Ancient Refuge in the Holy Land

PBS Airdate: November 23, 2004

NARRATOR: The great Judean Desert: south of Jerusalem and west of the Dead Sea;
the land of the ancient prophets of the Hebrew Bible; the land of King David and
King Solomon; the land of Jesus and the early Christians. Here, high above a de
ep, forbidding canyon, is a mysterious cave known as the "Cave of Letters."
Historians believe that 2,000 years ago, this desolate cave was used as a hideaw
ay by Jewish refugees escaping the oppressive rule of the Roman Empire. But what
actually happened here? What desperation could have driven people to this nearl
y inaccessible place? What can the ancient letters and objects found here tell u
s about their plight?
RICHARD FREUND (University of Hartford): Are there anymore backpacks over here?
NARRATOR: Richard Freund, a professor of Jewish history, is mounting a new exped
ition to the Cave of Letters, determined to unravel its deep secrets.
RICHARD FREUND: Head 'em up, move 'em out.
So you have Roman source, you have Christian source, you Jewish source, they all
say the same thing.
NARRATOR: Freund's busload of archaeologists and historians is in for an arduous
journey, a journey that will force them to confront long-held beliefs about Bib
lical history.
RICHARD FREUND: Okay, go get a helmet. Make sure you pick out one that works for
you.
NARRATOR: The trek begins on top of the cliff, then down a steep path to the lev
el of the cave. It continues across a sheer cliff-face on a series of narrow led
ges, and finally up to the cave itself. The path wanders precariously, 650 feet
above the canyon floor.
Lawrence Schiffman, a world renowned scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls, is determi
ned to complete the climb, although he's admittedly a man more at home in a libr
ary than on a cliff-side.
LAWRENCE SCHIFFMAN (New York University): There's no question; it's not an easy
thing for me to be here. You're holding on for dear life, and then when you fina
lly get to the ledges, and you climb sideways along these very, very dangerous l
edges where you have a 600-foot drop below you, you're just hoping, "Okay, let's
get this over with."
NARRATOR: One last challenge: a 50-foot climb up to the cave's entrance. Soon th
e real quest can begin. Schiffman, Freund and their colleagues will be able to e
xplore a place that's intrigued historians and biblical scholars for decades, a
place that may reveal secrets that have been held for thousands of years. Ancien
t Refuge in the Holy Land, right now on NOVA.
NARRATOR: The vast desert of southern Israel is one of the harshest wastelands i
n the world. For thousands of years, this arid land has witnessed epic struggles
, warrior heroes, religious visionaries, and tragic victims of persecution.
The history of the region is told in the hundreds of caves scattered west of the
Dead Sea. The famous Dead Sea Scrolls were found in caves like these sacred texts
written in antiquity and hidden away for safekeeping.

Israel, then called Judea, was part of the vast Roman Empire, but the Jewish nat
ion lived uncomfortably with its pagan rulers. The Emperor expected his subjectnations to embrace the culture of Rome with its multiple, human-like gods. But t
he Jews worshipped only at their temple, the center of their belief in one, unse
eable God.
When the Emperor defiled the temple, Jewish zealots rose up in bloody rebellion.
Rome prevailed, killing hundreds of thousands of Jews.
These timeless caves witnessed it all and may hold secret treasures deep within,
treasures that offer a window into those turbulent times of messianic fervor, o
ppression and revolt.
Just to stand on this soil is an emotional experience for Richard Freund. He's a
n American rabbi as well as an historian and has been determined to explore the
Cave of Letters for years.
RICHARD FREUND: This was the biggest opportunity, I think, that has been present
ed to an archeological team over the past half century: to go to probably the mo
st productive, most fruitful cave that's ever been discovered on the Dead Sea, t
he Cave of Letters.
NARRATOR: It was an Israeli expedition in 1960 that made the Cave of Letters fam
ous. The expedition was led by one of the founding fathers of the young state of
Israel, a military general, statesman and archaeologist named Yigael Yadin. Alo
ng with dozens of archeologists and hundreds of volunteers, Yadin launched an ur
gent search of the Dead Sea caves to rescue artifacts of historical importance b
efore Israel's rich ancient heritage was looted by treasure hunters.
In many of the caves, Yadin discovered little of interest, but there was still a
large cave left to explore high up in the cliff-side above a canyon called Naha
l Hever.
After a perilous climb, Yadin and his team found themselves in a vast foreboding
cavern. Soon, they struck pay dirt: human skulls and bones, and troves of ancie
nt artifacts from the common objects of daily life to a dazzling cache of bronze r
itual items evidence that people must have lived and died here, in this virtually
inaccessible place where temperatures often top 115 degrees and the nearest sour
ce of water is far across the canyon.
Why did people come here? Who were they? The mystery began to unravel with anoth
er amazing discovery. Hidden under a rock in the deep recesses of the cave was a
find that took Yadin's breath away, a cache of ancient letters that gave the Ca
ve of Letters its name.
The crumbling documents were military orders signed by a legendary leader of the
Jews known as Shimon Bar Kokhba, Simon, son of a star.
SHIMON BAR KOKHBA (Ancient Jewish Leader, Dramatization): From Shimon Bar Kokhba
to Yehonatan: get a hold of the young men and come with them, and I shall deal
with the Romans.
NARRATOR: Bar Kokhba led a heroic rebellion against the Romans about nineteen hu
ndred years ago. Over the centuries, he has been lionized in Jewish stories and
poems as the last ruler of a free Jewish nation. Some even considered him the Me
ssiah, born of a star to free his people from Roman oppression, but no historica
l evidence of his life had ever been found before.
With the discovery of the letters, the skulls and household objects took on new
meaning. Yadin believed they belonged to Jewish rebels who fled the Romans durin

g the Bar Kokhba rebellion.

But is this the only story the Cave of Letters tells? Richard Freund is not conv
inced.
RICHARD FREUND: The lingering mystery is what else is in the cave, because one t
hing's for sure: unlike Yadin in 1961, I'm absolutely convinced there are tremen
dous other finds to be found in this cave.
NARRATOR: The Cave of Letters is massive, with two openings in the sheer cliff w
all. Inside there are three chambers connected by narrow passageways. Overall, t
he cavern complex cuts more than 300 yards deep into the cliff-side.
RICHARD FREUND: So, what we're going to do is we're going to concentrate on a fe
w different areas where Yadin was unable to excavate and see, using our technolo
gy, if we can excavate there. And then we're going to check all of the things th
at Yadin says that he fully excavated just to see if he did his work quite as th
oroughly as he thought he did.
NARRATOR: In the early 1960s, Yadin's team scoured the cave perimeter but was un
able to search beneath the layer of rubble up to 15 feet deep that litters the c
ave floor, rocks and boulders knocked loose from the roof by earthquakes over th
e centuries. But Freund's team has ways of seeing beneath the rubble. Ground-pen
etrating radar, GPR, can locate underground features using radio waves.
HARRY JOL (University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire): The two antennae are sending...o
ne is sending down a signal and one is picking up the signal that's reflected of
f the layers beneath the surface. And what we're doing is getting an image of th
at sub-surface stratigraphy, or layers, where the people might have lived that w
ere in the cave.
NARRATOR: The radar pinpoints the most likely spots to dig for artifacts.
HARRY JOL: That'd be...something would be sticking out the surface of the floor,
such as pottery or something, and a rock that might bearing something as well.
NARRATOR: Identifying likely places to dig is one thing, but actually seeing und
er the ground requires another new tool, a device Richard Freund chanced upon ba
ck in the U.S.
RICHARD FREUND: It was during a physical for my own personal health that I was i
ntroduced to a new technology, an endoscope, a colonoscope, where they probe the
insides of your body. And I asked the, the doctor at the time, "Is it possible
to use this, I don't know, to search underneath rocks?" And he looked at me, and
he said, "I guess so."
NARRATOR: Freund invited Gordon Moshman, a physician who uses endoscopes to come
and operate it inside the cave.
GORDON MOSHMAN (Physician): We have to locate this stuff among all of the debris
of rocks and dirt and bat guano and things.
NARRATOR: A lot is riding on this device, a tiny camera lens at the end of a lon
g, flexible, optic fiber. Instead of the human body, he's probing history. And i
t's tedious, dirty work.
The Cave of Letters is nearly as inhospitable now as it was 2,000 years ago.
JACK SHRODER (University of Nebraska at Omaha): This place stinks. It hasn't got
any water; it's got salt all over the walls, which dries your skin out and caus

es, you know, problems that way. It's a bad place to live. It's the only...only
a place you'd like to live if you were running from the Romans or somebody else
that was out to get you.
NARRATOR: New evidence that people once lived in this wretched place is turning
up daily.
MAN 1: It's a piece of papyrus, not marked. It's like the corner of a page, I th
ink. You can see the square bottom.
MAN 2: Yep. We've got a rope sticking out of the ground here. I think it's attac
hed to something.
MAN: Yeah.
MAN: I think it runs toward the hole.
MAN: Why don't you do that? I've got fabric over here like crazy.
CARL SAVAGE (Drew University): We are sitting here in the A-B passageway, which
is the crawlway we go through every day as we enter the cave, go back to B and C
halls where we're doing all the work. And what happens is, as you walk through,
you're brushing the dirt down all the time, and someone found this comb halfway
under this rock.
NARRATOR: A simple wooden comb yields an important insight.
CARL SAVAGE: Here, again, it's evidence of people who were living here; they did
n't just hide out here. They were here for a longer time, obviously, if you're g
oing to keep your appearance up while you're in here, unlike us.
RICHARD FREUND: Oh, look at that. It's a child's left sandal. And it's very rare
to find the children's wear because unfortunately the children didn't always li
ve to be older. So when you find something like this, you wonder what the, the l
ife of this child was.
NARRATOR: Why would anyone have brought children here? How long would they have
been forced to live in such miserable conditions?
Freund's team has now been working for five days. Tomorrow they'll be joined by
an Israeli colleague who may help fill in the picture of those who once made thi
s cave their refuge.
Hannah Cotton is an authority on ancient languages. She's spent years studying t
he papers and personal items found by Yadin. She jumped at the chance to explore
the cave firsthand, despite the difficult climb.
HANNAH COTTON (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem): Wonderful, huh? My goodness,
I never thought I'd make it here. I can't understand how women and children cou
ld make it up here.
NARRATOR: The life of
Her name was Babatha.
n, she was related to
s documents. It seems

one ancient woman in particular captivates Hannah Cotton.

A widow and mother in her thirties when the rebellion bega
Yehonatan, the military commander mentioned in Bar Kokhba'
she fled with him to the Cave of Letters.

Babatha was an ordinary woman of her time, but we know her life in extraordinary
detail, thanks to a cache of 35 personal papers she left hidden in this cave.
HANNAH COTTON: So here is where they found the famous Babatha archive, that Jewi

sh woman who ended up her life here in this cave. And her purse was found here b
y Yadin.
NARRATOR: Babatha's purse contained documents written in Aramaic and Greek, the
official languages of the day, wedding contracts, property deeds, bills of sale
and more. Because women had only limited rights under either Jewish or Roman law
, Babatha guarded her documents carefully.
HANNAH COTTON: The first time we hear about her is when she got married for the
first time. The husband died, and she was left with an orphan who was a minor. T
hey appointed two guardians. And then she started a series of litigations with t
hese guardians that she thought were both incompetent, and I think she also thin
ks that they were cheats.
NARRATOR: Babatha probably lived a comfortable life before the Bar Kokhba uprisi
ng. Her papers show that she owned a date orchard in the prosperous town of En G
eddi on the Western shore of the Dead Sea.
RICHARD FREUND: En Geddi was a beautiful oasis in the desert. It had water. It h
ad date palm trees. Later it had a beautiful synagogue. This was a place where p
eople would have lived an upper middle class life, and for them to trek out into
the desert and to come to this cave must have been a tremendous shock.
NARRATOR: The Cave of Letters was so desolate and inaccessible, Babatha and the
others must have felt confident they could stay here, undetected, for as long as
necessary, then return home with their possessions once the Romans were defeate
d by Bar Kokhba's rebels.
But what triggered the rebellion? Scholars point to one primary cause: a burning
desire among some ardent Jews to reclaim Jerusalem from the Romans and rebuild
their holy temple. For centuries, the temple had been the center of Jewish worsh
ip. It had been for Jews what Mecca is to Islam, or the Vatican to Catholics.
LAWRENCE SCHIFFMAN: According to the book of Deuteronomy, there was to be built
"a special place of worship which was the place that the Lord shall choose." And
this was understood to be Jerusalem by the Jewish people.
NARRATOR: About 20 years before the birth of Jesus, Herod, the King of the Jews,
appointed by Rome, began expanding the 500-year-old temple on Jerusalem's Templ
e Mount.
He turned the temple into a monumental structure, using elements of Greek and Ro
man architecture, making it one of the wonders of the first century world. Here
Jewish priests worshipped God as they had for centuries, offering animal sacrifi
ces on the temple's great altar, amidst thick plumes of incense.
RICHARD FREUND: This is the temple that Jesus would have visited, the same templ
e that all those people who were making pilgrimage would have visited three time
s a year.
NARRATOR: But Rome came to see the temple as a threat to its sovereignty, the ce
nter of growing Jewish nationalism. The emperor imposed oppressive restrictions
on its use, and Roman soldiers breached the sanctuary, defiling it in Jewish eye
s.
Then, in the year 66, the Jews rebelled, vowing to kick out the pagans and free
themselves from Roman rule. But after four years of bitter fighting, the mighty
Roman army prevailed, leveling much of Jerusalem and destroying the temple.
LAWRENCE SCHIFFMAN: There was enormous killing in the streets of Jerusalem, and

then the wooden parts of the temple were burned. The walls were toppled and the
building was totally wrecked. The Romans wanted to obliterate the entire thing b
ecause they understood its significance to the Jews, really, as a national cente
r. That's what they were after. They weren't after Judaism; they were after this
as a national political center. And they wanted to make sure that the Jews had
learned a lesson of revolting, so it was totally destroyed.
NARRATOR: All that remains, today, of the temple complex in Jerusalem, is a part
of its massive outer wall now known as the "Western Wall" or the "Wailing Wall.
" Jews still consider it their holiest place.
Judaism has adapted and survived for 2,000 years without the Great Temple. Local
synagogues became the centers of worship, and prayer replaced the ancient pract
ice of animal sacrifice. But for decades after its destruction, Jews feared thei
r religion would die without this central place of worship. Then, in the year 13
2, a new Emperor struck yet another blow to the heart of the Jewish religion.
LAWRENCE SCHIFFMAN: Hadrian, the Roman emperor, had decreed that this temple mou
nt would become Alia Capitolina essentially a temple of Jupiter and that Jews would
be forbidden to worship there, turning it, really, into a pagan cult site, which
, of course, to the Jews, was the greatest possible disgrace.
NARRATOR: For Bar Kokhba, this was the last straw. He raised a rebel army of ski
lled Jewish fighters and caught the Roman legions by surprise. For nearly three
years, the rebels held the upper hand and re-established Israel as an independen
t, Jewish nation with Bar Kokhba as its leader.
Freund's team finds direct evidence of Bar Kokhba's early triumphs.
CARL SAVAGE: We found one Bar Kokhba coin in the A-B passage. It's only the eigh
th coin altogether found in this cave.
NARRATOR: Bar Kokhba made his coins by overstamping the Roman emperor's coinage
with temple imagery and the inscription "For the freedom of Jerusalem."
It was a bold act of defiance.
Yadin had found similar coins and declared them proof of Bar Kokhba's heroic sta
tus. But new studies of Bar Kokhba's letters paint a different picture.
BARUCH LEVINE (New York University): My first impression, when I started to read
the letters of Bar Kokhba, was that he was much less...had much less stature th
an the legend ever had. And that he was not a nice guy. He's constantly threaten
ing everybody. "I will punish you. I will exact punishment from you." He was bar
king out orders right and left.
BAR KOKHBA: To Yehonatan: you too will be punished. In comfort you sit, eat and
drink from the property of the House of Israel and care nothing for your brother
s.
NARRATOR: Bar Kokhba wrote several threatening letters to Yehonatan, the leader
from En Geddi whom Babatha and the others followed into the Cave.
Had Yehonatan fallen out of favor? Were the Jews in the cave actually hiding fro
m Bar Kokhba as he became desperate and wrathful, fearing the tide of the war wa
s turning against him?
LAWRENCE SCHIFFMAN: Apparently, there were a lot of Jews who must have been gett
ing arrested by Bar Kokhba and his army at this time. And I think we have to rem
ember as we read these letters that not the entire Jewish people supported the B

ar Kokhba revolt. There were many who thought that peace with the Romans would b
e a better course of action.
NARRATOR: Babatha's documents, for instance, reveal no signs of tension between
Jews and their Roman overlords.
HANNAH COTTON: Had I only read these documents, I would have said these are the
last people to revolt against the Romans.
BARUCH LEVINE: Jews and others were getting along quite well. They were not ghet
toized people, they were people that did business. And there was some sudden sho
ckwave that descended on the area.
NARRATOR: The shockwave might have been Bar Kokhba's rebellion itself. Opinions
differ as to how many people joined Bar Kokhba, or how popular he was within Jud
ea, but most historians do agree on one thing: the Roman response was massive an
d brutal.
RICHARD FREUND: Hadrian called in 12 divisions, from as far away as Britain, in
order to put down the rebellion for once and for all. They were going to use thi
s small Jewish nation as an example to the entire empire, and that's what they d
id. Nearly 600,000 people were killed in the revolt. Over 900 villages were, wer
e destroyed. The scope is so great that it's only eclipsed in our own times with
the Holocaust.
NARRATOR: Hadrian's wrath knew no bounds. Jews who survived the slaughter were f
orbidden to enter their holy city, Jerusalem. He even sought to erase the Jewish
people from world memory, changing the name of their country from Judea to Syri
a Palestina.
Roman legions scoured the countryside for Jewish rebels and their sympathizers,
even into the most remote reaches of the desert where Yehonaton, Babatha and oth
ers had fled, seeking refuge up in the Cave of Letters.
High above the cave, on the cliff-top, Roman soldiers built small camps which ca
n still be seen today. There they waited for the Jews to emerge.
Clues to the refugees' fate may still be found. One of Freund's slender colleagu
es squeezes through a narrow passageway to explore a niche where Yadin had seen
human bones. Is this what became of the Jewish refugees trapped inside the cave
by the Romans camped above?
He brings back a videotape to show the others.
HANAN ESHEL (Bar-Ilan University): Here is a skeleton.
CHRIS: Yeah, part of the pelvis.
NARRATOR: The bones are small, all women and children.
HANAN ESHEL: It's a finger bone.
NARRATOR: Freund's team of experts may now be able to answer an important questi
on that haunted Yadin: what was the exact cause of death for these refugees?
Joe Zias is a specialist in the forensic analysis of ancient skeletons.
JOE ZIAS (Paleopathologist): What's interesting here is that there seemed to be
a lot of kids here, between the ages of, I would say, seven to 15, which is unus
ual. The other thing is no pathology whatsoever, not even one broken bone. You u

sually see, you know, you're looking at this much material, you're going to see
some trauma...nothing.
NARRATOR: The lack of physical trauma suggests that these people did not die vio
lently. It seems they may have slowly starved to death after the Roman legions c
ut off their supplies.
There's evidence that the refugees were able to hold out in the cave for some ti
me. The team finds signs that they brought goats to eat and birds to lay eggs, a
nd they had made elaborate preparations for cooking.
FRED STRICKERT (Wartburg College): Here's a piece that's kind of interesting. Th
is is piece of oven. They had huge circular ovens and we assume if people were i
n here for any time, they had to make their own bread, and bread was very import
ant in their diet.
They didn't just come in one day, running away from the Romans, and bring a few
pieces of firewood. They were prepared. They came with stacks and stacks of wood
, and they were getting ready.
NARRATOR: But how did desperate refugees, chased from their homes by Roman Legio
ns, find the time to gather so many supplies? How did they know where to go?
RICHARD FREUND: How did they know that this cave existed, in 132, to bring all t
hose people from En Geddi out here, unless they knew it from before? So it's cle
ar to me this was a well-known cave, a cave that had been used before and people
talked about in closed circles. This was the place to go to in case of a refuge
.
NARRATOR: Richard Freund has a radical theory: long before the Bar Kokhba rebell
ion, Jews would also have been in need of a refuge, when the Romans crushed the
First Jewish Revolt and burned the temple to the ground in the year 70. Freund b
elieves that the Cave of Letters was occupied during that first revolt, decades
before Bar Kokhba, a possibility that Yadin's team never really considered.
RICHARD FREUND: When they discovered this cave, they thought that this was going
to be one story, the story of the Bar Kokhba Rebellion. And after examining the
material, I started to question whether maybe there wasn't another story, the s
tory about, not the second century, but the first century; not the story of the
Bar Kokhba Rebellion, but the story of the destruction of the temple and those r
efugees who came out of Jerusalem.
NARRATOR: Freund is convinced that there must be a lower layer in the cave, dati
ng back to the temple era. He turns to another new technology that might confirm
this, Electrical Resistivity Tomography.
This device can identify underground features by measuring how well the ground c
onducts electricity. The solid bedrock on the bottom is the best conductor, and
shows up as blue. Above are lines of green, yellow and orange, indicating layers
of hard-packed clay that at one time made up the cave floor. These are weaker c
onductors. Above, displayed in pink, is rubble, the poorest conductor.
When these images are overlaid with ground penetrating radar data, a more detail
ed picture emerges. The rubble appears to be layered, suggesting it was built up
over time when earthquakes rocked the area.
Freund believes the layers represent different periods of occupation. He's convi
nced that some of Yadin's most spectacular finds came from the lowest layers. In
particular, a set of 19 bronze artifacts: shovels for carrying the incense need
ed for religious ceremonies; wine decanters; and a patera, a ritual libation dis

h, decorated with figures from Roman mythology.

PINHAS PORAT (1960 Excavation Team Member): Wow it's been more than 40 years sin
ce I've been here... It's something.
NARRATOR: One of the original members of Yadin's 1960 expedition, Pinhas Porat,
remembers vividly how the bronzes were found.
PINHAS PORAT: The metal detector gave the signal that there was a large amount o
f metal. It gave a very strong signal.
NARRATOR: When Porat and his colleagues began to dig, they made an unpleasant di
scovery.
PINHAS PORAT: It was a toilet. It was...this was where their toilets were. And w
hat we were finding was the dried up remnants of people going to the toilet.
We didn't know why a metal detector would be going off in the toilet. And we dug
and dug and dug and dug, and we were just about ready to give up, and suddenly
we found a piece of rope. And we followed the rope down. We kept uncovering the
area. And the rope was attached to the handles of a closed basket, and of course
it was full of the bronze vessels that are on exhibition in Jerusalem today.
NARRATOR: All the other finds in the Cave of Letters were of Jewish origin, but
Yadin believed these bronzes were pagan ritual items, Roman, that had been stole
n by the Bar Kokhba rebels. But Richard Freund disagrees.
RICHARD FREUND: The most beautiful bronze artifacts ever found together in any l
ocation, and the fact that it was buried inside of a cave in the Judean Desert,
leads me to believe that there's something more going on here. Why were they bur
ied? I mean here was a person, Bar Kokhba, who needed bronze for weapons, for co
inage, for everyday life, and here...if they were pagan objects, would he have b
uried them? He would have melted them down!
NARRATOR: As the dig winds down, the team makes one last search with a metal det
ector: another coin, but this one is different.
RICHARD FREUND: This is a First Revolt coin that was minted in 68, before the de
struction of Jerusalem. This is the first clear piece of evidence that we have,
of some type of first century appearance here in the cave. It's the most importa
nt find that we found so far. This is the smoking gun.
NARRATOR: This coin convinces Freund that the cave was indeed occupied in the ye
ar 70, following the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. And that the 19 bro
nzes are not Roman at all. He believes they are Jewish ritual objects rescued fr
om the temple just before it was destroyed and hidden away in the Cave of Letter
s.
RICHARD FREUND: No artifacts from that temple in Jerusalem have ever been found,
and to be able to rediscover those artifacts that were used in that service wou
ld be a remarkable event.
NARRATOR: It's long been believed that everything from the great temple was dest
royed or carted away by Roman soldiers as depicted on the arch of Titus, the tri
umphant structure erected by the Emperor to celebrate Rome's victory over the Je
ws. But some scholars believe that Jewish priests were able to hide precious rit
ual objects before the catastrophe. They point to a cryptic first century text k
nown as the "Copper Scroll" to support their theory. It's the most unusual and p
uzzling of all the Dead Sea Scrolls.

RICHARD FREUND: Out of the over 800 manuscripts that were discovered on the Dead
Sea in the 11 caves, only one is unique. All the rest are on papyrus and parchm
ent. This one scroll is on copper. And it's a list. It's not a theological text,
it's not the Bible, it's a list of the 64 locations where the artifacts from th
e temple in Jerusalem were buried. And it's probably the most unique, the most i
mportant, and the least understood.
AL WOLTERS (Redeemer University College): If we want to imagine how the Copper S
croll came into being, the thing that we should think of is probably a high rank
ing priest sitting there thinking, "How can I prevent this treasure from falling
into the hands of the Romans?" And then devising the plan to find various kinds
of hiding places in the outskirts of Jerusalem and the Judean Desert and squirr
eling away these treasures.
What he would have done after he had identified the hiding places is, personally
, to put on a piece of parchment the list of 64 hiding places and what is hidden
there. Then he would have hired a metal worker and asked him to copy it on a sh
eet of copper.
NARRATOR: This scroll of copper was hidden in a cave like this near the Dead Sea
village of Qumran, where it lay undiscovered for nearly 2000 years. The copper
was coated with clay and could not be unrolled. Only by carefully slicing the sc
roll into thin strips could the ancient writing be deciphered.
Item number 25 particularly intrigued Richard Freund. It read, "In the Cave of t
he Column of two openings, facing east, at the northern opening is buried, at th
ree cubits, a ritual limestone vessel. In it is one scroll; underneath is treasu
re."
RICHARD FREUND: The Cave of Letters may be one of those 64 locations mentioned i
n the Copper Scroll. It says in a double entranced cave which is called the Cave
of the Column this is a double-entrance cave and from the outside that looks like
it's a column. On the northern entrance this is the northern entrance three cubits
down, you're going to find these metal objects. In addition, it says that above
them, you're going to find a limestone vessel and next to that you're going to f
ind a scroll.
NARRATOR: Yadin's expedition had found the bronze artifacts near this northern e
ntrance. Now Freund wants to measure how deep the bronzes were buried. Is it the
same depth as described in the Copper Scroll?
RICHARD FREUND: If I'm right, and these, these are the bronze artifacts from the
Copper Scroll, then they should be approximately four and a half feet down, yea
h, a meter and a half. So let's see what the...if it's a meter and a half or not
.
RAMI: Hurray! That's exactly what the scroll said.
RICHARD FREUND: No, no. Really was it, was it...no. Was it really a meter, 70?
MAN: Yeah, a meter, 70.
RICHARD FREUND: Well, that's not bad.
NARRATOR: It seems too good to be true: the bronzes were found at nearly the dep
th described in the Copper Scroll. The text also mentions a stone jar buried by
the metal objects. Yadin found two stoneware vessels near the bronze ritual item
s. He also found a small piece of parchment with a verse from the Bible's Book o
f Psalms, written in a style of script common to many first century documents:

"Lord , who may dwell in your sanctuary?

Who may live on your holy hill?
He whose walk is blameless."
RICHARD FREUND: That little section from the Psalms scroll, that was found was f
ound right over here?
RAMI: Right.
RICHARD FREUND: Okay. Next to it, over here, was found the stone vessels?
RAMI: Un huh.
RICHARD FREUND: So the question...
RAMI: The bronze was found here.
RICHARD FREUND: The bronze was found here.
That's about as good as it gets on a good day. We have the scroll, we have the l
imestone vessel, and we have the metal objects all together. So, either this is
a tremendous coincidence, or what we've uncovered is one of the items in the Cop
per Scroll.
NARRATOR: Freund's theory has controversial implications. If he's right, it woul
d mean that some items from the Jew's holy temple were decorated with images fro
m pagan mythology.
The patera found in the cave, for instance, depicts the sea goddess Thetis, moth
er of Achilles.
AL WOLTERS: Because of the fact that this was pagan imagery, Yadin thought this
could not possibly be from the temple in Jerusalem. However, there is some evide
nce that there was a good deal of cross-pollination between different religions
at that time and that imagery which was used in one religion could very well hav
e been used in others as well. So, I don't think the fact that this is a Roman m
otif on this particular item proves that the item couldn't have been from the te
mple in Jerusalem.
NARRATOR: In fact, the goddess Thetis appears on the base of the Jewish menorah
carved on the Arch of Titus, along with several other Roman mythic icons. Did th
e Jews appropriate pagan imagery? Certainly some did. King Herod himself modeled
many of his buildings after Greco-Roman structures.
RICHARD FREUND: King Herod was not your classic Jewish King David or King Solomo
n. He was an extremely Romanized Jew who wanted his temple to reflect the values
and aesthetics of Roman culture as much as it would reflect some of the culture
and art and artifacts and aesthetics of Jewish culture.
NARRATOR: But many of Richard Freund's colleagues think he's gone too far.
LAWRENCE SCHIFFMAN: Even Jews who were loyal Jews may have been a bit loose on s
ome of the decorations that they had, sort of like the Santa Claus on Coca Cola
that is served in my synagogue every winter, but this doesn't really mean that a
nybody was ever religiously attached to that. But I cannot believe that you coul
d have used Roman images on Jewish ritual objects.
NARRATOR: Freund must gather more evidence to support his claim. He thinks he ma
y have found something here in the ancient ruins of a place called Bethsaida.

Bethsaida was best known as the place where Jesus was said to have walked on wat
er and fed the multitudes. It was an important Jewish town on the shores of the
Sea of Galilee.
RICHARD FREUND: We found this incense shovel in a temple at Bethsaida. And a sim
ilar shovel, one that looks like it could be a sister to this, was found in the
Cave of Letters in 1960.
NARRATOR: The best way to know if this incense shovel matches the one found by Y
adin is to examine them side by side, so Freund heads to Jerusalem.
RICHARD FREUND: Jerusalem has been the center of Jewish civilization for 3,000 y
ears: 26 times destroyed, rebuilt. And here we are, in Jerusalem, doing research
on the Cave of Letters and its connection to Jerusalem, and again Jerusalem is
in conflict. Things change and things stay exactly the same.
NARRATOR: The 19 bronze items from the Cave of Letters were on display here at t
he Israel Museum's Shrine of the Book. The curator, Adolpho Roitman, carefully l
ifts out the incense shovel that was discovered by Yadin, so Freund can compare
it to the one from Bethsaida.
RICHARD FREUND: This is the incense shovel of Bethsaida from the first century.
It looks exactly like the incense shovel from the Cave of Letters. So I think it
's pretty clear that this incense shovel is not from the second century, but fro
m the first century, and from a Jewish site; Bethsaida was a Jewish site. So I t
hink the Jews were using incense shovels like this. What do you think?
ADOLFO ROITMAN (Head of the Shrine of the Book and Curator of the Dead Sea Scrol
ls): Maybe you are right.
NARRATOR: Some scholars are intrigued by Freund's ideas. But others are not conv
inced that the Cave of Letters incense shovel came from the temple and not from
an ordinary household.
LAWRENCE SCHIFFMAN: The problem is that incense shovels were also used in people
's houses to dispel odors. They were used for cleaning clothes, as we actually k
now from the Dead Sea Scrolls as a kind of dry cleaning that you could cause your
clothing to smell good again after coming out of winter storage or something and s
o, the problem is that this is sort of like asking whether a screwdriver used in
a synagogue or church would be any different from a screwdriver used outside. A
nd it certainly would not be.
NARRATOR: The dig is done for now. But the debate over what has been learned is
just beginning.
HANAN ESHEL: I think there's tens of thousands of this coin.
RICHARD FREUND: No, so my idea is...
NARRATOR: Freund's theory that the cave was used as a refuge after the destructi
on of the temple in the first century, as well as later during the Bar Kokhba re
volt, is based on many small pieces of evidence, and his colleagues aren't buyin
g it.
HANAN ESHEL: You have to prove the point.
RICHARD FREUND: I know, I know, I know.
HANAN ESHEL: It's not that I have the point. If you want to say that in the Cave
of Letters there was somebody before 135, you have to find evidence of things t

hat must be before 135.

There's no evidence yet that the cave was used twice. The cave is so remote, to
enter it is so difficult, that, in order to convince me that the cave was used t
wice, you need to have evidence which are significant from the second temple per
iod that will make sense that Jews had fled there twice.
NARRATOR: Convincing evidence could come from the bronzes themselves, if their a
ge can be determined using the latest carbon dating techniques. The metal itself
can't be dated, but the rope can.
RICHARD FREUND: What we're trying to do is solve this mystery: whether these bro
nzes were in fact placed there in the first century or they were placed there in
the second century. And this rope is a key to solving that mystery. We can carb
on-14 date it, and then we'll know that this rope, together with the bronzes, we
re placed there in the first century.
ELISABETTA BOARETTO (Weizmann Institute of Science): We are going to take a very
small amount of samples, and we are going to burn the sample in order to recove
r the carbon in the form of CO2.
NARRATOR: The test measures the amount of radioactive carbon present in the samp
le, an amount that decays steadily over time at a known rate. The technique cann
ot pinpoint a precise year, but it gives a probable range of dates for the mater
ial. The rope comes from sometime between the years 70 and 260 hardly conclusive r
esults. It could be, as Freund believes, from the time of the First Revolt when
the temple was destroyed, but it could also be from Bar Kokhba's time.
RICHARD FREUND: Is it the older extreme or the newer extreme?
NARRATOR: Freund is not discouraged. As he presents his findings at a conference
at New York University, he has one more card to play, a well-accepted test by a
n Israeli archeologist to narrow the range.
RICHARD FREUND: It's called Broshi's Law. Magen Broshi came up with a law when t
hey carbon-dated all of the Dead Sea Scrolls but they still had a 200 year gap,
and they couldn't figure out. And Broshi's Law was an experiment that they did o
n letters from the Cave of Letters. Why? Because the Cave of Letters has dated d
ocuments.
NARRATOR: Using three letters from Bar Kokhba, archeologist Magen Broshi compare
d the actual dates appearing on the letters to the results of the carbon-14 anal
ysis. In each case, the actual date of the letters corresponded almost exactly w
ith the older date in the carbon-14 range.
RICHARD FREUND: Broshi's Law is, "You always follow the older extreme." That's w
hat they use in the Dead Sea Scrolls; I didn't make this law up. But I also want
to start to show you something very interesting about the carbon-14 dating we d
id.
HANAN ESHEL: Another thing, Cave of the Column, why do you think it's a column b
etween two entrances?
RICHARD FREUND: It doesn't say a cave of a column between two entrances.
NARRATOR: Freund is still having trouble convincing a majority of his peers, but
that's to be expected, especially in Biblical archeology where science meets po
litics meets religion.
LAWRENCE SCHIFFMAN: I think that we have to realize that the finding of the Copp

er Scroll, and some other excavations that have gone into the area are part of a
very, very long quest by idealists who think, somehow or another, they're going
to find the remnants of the ancient temple and that, somehow or another, these
remnants will in some way play into the rebuilding. It's not simply an archeolog
ical act. There's something redemptive about finding this true thing, almost lik
e a Holy Grail.
RICHARD FREUND: If I do have a theological agenda, it's that sense of discovery,
that sense that all that we need to know is not yet known, and that I can play
a part in the unraveling of God's destiny for the world. If that is a theologica
l agenda, that's also the same agenda of science.
You're never going to know for 100 percent sure. I may have to leave it for anot
her generation for people to actually test my own theory against that of Yadin a
nd maybe their own.
On NOVA's Web site, explore the Cave of Letters yourself, hear from a man who he
lped discover the bronze cache, scroll through a 2000-year-old document and more
. Find it on PBS.org.