether this treasure was real or not. Some scholars felt that the treasure was too large to be real and that it was a figment of its author's imagination. They sought the origins of the scroll in ancient Jewish legend. Others believed the treasure to be quite plausible, probably connected to the Temple in some way. The scroll itself, however, revealed nothing that might settle the issue in one direction or the other. In what follows, I wish to explore a way beyond this impasse, not resolving whether the treasure was real or not, but suggesting how it could be both at the same time. Such a claim will seem contradictory, but it is my hope over the course of this essay not just to establish the possibility of such a position but to demonstrate that such a reading is actually more consistent with the evidence we have than any reading that imposes an either/or choice between reading the treasure as fictional or genuine.
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References
1 Veyne, Paul, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination (trans. Wissig, Paula; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) 102–33Google Scholar. I would like to thank Mira Balberg, Hindy Najman, and Mira Wasserman for their feedback in response to earlier versions of this essay, and James Redfield for careful and discerning editorial assistance.
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19 Wilmot's research was never published, and I could not get access to his unpublished draft, but his argument has been summarized by his student Michael Wise, and through him, we can get some sense of his conclusions. See Michael O. Wise, “David J. Wilmot and the Copper Scroll,” Copper Scroll Studies, 291–309.
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26 The translation is from Aleshire, Athenian Asklepieion, 278–79. For the Greek text, see 251.
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45 Shaya, “Lindos Chronicle,” 125–27. Earlier scholarship suspected that a few of the treasures still existed at the time of the inscription's composition, but, as Shaya notes, even if some of the objects still existed in the authors’ day, these were the exception.
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54 For evidence of priestly theft from the Temple, see 2 Maccabees 4:32; Jewish War 6.387–191. For the pilfering of sacred donations intended for the Temple, see Antiquities 18.82–83.
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57 Tanhuma, Pequdei 7; Exodus Rabbah, 51.6.