In the Spring of 2006, a colleague A_____ , at Damascus University invited us to come to visit for what he said was “the opportunism of a lifetime.” A____ was someone that we knew, but did not know well and so we felt like the urgency he expressed about us coming was a little strange (we had met him at a conference in Mississippi the year before, but all we really remembered about him is that he would mix orange and grape Vitamin water together– which turned brown).
He claimed that on one of his regular trips to survey the new acquisitions of antiquities dealers in the middle east, he had come across a collection of yet unopened clay jars, which he believed could be dated somewhere between 300 and 400 BCE. The dealer who showed them to him claimed that a peasant had stumbled acr0ss them “when plowing his field.” D and I have had enough experience with undergraduate plagiarism to know that this story had been “borrowed” from Wikipedia (who knew how much our cultures had in common!) D and I were both busy grading but we were figured it would be a good thing to do because we were also both trying to get some perspective about our respective relationships. Mine ended; his didn’t.
When we arrived in Damascas, A___ picked us up at the airport. His beautiful cousin, Ayah, rode shotgun and I gained some perspective about my relationship. It was 4:30am, but he took us immediately to his uncle’s palatial home where they served us breakfast. He had convinced his uncle that volunteering his basement for the opening would ingratiate the family to the antiquities dealer, which would in turn could help position them as buyers. When we asked him why he hadn’t opened them already to see what was inside, he said that he did not doubt that the academic community would appreciate whatever was found in the jars once thorough investigation had been done. However, he thought that his colleagues in the middle east would be quicker to accept them if Westerners were present when the seals were broken.
By 8:30 am, the antiquities dealer had arrived along with another academic from Damascus University. The basement was windowless and cool. We heard a short (but too long) discourse about the age of the pottery (things we already knew, but were too polite to interrupt and signify) and the substance used to seal the jars (something we found dubious). Still, we all knew that in the past ancient and important archaeological sites had been looted and that this very well could have been the spoils of one of those events, either in their original containers or laughably replaced in new jars to make them seem more authenic.
Inside the clay tablets were a series of scrolls, potsherds, cords of decomposing fabric, and other relics. The scripts of the documents looked to be the same variety as those found at Ugarit plus other proto-cannannite scripts that we had never seen before. A______ refused to allow us to make photographs of the documents to bring back to the states, but his uncle agreed to become our patron for the summer, housing us at his house and giving us a nice stipend, if we chose to stay in Damascus to work on them.
For the next three months during the summer of 2006, fueled by coffee three times the strength of Gorilla coffee, the vibrations of the frequent and beautiful nearby call to prayer (which also woke us every morning), and an adrenaline we had not known for a long time, we worked around the clock to translate the scrolls and understand the relics. A_____ often helped us in the endeavor, but also frequently went on excursions to other antiquity dealers in the area, for weeks at a time.
This was an incredible challenge– not just to try and come up with meanings of words that we had never seen before, but also to try and believe that we were right about what we thought these scrolls were saying.
What we present in this journal are our translations, if not the most important, then surely the most interesting biblical discovery of the last century. Every day we were completely enthralled by what we found– a corresponding, but variant version of the Bible, which centered not only around the growing relationship of the Israelites with Yahweh, but also their attempts to survive in a world with what we realized could only be translated as “Zombies.”
