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"From Shimon Bar-Kokhba to Yehonathan . . . get ahold of the young men and come
with them. And I shall deal with the Romans." So wrote legendary Jewish patriot
Shimon Bar-Kokhba to his supporters during a desperate uprising for religious
freedom in the year 132. In this program, NOVA explores the last refuge of one
group of Bar-Kokhba's followers with an historian whose bold theories have
rocked the world of biblical archeology.
The expedition takes NOVA to a remote cave in the Judean desert, first
excavated by the famed Israeli archeologist Yigael Yadin in 1960-61. Yadin
uncovered a cache of ancient documents, human skulls, and artifacts that shed
new light on the Bar-Kokhba revolt, which resulted in the Roman slaughter of
580,000 Jews.
Now, Jewish historian Richard Freund of the University of Hartford returns to
the cave, certain that the site still holds startling secrets. The place is
called the Cave of Letters, after one of Yadin's most notable finds: letters
from Bar-Kokhba himself and the haunting personal archive of Babatha, one of
several women who lived in the cave along with dozens of children. Yadin also
found pottery, coins, cloth, and a dazzling collection of bronze ritual items,
which, because of their pagan designs, Yadin believed had been stolen from the
Romans.
Convinced that Yadin's excavations were incomplete because of the thick layer
of debris five to 15 feet deep on the cave floor, Freund organized an
expedition equipped with state-of-the-art technology. This included
ground-penetrating radar, electrical resistivity tomography, and a medical
imaging endoscope adapted to search beneath boulders. Freund's results have
sharpened the picture of life and death in the cave complex, which cuts more
than 300 yards deep into a virtually inaccessible cliff west of the Dead Sea.
Supplied with a clay oven, extensive provisions, and articles of daily life,
the Bar-Kokhba rebels were clearly intending long-term occupation. Human bones
found in the cave show no signs of trauma, indicating that the residents
probably starved to death.
But the most surprising outcome is Freund's new theory about the bronze ritual
items uncovered by Yadin (see Stumbling Upon a Treasure). Based on fresh discoveries and a cryptic inscription
from a copper scroll found among the famous Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940s,
Freund believes the bronze items are not pagan, as Yadin held, but Jewish. And
he speculates that they might be the only surviving artifacts from Judaism's
holiest site, the Second Temple in Jerusalem. The Romans destroyed the Temple,
the center of Jewish worship, in the year 70, six decades before the Bar-Kokhba
uprising.
Freund hypothesizes that the cave was used multiple times as a refuge and
hiding place. After all, he says, "How did they know that this cave existed in
132 to bring all those people out here unless they knew it from before? It's
clear to me this was a well-known cave, a cave that had been used before and
[that] people talked about in closed circles."
More controversially, Freund's theory suggests that Jews of the era assimilated
decorative aspects of Roman mythology to the point of including mythological
figures on their holiest objects. Freund makes a convincing case involving
carbon-14 dating, comparison with other artifacts, and the fact that pagan
motifs are featured on the Temple's great menorah as depicted on the Arch of
Titus in Rome, which commemorates the sack of Jerusalem.
Especially persuasive is the copper scroll's description of the site of one
hidden cache of Temple objects: "In the Cave of the Column of two openings,
facing east, at the northern opening . . . is buried, at three cubits, a ritual
limestone vessel. In it is one scroll; underneath is treasure." This
description fits very closely with what Freund finds.
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The Cave of Letters rests on a sheer cliff face, which made filming portions of "Ancient Refuge in the Holy Land" a challenge. Here, NOVA cameraman D. J. Roller gets a shot from high above Israel's Nahal Hever valley, in which the cave lies.
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