The Sacred Cipher (52 page)

For three hours, they had been walking, nothing but tunnel, straight and true. No
turns. No forks or junctions. And now this. They had entered a room. Not a cavern
but a room, with a high, but flat, ceiling and straight, stone walls. And light—dim,
dusty shards, diffused through minute chinks in the stone wall to the west.

After three days of wandering through an underworld, it was as if they had been resurrected.

“What is this, Doc?” asked Bohannon. “Where are we?”

The three men wandered about aimlessly. The room was about the size of a small house,
perhaps sixty feet by thirty feet, with a ceiling that had to be twenty feet high.
The walls were unadorned, but the stone of the walls had clearly been worked. They
weren’t hallucinating: this room was built by men. Scattered debris dotted the floor,
a huge mound of debris nearly filled one corner, and everything was covered by a heavy,
gray dust that stirred up into little clouds around their feet. The room did not smell
of death or decay—a welcome respite. The insidious dampness of the caverns was left
behind. In the dim light and swirling dust, Bohannon felt like he was walking through
a dry fog.

Halfway down the long side of the room, on each side, was a low, stone bench. Bohannon
wandered over to the bench and took off his pack. He kept on his helmet because, even
though there was light, it wasn’t strong enough to eliminate the need for the TAG
lights affixed to their gear. Rodriguez crossed to the other side of the room and
put down his pack, but Johnson still seemed to be wandering aimlessly, resting his
hand on the stones, crouching down to sift the dust on the floor, peering intently
at some of the debris.

“Doc,” said Bohannon, “why don’t you get rid of that weight? Here, let me help you.”

Bohannon went over to Johnson, who had rested one knee on the dusty floor, his face
just inches from a chunk of stone.

“Let me take your pack.” As Bohannon started to lift the pack from his back, Johnson
turned his head, a flicker of sudden recognition registering in his eyes.

“Thank you, Tom,” he said absently. And he turned back to the stone.

“Hey,” Rodriguez shouted, “the GPS is working again.”

Without a word, Johnson was on his feet and beating a path to Rodriguez.
It’s the same stride
, thought Bohannon.
Glad to see Doc back
.

“May I see that, please,” said Johnson, reaching out his hand, forgetting that he
had the same device in the padded, side pocket of his pack. Johnson sat down on the
stone bench, pulled the folded map from his shirt pocket, and gazed at the GPS screen.
Bohannon and Rodriguez simply watched in silence, not sure which was the more interesting
sight, this totally unexpected room, or Doc, back to life, animatedly measuring and
scribbling on his map, his eyes darting back and forth from the GPS screen. Abruptly,
he was up, walking back across the room to the chunk of stone he had been inspecting
before. This time, he sat himself on the floor, causing a minor dust storm, and began
minutely inspecting the stone’s face. Bohannon looked at Rodriguez. Both shrugged.

“Av beit din,”
Johnson said to no one in particular. “This stone says,
‘Av beit din.’
Isn’t that marvelous?”

Perhaps his mind had been dulled by three days underground. Bohannon didn’t know how
to respond.

“Come, come here,” said Johnson.

Bohannon and Rodriguez crossed to where Doc was in the dust and joined him on the
floor. Johnson pointed to the stone, now more illuminated by his TAG light. “Do you
see the inscription? It’s ancient Hebrew. Only a portion of the entire, original inscription
is visible, but this section is very clear. It’s a list of priests who should perform
the temple service at the direction of ‘the Great Beit Din.’ It also outlines the
acceptable patterns of ‘ritual acts for the Day of Atonement . . . the burning of
the Red Heifer . . . the preparation of the water of purification.’ Then, see here,
it says all these things are, ‘under the authority of the Nasi and the Av Beit Din.’
Johnson turned at his waist to look at his two companions, a glow of triumph on his
face. He bounced up to his feet, outstretched his arms, and twirled in the dust, nearly
obscuring Bohannon and Rodriguez. “This, gentlemen, this is the Hall of Hewn Stone,
in which the Great Sanhedrin met.”

Johnson stopped his sweep of the room, turned to his friends, and looked them squarely
in the eye.

“The Temple.” Simple words spoken without a great deal of drama. “The Hall of Hewn
Stone was part of the Temple,” said Johnson. “I believe this may be the Hall of Hewn
Stone.”

Rodriguez was chewing on a granola bar, listening to Doc’s history lesson, the three
of them settled on the stone bench, trying to rebuild their energy and strength.

“The Great Sanhedrin sat in the Temple, in a room on the southern side of the inner
court of the Temple. The room was called the ‘Hall of Hewn Stone.’ The larger part
of the hall was on the site of the court of the laymen, and there were two entrances:
one from the Outer Court, used by the priests, and one from the Water Gate, used by
the laity. The Great Sanhedrin, the Beit Din, met every day except the Sabbath and
feast days, between the morning and the evening services in the Temple. It was the
highest religious authority in Israel and dated back to the days of Moses and the
seventy elders who Moses invited to join him in the governing of Israel.”

“So why couldn’t this room be Abiathar’s Temple?” asked Bohannon. “It looks like a
temple, and it’s hidden under the Temple Mount. Seems to meet the criteria.”

Johnson reached out a hand and placed it on Bohannon’s arm. “For a moment, I had the
same thought,” he said. “But it’s not possible. By the time Abiathar’s father started
building the temple, the Sanhedrin was long gone. Nine hundred years before Elijah,
the Romans destroyed every vestige of Jewish sovereignty. Every Jew who remained alive
was banished from the city and the areas near the city. For nearly one thousand years,
Jewish elders desperately tried to hold together a community that had lost the center
of its universe. Without the temple, they created new forms of governance—the Academy
in place of the Sanhedrin and new, hereditary leaders in place of the high priests.
No, Tom, this room was part of the Temple complex before the Romans invaded.”

Johnson’s eyes kept scanning the room.

“The GPS has us positioned under the Temple Mount, near that space between the Dome
of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque that we targeted.”

“That is a miracle in itself, if you ask me,” said Rodriguez.

“On that stone over there is a clear inscription of the duties of the Great Beit Din,
the head of the Sanhedrin. This
must
be the Hall of Hewn Stone.”

To Rodriguez, Johnson’s words sounded like a desperate plea. Signs of stress were
regularly manifesting in Johnson. And now, Rodriguez was going to burst what little
hope the Doc had resurrected.

“Doc, you’re the linguist, and I’m sure you translated the inscription correctly.
But,” he said, reaching his hand out to Johnson’s shoulder, “I don’t see how this
could be the Hall of Hewn Stone. Like you said, there was nothing left of the Temple,
not one stone left upon another, when the Romans destroyed the Temple. It’s not possible
for this room to be part of that Temple complex.”

Rodriguez watched Johnson deflate just like the sleeping bags in the lake crossing.
But just as quickly, he was blown back up again. “You’re right, Joe. You’re right.
The hall is gone. But what is this room? And more importantly, where is this room?
Why is there an inscription in here about the Great Beit Din? Look at the GPS. We’ve
got to be close!”

“There is one thing the GPS doesn’t show us.” Bohannon got up off the bench, looking
again at the ceiling. “It doesn’t tell us how deep we are. It doesn’t tell us how
there can be light in here. Let’s look around some more, take our time, see what we
can find. Like a way out?”

Yeah, a way out
, thought Rodriguez. They had all been so stunned by the appearance of this room that
none of them had even thought to look for an exit. Each of them cracked a cyalume
stick and headed in different directions.

“Hey, Doc, was that Ben Dit—”

“Beit Din, Mr. Rodriguez.”

“Yeah, okay, Ben Dit . . . wasn’t it the Sanhedrin that tried Jesus?” Rodriguez was
scrambling over a larger pile of debris in what they had determined was the northwest
corner of the room.
There must have been a massive collapse of material here at one time
, he thought, pulling himself to the top of a broken column.

“Well, no, actually.” Johnson stopped. He had been searching carefully along the stone
bench on the western side of the room. “Two bodies were labeled Sanhedrin. The
Great Sanhedrin
, which had dominion over all religious activities and met in the Temple, and the
just-plain
Sanhedrin
, which had dominion over all legal and secular aspects of Jewish life. The secular
Sanhedrin was chased out of the Temple courts by the Pharisees, who thought they profaned
the Holy.

This secular Sanhedrin met, it is written, ‘in the vicinity of the Temple Courts.’
Some writers said the secular Sanhedrin, ‘met below the Temple Courts.’ It was the
secular Sanhedrin, the legal court, which tried Jesus.”

“Hey, Doc,” chipped in Bohannon, “could this be the meeting place of the secular Sanhedrin,
the lower place?”

“Tom!” A shout of triumph from Johnson’s corner. “Yes, I think you’re right. This
can’t be the Hall of Hewn Stone, but it could certainly be the meeting hall of the
legal Sanhedrin. Joe, what do you think of that?”

The sweep of their TAG lights as they moved their heads, the blue-light brightness
of the cyalume sticks, joined with the dim natural light and covered the room with
an eerie dance of light and shadow. Added to the disjointed effects of the lights
was the odd fact that there was no echo in the room, no reverberation of sound at
all, as if sound was being absorbed by the stones themselves.

The room itself was silent, a silence they all heard.

Rodriguez scrambled over a large fall, a pile of both natural and man-worked stone
debris, in the northwest corner. Gingerly, Rodriguez stepped over two polished columns,
now lying in a heap. His foot slipped. Awkwardly, both his feet came out from under
him, and he was headed for a hard crash in the midst of some very jagged stone. Instinctively,
his hands shot out, looking for help. The left one grabbed air, but the right locked
onto a solid piece of stone that wasn’t moving.

“Hey, Joe, are you okay?”

He could hear Bohannon’s voice, but his heart was in his throat as he clung to the
stone and hung over a ten-foot drop. Close. Swinging his body slightly, Rodriguez
reached up with his left hand to also grasp the stone that suspended him. He took
a deep breath and was about to reply, when he looked up between his grasping hands.
And saw some very familiar symbols. One looked like a mouse with an eye and a long
tail.

“Joe, hey, Joe, where are you?” He could hear Bohannon’s voice, responding to the
crash and clatter of falling stones where Rodriguez had once been visible. “C’mon,
Joe, are you okay?”

No, I’m not okay
, thought Rodriguez. “Tom, Doc, you better come over to see this,” he said, not removing
his eyes from the Demotic symbols above him. “And you better come over to rescue me,
too.”

Bohannon gladly sacrificed his toothbrush—he had no one down here to impress. Doc
was frantically brushing away dust and dirt from every crevice and corner, while he
and Joe stood looking over Doc’s shoulder, their precious scroll held between them.

“It’s Demotic, Joe. You’re right, it’s definitely Demotic. But”—Bohannon squinted—“what
is that other language?”

“It’s Aramaic,” said Johnson, not breaking his rhythm. “And the third language is
Greek.”

“Then it’s like the Rosetta Stone?” Bohannon asked.

“Yes,” said Johnson, putting down the toothbrush. Before them, now resting on the
room’s stone bench, was a stone stellae similar to the Rosetta Stone, but much smaller.
“Yes,” said Johnson, a note of excitement rising in his voice. “But it’s much more
like our scroll. Look at the symbols. Look at how they are inscribed.”

Like the Rosetta Stone, this stellae had three languages inscribed on its face. Unlike
the Rosetta Stone, the languages were inscribed in vertical columns.