The Aleppo Code (The Jerusalem Prophecies) (15 page)

And Jeremiah fell to the ground as if dead.

“What happened? We came back for you when we realized you were missing. Did you fall?”

The ground in the cavern was rough and uneven. Jeremiah lay on the ground and looked into the face of Daniel. Nothing in his old body hurt from hitting the ground. Then he thought of the tree and the staff.

“Did you see it? The trees and the garden?”

Baruch knelt down alongside Jeremiah and took his hand to help him up. “How could we see anything in the blackness? Come, master. Can you rise?”

Jeremiah rose to his feet, surprised at how good his body felt, not like the old, frail bones he endured when he entered the chamber. “Did you hear the music, the voices of the angels?”

“We heard nothing,” said Baruch. “Sir, where is the staff?”

He gazed into the darkness. “It’s home.”

Reaching out to take his arm, Daniel drew close to Jeremiah.

“Then we have a wall to build.”

The sun was lowering across the western desert, the shadows extending down the wide streets of Babylon. Their rooms on an upper floor, Jeremiah could see the great tower rising in the distance, so visible to the world, so important to Nebuchadnezzar. Only a precious few in Babylon knew a far more important construction had only recently been completed deep in the earth under the tower.

It was time to go home. One more task and they could gather the caravan for their return to Jerusalem.

“Open the mezuzah and bring the discs,” said Jeremiah, sitting at a small table by the window. “We need to grab the light while we can.”

He took a small knife and rubbed it against the flat surface of a whetstone, sharpening its edge, while Baruch removed the end caps from the brass mezuzah and withdrew the leather sprockets.

“What shall we inscribe on the discs?” Baruch asked.

“Directions,” said Jeremiah, “for the one who will come later, at the appointed time. The one for whom the staff waits.”

Baruch sat opposite Jeremiah, laid the discs with the strange arms on the table—the one with the holes to his right—and accepted the knife from his master. “But if we carve directions into the discs, what if the wrong person finds the mezuzah? They will know the secrets. They will know how to find the staff. If we inscribe the directions in our language, even in the Akkadian of the Babylonians, won’t the chance of discovery be too dangerous?”

There was a sheet of parchment on the table, to Jeremiah’s right. He pulled the parchment in front of him, close to his eyes, then looked up at Baruch. “This mezuzah, and others like it, have carried many messages back and forth to Egypt. Only we will know which of these scroll holders is the most important. We will pass this knowledge on to the high priest and use the language and the code of the high priests, brought from Egypt. The rest is in the hands of God. We have done what we can, what we’ve been called to do. Here.”

Baruch took the parchment and scanned its surface. Jeremiah had drawn copies of the four sprocket sides. In the solid sections between each arm was one of the symbols of the Egyptian language.

“Inscribe the symbols as I’ve drawn them. And carve them deep. They will need to last a long time before they are used once more. And, my son …”

The knife poised above one half of the disc, Baruch looked up at his master. “We will pray to El Shaddai, for the one who is anointed to uncover these secrets. He will carry the plan of God, and the future of this world, in his hands.”

S
ATURDAY
, A
UGUST
29

8:00 a.m., Jerusalem

Tom trailed as Rabbi Fineman led the team away from his home on Tavon Street and turned left on Shiloh Street, away from the Machane Yehuda market area. The Nahla’ot neighborhood was the earliest Jewish neighborhood established outside the Old City of Jerusalem, in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Tom was impressed with the gentrification that had turned the old buildings into quaint homes full of character. “My wife and I have lived in this neighborhood ever since we immigrated to Israel,” said Fineman. “The house belonged to my grandfather … our family has lived here a long time. My grandfather and my father were members of this synagogue. We worshipped here on Sabbath. That is how I came to know many of the elders.”

Rizzo was right on Fineman’s heels, his legs pumping furiously to keep up with the long-striding rabbi. “Hey … I didn’t think you were Jewish anymore.”

Fineman crossed Rama Street and continued the short block to Be’er Sheva. “I may believe in Yeshua, who is our Messiah, and that may make me a Messianic Jew … a completed Jew, some might say … but a Jew nonetheless. It’s like saying if you switched churches you would no longer be Italian.”

“I gotcha, Padre. I wouldn’t stop being Italian if they named me O’Reilly. But I don’t expect these guys in the synagogue would like you too much, since you switched sides and all.”

Reaching the corner of Shiloh and Be’er Sheva, Fineman slowed to a halt. Across the street was a squat, nondescript, ochre, cinder-block building, with a brown terra cotta roof. A four-foot-high wall of the same common block—not the glorious and ubiquitous Jerusalem Stone that gave the city much of its radiance—protruded from the front of the building well out into the sidewalk and was crowned by a stout, wrought-iron railing that rose another four feet.

His head cocked to one side, Fineman turned away from the building to peer at Rizzo. “My wife and I have invested a good bit of our time and resources into helping the children and youth of this neighborhood. We’re welcome here, regardless of our beliefs. In fact, I think the elders enjoy our regular theology arguments.” He looked up, lifting his hand toward the building on the far side of the narrow street.

“The Great Synagogue Ades of the Glorious Aleppo Community … Addis—like Addis Ababa,” Fineman explained. “Quite a name they have given themselves. But this truly is one of the greatest synagogues in Jerusalem. It was founded in 1901 by two cousins from Aleppo, Syria, who came here with an immigrant contingent of Syrian Jews. This synagogue has continued to be primarily the worship center for Syrian Jews over the last 110 years and is known as a center for Syrian
hazzanut
, a type of Jewish liturgical singing. Today it maintains the rare tradition of
bakashot
, a set cycle of kabbalistic poetry sung in the early hours of Shabbat during the winter months. Although you can’t tell from the outside, the interior of the Ades Synagogue is one of the most beautiful in Jerusalem. Come, let me show you.”

Tom joined the group crossing the street to the large, metal gate, but he wanted to keep their minds on the task at hand. “So what does all this have to do with the book?”

“Be patient,” Fineman said as he pushed open the gate. “All in good time.”

Fineman wasn’t exaggerating about the interior of the Ades Synagogue—it was sumptuous in its furnishings and striking in its decoration. Tom was intently staring at the colorful mural that ran around the top of all four walls when he felt a tap on his elbow. He turned to find a young, bearded man, achingly slim, standing beside Fineman. He looked as if he had just come off the kibbutz, tanned, dressed in faded jeans and a soiled work shirt, battered boots long past their prime.

“Tom … this is Rabbi Asher,” said Fineman, who completed the introductions to the other members of the team.

“Please, call me Benjamin.” His smile was wide and welcoming.

“The rabbi has agreed to allow us into the
gniza
… the room where old Torah scrolls are kept until they can be properly disposed,” said Fineman, a sparkle lighting his eyes.

Benjamin leaned closer to Tom and put his hand on Tom’s arm as if they were involved in some conspiracy. “It’s where the book is … that’s what you want to see, right? C’mon, you’re going to like this.”

Benjamin reversed toward the entrance, turned to the left just before the doors, and ducked under a low portal to a flight of descending stone stairs. “I’m from New York, too,” said Asher, his voice trailing behind his body as he disappeared into a below-ground twilight. “But you can’t escape your roots.” Reaching the basement floor, Benjamin stood before a large, solid timber door, fumbled for a moment with a huge ring of keys, freed the lock, and swung the door out of the way.

“Ronald, you know the drill,” said Benjamin, who reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out two keys fastened to a gold star-of-David key fob. “You know what these are for. My grandfather will be down shortly to answer any questions, but I’m sure you can keep these folks occupied until then. Mr. Bohannon … enjoy.”

The interior of the room was longer than Bohannon expected, running about the full length of the building. It was full of wooden shelves—like bookshelves, but deeper—that gave it a library feel, although the documents on the shelves were scrolls rather than books. Thousands of them. The scrolls were piled high and packed tightly, filling almost every space and blocking almost any light from penetrating into the room. To the right, a small alcove was protected by a wrought-iron fence. Fineman walked up to the fence, unlocked its gate, and turned on a low, diffused light. In the middle of the alcove was a large, wood table, surrounded by heavy chairs. On the table was a large, padlocked metal chest. Fineman unlocked the chest and opened the lid. He pointed to a stack of thin, white cotton gloves. He put on a pair, then lifted the book out of the chest and rested it on the table.

This book looked similar to many other large, ancient books Bohannon had seen in the past—thick leather cover on both sides, embossed and carved in swirling designs, a metal hasp attached to the front and back covers, its hinged end sliding into a metal lock on the front cover. Fineman took a key from inside the metal chest, unlocked the hasp, and carefully opened its pages, one after another.

The Aleppo codex copy in front of them had three vertical columns of Hebrew letters on each page. Each line in the column contained about a dozen or more symbols, about two dozen lines in each column. At the top and bottom of each column, and in the margins between them, were additional Hebrew symbols. While the marks inserted between the columns of the Scripture were generally one, two, or three symbols, the notations at the top and the bottom of each column were generally more extensive, sometimes running several lines, and were written in a smaller size than the characters in the Scripture verses themselves.

“The original codex, held in the Shrine of the Book in the Israel Museum, is missing nearly half its original pages,” said Fineman. “The first page in the original comes in the middle of Deuteronomy—the first four books are missing altogether. But this copy—this one is complete.”

“How is that possible?”

“It was copied long before the original was destroyed,” said Fineman.

Bohannon stood on the left side of the table, Joe Rodriguez on the right, watching as Fineman gently turned each page. Rizzo stood on one of the wooden chairs, Annie by his side.

“How old is this book?” asked Rodriguez. “The original is over one thousand years old, correct? This one looks pretty ancient, itself.”

A new voice came from behind them all, near the gate into the alcove. It was soft, but pregnant with authority. “We believe our codex is over six hundred years old.”