Read Online The Moses Legacy by Adam Palmer - Free Book Online Page A

horizontally and read one column at a time.
    Daniel stared at it for a long time, taking in the fact that what he had before him was a very ancient papyrus in remarkably good condition. After a while, he looked up at Mansoor. ‘What is it?’ he asked.
    Mansoor frowned. ‘That’s what you’re supposed to tell me.’
    â€˜I mean what can you tell me about its provenance?’
    â€˜First of all, can you translate it?’
    Daniel sat down, took out his one-page concordance and started looking for words in the papyrus that matched. After some considerable time, he looked up, disappointed.
    â€˜There aren’t enough words matching the concordance. I found nine instances of Jehovah and three variants of El which I assume is a generic reference to God. But there were no other common words.’
    He noticed that Gabrielle looked disappointed. He could always tell her mood from her face, even when she tried to hide it. It was harder to tell with Mansoor; Daniel had not known him long enough.
    â€˜But nine instances of Jehovah ,’ said the Egyptian contemplatively. ‘What’s your general impression? I mean what sort of a document do you think it is?’
    â€˜Well, my first impression was that it was a proclamation intended to be unfurled vertically and read out loud by a herald to an assembled audience. But then I rejected that because proclamations would more likely be engraved on astone monument and displayed in public to be seen by one and all.’
    â€˜Not if it were a proclamation to a nomadic people,’ Gabrielle interrupted, picking up the theme of the nomadic Shasu of Yahowa that they had talked about earlier.
    Daniel nodded approvingly. ‘True. But then I considered the possibility that it might be a letter or missive to a single individual. I also noticed a peculiarity about the way it was set out: every single line is different in length. That is precisely the way that poetry would be written.’
    â€˜So which is it?’ asked Mansoor. ‘A proclamation to a nomadic people or an ancient poem?’
    â€˜Well, if it weren’t for the presence of the name Jehovah, one might speculate that this was copied or plagiarized from an old Egyptian poem. But Jehovah precludes that.’
    â€˜So it must be a proclamation to the Israelites,’ said Gabrielle.
    Daniel wanted to proceed more cautiously. He turned to Mansoor. ‘I’ve told you as much as I can based on looking at it. I might be able to tell you more if you can give me some idea about its origins.’
    â€˜I can tell you that it’s been carbon dated to around 1600 BC,’ said Mansoor.
    â€˜That makes it older than the Bible.’
    â€˜Yes it does. But I can’t tell you when or where it was found.’
    â€˜Why not?’
    â€˜Because I don’t know. That is, I can tell you where it was found latterly . But I cannot tell you where it was found originally .’
    â€˜What do you mean?’
    â€˜It was found here in one of the storage rooms, when we were in the process of entering all the items in the museumon to our new computer database. But it didn’t have any object card with it, so the provenance is completely unknown. All we found was the clay jar with the papyrus.’
    â€˜Clay jar?’
    â€˜Yes, the papyrus was actually found inside an old clay jar. We only mounted it in glass recently, shortly after finding it. But we haven’t been able to trace the origins of either the papyrus or the jar.’
    â€˜But aren’t they listed in the museum’s register?’
    â€˜We did a thorough search of the register and haven’t found it.’
    â€˜Isn’t that rather… strange?’
    â€˜It’s not suspicious , if that’s what you mean. There are quite a few items in the storage rooms that we haven’t been able to find listed in the register books.’
    â€˜When you say “the register books