Dead Sea Capers

Dead Sea Capers

       Stingray Pete

One studied, the other sold. That's the way of the world, isn't it? Read Homer, for instance, or even better, Horace, and after Horace, Ovid. When you tire of the ancients, turn for a few well-spent evenings to Beowulf and Sir Gawain. End with Geoffrey Chaucer. In Chaucer we have the greatest purveyor of, or more accurately, the intense dealer in the contradictions between the meditant and the merchant. He is fiction's grand marquis of the philosophy of the ascendancy of thought over action.

       Who am I? My name is Meckling. I teach philosophy of religion at a small college in Trier, the oldest city in the country. That is neither here nor there, though. In my spare time I read, increasingly, to my own curiosity, accounts of the intrigue surrounding the release of Dead Sea scrolls privileges. These codices are all housed in the Kumran Building in Hafiz and access to them is strictly controlled, ostensibly by university religious scholars but actually by the Israeli government itself. What is this to you? Nothing. This is a question for the trained thinker, not for you. Not for commoners dabbling in ideas as if they were indifferently stirring their pudding after a sumptuous dinner of roast beef or candied pig. I eat no pig. My name should tell you that. Mine is one of the few sects, let me qualify to you, that still observes ritual Jewish holidays and fervently follows Levitican laws. I am a believer, that is. That is neither here nor there, however. You, unfamiliar with either Jewish ritual or German intellectual rigor, will about now be throwing this account aside for some less patently partisan and more piquantly sexual reading material. But bear with me. This is the conclusion of my digression into exposition of this sort. So, let me begin my story.

       First, however, I want to ask you if the name Eisermann means dick to anyone here? No? I will introduce him to you. Eisermann single-handedly toppled the Israeli government over this business of the Dead Sea scrolls. They--these scrolls, that is-- were to be kept out of reach of all scholars as well as out of the public eye. Nothing was to escape the vigilance of the repressors of information. No information flow about them whatsoever was to be allowed. No publications in scholarly journals. No newspaper accounts of how Malek the shepherd found them when he threw a stone into a hidden cave and heard pots breaking. Two thousand years after they had been placed there they had till then not been discovered! They had not been robbed! Nor any hurt or piracy done to them! Astonishing! Why astonishing? Because the Bedouins, who share that particular desert around Kumran, where the Essenes made their last stand against the Romans in 70 A.D. not on top of Mount Oreb but that fascinating messa the middle east has come to call Masada, have done for centuries a flourishing trade in and made passable livings from illegal trade in codices such as the Dead Sea scrolls. The only difference between scholars and Bedouins is that the latter get big dollars for these texts, and I mean big dollars. So, guess what. They break--yes! literally break, and it breaks my heart to say it--these more than precious texts into fragments, each of which they sell to the casual buyer or fortune hunter with the promise of more of the same if she comes up with another half a million denarii. God! God in heaven, how can You permit such a travesty?

       No appeals to the divine. It helps one dick, let me tell you. Back to the story. Now, having found these scrolls this shepherd, not practiced in the nasty science of scroll profiteering, actually visited a local scholar with his news, not a man of any renown but still someone who understood the significance of the discovery and who himself longed not for money but for the joy of historical knowledge. This encounter immediately reminds me of "The Pardoner's Tale." The maligned Pardoner, the protagonist of that marvelous tale, decides to confide to his fellow travelers, men and women on a pilgrimage to Canterbury one spring who have each agreed to tell a story to pass the time, confide to them that he is a cheat and a liar. Now, imagine that! A seller of relics and religious artifacts no more holy than the trinkets German entrepreneurs market to "seely" tourists in their hauptmarts in May or June or around the Porte Negra, he decides to come clean. Oh, sure, scholars have argued that the Pardoner does this to pinch and piss off his less pecuniary companions, but I have another theory, one eminently more intelligent than any I have read in Modern Languages Quarterly or Chaucer Quarterly.

(To be continued)