The Sword of Moses (14 page)

He turned.

It was Pamela Richards. She was running towards him.

With alarm flaring, he forced himself to breathe—slowly.

She reached him in seconds.

“I was just in the room checking the objects,” she began breathlessly.

Malchus felt a rush of anger washing over him.

Stupid interfering woman.

He looked about quickly. There was no one else in the corridor, and he could see no security cameras.

He felt for the knife again. The blade was still locked open.

No one was going to disrupt the work.

“I went back to collect this,” she continued. “And saw that … .”

Malchus looked down at the folder of academic articles on Dee she was carrying. As he did so, he scanned again for any other movement in the corridor.

There was none.

They were alone.

He tightened his grip on the knife.

“… you had been reading them.” She paused. “I just wondered if you wanted to keep the folder? I had the articles copied from the master file for you—so you’re welcome to take them with you.”

She handed him the folder, smiling. “I know how much bother it can be to get copies of articles from some of the more obscure academic journals.”

He exhaled deeply, and forced a smile. “Thank you, Mrs Richards. You’ve been most kind.” He took the folder she was holding out. “You’ve helped me very much today. In fact, you’ve no idea how much.”

“Our pleasure,” she answered. “Thank you for visiting. Do, please, come again.” With that, she turned and headed back down the corridor.

Malchus tucked the folder under his arm and left the museum quickly, joining the massed crowds of tourists spilling out onto the narrow streets of Bloomsbury.

In no time he was gone, lost in the London evening, along with one of the most famous black magic objects in history.

——————— ◆ ———————

Burj al-Arab Hotel

Dubai

The United Arab Emirates

The Arabian Gulf

It had been late the previous night when Ava had arrived in Dubai. A car had been waiting for her at the airport, but she had been too exhausted to take up the driver’s offer of a tour of the nocturnal city. Instead, he had merely whisked her speedily through the streets of skyscrapers and onto the hotel’s private causeway, from where she had got her first close-up look at the iconic building shaped like a dhow’s billowing sail.

On being ushered inside, she had been startled to find herself standing on a luxurious blue, cream, cerise, and apricot carpet in the unmistakable shape of the mystical
vesica piscis
. Looking up, she saw the same shape was echoed on the ceiling, where a vast curvaceous sculpture of a three-dimensional mandorla hung in amber and gold. She had never seen the ancient magical symbol in Arabia before, where anything redolent of the occult had long been banished.

Looking around, she had been equally amazed to find the hotel had no check-in desk.

Instead, a personal butler in white tie and tails had materialized, as if from nowhere. He had shown her to a seventeenth-floor suite, checked her in, and quietly made the necessary arrangements for her comfort. Before finishing, he had laid out a pile of complimentary brochures and vouchers for her.

Glancing briefly at them, she had immediately spotted a thick black envelope embossed with the same astrological symbol for Leo as on the mini-disc Saxby had given her.

When the butler had finally disappeared, she had torn open the envelope to find a stiff black card informing her in gold lettering that the midday previewing of the Ark would take place in the hotel’s library.

Still tired from the ordeal in Kazakhstan, and now with more jetlag, she had crawled upstairs. Ignoring the thirteen different pillow options and the interchangeable mattress cassettes for optimum comfort, she had simply collapsed into the gargantuan bed, and fallen asleep immediately.

But now the bright Gulf light was streaming in from around the curtains, and she awoke feeling rested and refreshed.

Dressing quickly, she decided to explore.

Looking around her suite, it was quickly evident that she was not in a typical hotel—more a sheikh’s palace. When Saxby had said a suite had been reserved for her, she had pictured a pleasant but ordinary hotel room with a small adjoining sitting area.

She could not have been more wrong.

Her ‘room’ was split over two floors. There was a chandeliered double-height hallway, sweeping marble staircase with gold and silver banisters, panoramic bedroom, sitting room, living-dining room, bar, kitchen, dressing room, and an intricately mosaicked bathroom that alone was bigger than most hotel rooms she had ever stayed in.

The whole suite was decked out in a riot of gold leaf, deep plush fabrics, exotic woods, and Carrara marble. Everything oozed opulence that even the most lavish spenders had probably only dreamt of. The butler had proudly informed her that the building was decorated in over fifteen thousand square feet of twenty-four carat gold leaf. As she flipped through the brochures on the table, she was amazed to learn there were seven suite options. More opulent ones came with their own private elevators, cinemas, and other refinements for the truly discerning visitor.

Leaving her room to stroll around the building, she had never imagined that places like this existed. It was as if she had stepped into an Arabian palace from a Walt Disney set of
The Thousand and One Nights
. Every corner she turned opened onto a fountain strewn with rose petals or orange blossoms, or a set of doors in hammered gold leading to an incensed
majlis
.

Exploring further, she found the famous helipad-tennis-court jutting precariously off the twenty-eighth floor, and even discovered a basement seafood restaurant that she could only reach via a submarine simulator.

The assault on her senses was so sustained she soon started to feel numb.

It occurred to her that people had not built or lived so decadently since the Roman Empire hit its dizzy heights of excess.

The contrast with battle-scarred and rubble-filled Baghdad could not have been greater. They were both world-famous Middle-Eastern cities only eight hundred and fifty miles apart, but it may as well have been a light year.

Eventually, dazed by the extravagant and at times surreal surroundings, she headed back to her room, where she opened her bag and pulled out the books she had brought with her.

If she was going to identify and assess the Ark, then she needed to remind herself of a few things.

She padded over to the kitchen, poured herself a glass of juice, then settled down on the cushion-strewn sofa to reacquaint herself with some of the finer details of gold working in the late Bronze Age.

After a few moments, a thought occurred to her, and she got up to hunt through the suite’s various drawers for the usual Bible left by the Gideons.

Then she remembered she was in Arabia.

Glancing up at the ceiling, she soon found the little
qiblah
arrow pointing the way to Mecca.

She telephoned the concierge instead, and within a few minutes her butler appeared with a pristine-looking Bible wrapped in a luxuriously thick embroidered cloth.

She flipped it open at the book of Exodus, turned to chapter twenty-five, and started reading:

Have them make an ark of acacia wood … . Overlay it with pure gold, both inside and out, and make a gold moulding around it. Cast four gold rings for it and fasten them to its four feet, with two rings on one side and two rings on the other. Then make poles of acacia wood and overlay them with gold. Insert the poles into the rings on the sides of the ark to carry it. The poles are to remain in the rings of this ark; they are not to be removed. … Make an atonement cover of pure gold … . And make two cherubim out of hammered gold at the ends of the cover. Make one cherub on one end and the second cherub on the other; make the cherubim of one piece with the cover, at the two ends. The cherubim are to have their wings spread upward, overshadowing the cover with them. The cherubim are to face each other, looking toward the cover. Place the cover on top of the ark and put in the ark the tablets of the covenant law that I will give you. There, above the cover between the two cherubim that are over the ark of the covenant law, I will meet with you and give you all my commands for the Israelites.

Further on, there was a description of more gold working, when the Hebrews had become bored waiting for Moses to come back down the mountain with instructions from their new God. So they made an idol to an old one on the orders of Aaron, Moses’s brother. He commanded them:

“Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me.” So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, “These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.”

It was clear to Ava that what was being described in both cases was advanced metallurgy.

If the wooden core of the Ark was covered in gold, its makers would have required detailed knowledge of building and firing a crucible to melt the gold, and experience in beating the hot metal into even sheets.

Whichever way she looked at it, these were highly skilled tasks.

Moreover, casting the cherubs and the calf would have been even more technical—requiring additional knowledge of moulds, clay, wax, casting techniques, and firing temperatures.

Whoever had been engaged to undertake the work with such precious materials would have been highly experienced goldsmiths—or indeed whole workshops under master craftsmen.

But according to the book of Exodus, the Ark and other sacred golden objects for the Tabernacle tent were made in the desert by Bezalel of Judah and Aholiab of Dan, two men randomly chosen on the spot and ‘filled with wisdom’ to work the metal and wood and to cut and set the precious stones.

Was it possible, she wondered, that amateurs, living rough in the desert, could have gained the knowledge and equipment to create metal sculptures of that complexity?

She lived these problems every day.

Biblical archaeology was always controversial.

Some people accepted the early books of the Bible as unerring literal fact. Others saw them as an intricate collection of fireside tribal tales which the centuries had interwoven with myth and symbol until only trace elements of any real historical events remained.

She picked up a book on biblical archaeology she had taken from her bag, and re-read the now famous passage by the highly respected director of the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University. He had published it in 1999, and it was still causing waves today:

This is what archaeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel: the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is the fact that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom. And it will come as an unpleasant shock to many that the God of Israel, Jehovah, had a female consort and that the early Israelite religion adopted monotheism only in the waning period of the monarchy and not at Mount Sinai.

Ava knew only too well that he was by no means the only Israeli scholar to share that view. On the next page, another archaeology professor from the University of Tel Aviv was quoted describing Jerusalem in the period as ‘a hill-country village’. And he had likened King David to a ‘raggedy upstart akin to Pancho Villa’, whose fighting men were ‘five hundred people with sticks in their hands shouting and cursing and spitting’—not the great royal army of chariots described in the Bible.

The question of Yahweh’s wife was even more controversial. She had spent a lot of time in Amman looking into it—and had found to her surprise there were a number of them.

There was the terrible Anat, a brutal war goddess. Ava’s research had found there was solid evidence of Yahweh and Anat being worshipped together by biblical Hebrews as a warrior couple, even as far afield as Elephantine in southern Egypt.

Another of Yahweh’s wives was Asherah, who was widely worshiped alongside Yahweh as Queen of Heaven from before the time of Moses, during the reign of Solomon, and right up to the Babylonian captivity. Ava had counted up the number of times Asherah was mentioned in the Bible, and it came to over seventy. The book of Exodus explicitly referred to the male prostitutes’ quarters in Solomon’s Temple where women wove the robes used for Asherah worship. And for a while there was even a sacred statue of Asherah in the Temple itself. Ava had taken part in archaeological digs in Israel whose finds of pottery inscribed ‘to Yahweh and his Asherah’ had confirmed Asherah’s status beyond doubt.

Although this shocked many people, Ava regularly had to explain to them that modern historians and archaeologists had found a great deal of evidence that the Hebrews worshipped many gods up until the mid-500s BC, when they gave them up during their forced exile in Babylon. This was the true start of their monotheism, seven to eight hundred years after Moses and Mount Sinai.

The Bible confirmed this original polytheism in many places, with repeated commands for the Hebrews to stop worshiping gods such as Baal, Moloch, Tammuz, the sun god, and the moon god in the shape of a calf.

And worship of these other deities was not a fringe activity. Ava was well aware of the section in the book of Kings which stated explicitly that King Solomon worshipped many other gods besides Yahweh, and built them temples, too.

These differences between people’s long-held beliefs and modern scholarship intruded into Ava’s life every day. She had to make fine judgements, based on all the evidence.

Putting the books down, she looked out of the window at the azure water around her.

Would the Ark be a crude desert-made object consistent with the Bible account, or would it be something more sophisticated from an established workshop, as modern scholarship suggested?

If she was going to evaluate the physical Ark now, in the hotel’s library, she would have to be ready to make some assumptions about what was possible, plausible, or probable in the period. And she would have to think laterally, focussing on the Bible descriptions and all available modern scholarship.

She looked at her watch. It was coming up to midday.

She got up off the sofa and grabbed the mini-disc. Shutting the suite’s door firmly behind her, she headed up to the library where she hoped, with mounting excitement, a great many things would very soon become much clearer.