Was There Another Version of the Ten Commandments?
By: Jonathan Poletti
Tags: Life, Bible, Christianity, History, Creative Non Fiction

Scholars are less hopeful

Archibald H. Sayce, Professor of Assyriology at Oxford, published a brief dismissal:

“It is really demanding too much of Western credulity to ask us to believe that in a damp climate like that of Palestine any sheepskins could have lasted for nearly 3,000 years…”

Charles Clermont-Ganneau arrives, once again, to cast a cold eye on Moses Shapira’s discovery. “I will not conceal the fact that I entertained in advance most serious doubts as to their authenticity,” he writes in the London Times on August 21st, 1883. “But I thought it my duty to pronounce no opinion until I had seen the originals.”

He’d asked for a private audience but was refused. So, he waited in line with the general public. The exhibit was “very ill-lighted and difficult to approach owing to the crowd of the curious,” he relates, but he could see very clearly. “The fragments are the work of a modern forger.”

The leather was obviously cut, he suspects, from the margins of a copy of a Torah as kept in Jewish synagogues.

A writer in London’s Daily News questions Clermont Ganneau’s evaluation. The fragments seem to be “written on leather of a thicker character, differing very considerably from that usually employed in synagogue-rolls.” The story Shapira told of how they were found was unusual, but not impossible, perhaps, and “it would be desirable, in a matter of so great importance, that some enquiry should be made.”

However, the debunking was a shockwave felt around the world. The Philadelphia Times reports:

“The Shapira manuscripts are pronounced by M. Clermont Ganneau to be fraudulent. This decision by so eminent an authority has produced a sensation and has caused all sorts of critical comment.”

The story of the Bedouin discovery is held out, now, for its obvious fraudulence. The Chicago Tribune suggests that a manuscript, if found, “would be immediately utilized as fuel.” Then, really, one just has to look at the people involved? “The Oriental races, when once embarked on a career of crime, stick at nothing,” notes the London News.

The character of Shapira was exposed as well, as London’s Daily News reports:

“Mr Shapira unfortunately failed, not only to support the genuineness of his manuscript but also to show that he became possessed of it in circumstances affording a reasonable presumption of good faith.”

A Dublin newspaper updates that Shapira “complains bitterly of the flouts and gibes flung at him, and protests that if the document is spurious he has been the victim of a trick played upon him by his old enemy, M. Clermont-Ganneau.”

Shapira leaves for Europe with “a very bad attack of brain fever,” reports the Liverpool Mercury. In March 1884, in Rotterdam, Holland, he checks into a hotel. The details are reported a week later: “He had not left his room for several days. The police forced the door and found the blood-bespattered corpse upon the bed.”

For the occasion, the Weekly Standard and Express composes poetry.

“Of poor Shapira it may, p’rhaps be said

He once lied living, and he now lies dead —

That is to say, the thread of life is fractured

For him who manuscript-ures manufactured.”

A writer at the Leeds Mercury explains:

“It is impossible to resist the conclusion that something like poetic justice has befallen the man who was the leading actor in the daring, but unsuccessful, crime.”

In 1948, leather scrolls again appear in public

Found in a cave by the Dead Sea, wrapped in linen, by Bedouin who seem to have associated them with mummies. The scrolls were blackened, slimy, and smelled like death—and were full of ‘new’ readings of the Bible.

Scholars immediately recalled the Shapira matter, and were a bit anxious? Had their profession failed to recognize an actual ancient manuscript from the Bible, and allowed it be lost?

The Christian archaeologist W.F. Albright, championing the new scrolls into public acceptance, dismissed the Shapira fragments again. There is “nothing whatever in common between them except the fact that texts of the Hebrew Bible written in ancient scripts are involved,” he writes. He referred “interested students” to Clermont-Ganneau’s “delightful little book, Les fraudes archéologiques en Palestine,” i.e. ‘Archaeological Fraud in Palestine’, which had covered the Shapira case.

In 1956, Manahem Mansoor, an American scholar of Hebrew, suspected the opposite. A profile of him in the New York Times notes that “when he first heard by chance that something remarkably like a Dead Sea scroll had been discovered more than seventy years ago and might still be in the vaults of the British Museum, he ‘could not sleep.’”

He and many other scholars would discuss the vexing question of whether the Shapira fragments had been real. Leo Deuel writes in 1965:

“Even if Shapira’s documents are not genuine, the conclusion seems warranted that their fabricators must have known or heard of previous manuscript discoveries in Moabite or other ‘Dead Sea’ caves.”

Helen G. Jefferson wonders in 1968: “If Shapira or an accomplice forged it, why does it deviate so widely from the Massoretic text?”

In a 1974 book, Riddles in History, Cyrus H. Gordon thinks there is “no longer any doubt” the find had been real:

“The fate of the precious Shapira Scrolls is a warning to us not to let negators, no matter how great their reputations, perpetuate irreparable damage.”

However, W.F. Albright held the line of scholarly dismissal. In 1965, he re-affirmed the Shapira fragments had “absolutely nothing in common” with the Dead Sea Scrolls. He deals with a new wrinkle in the case. Shapira’s daughter had grown up and become a public figure, and she said her father had been telling the truth.

She displays, Albright adds, “an extraordinary ignorance of what was going on in the field of archaeology.”

Maria Shapira had re-invented herself as ‘Myriam Harry’, an outrageous ingenue

She was sexually liberated, amusing, exotic. In her many books, her alter-ego, ‘Siona’, re-lives her life. She writes of her father many times.

She became famous with a 1903 novel, The Conquest of Jerusalem, which was based on him—the story of an antiquities dealer, intent on finding artifacts proving the Bible is real. He becomes disillusioned, and falls into a suicidal spell. The book was thought the sure winner of the Prix Goncourt, a literary prize. The famous J.K. Huysmans, heading the panel of judges, has to explain she won’t receive it because she is a woman.

La Vie Heureuse (March 1905; public domain; colorized)

A female equivalent, the Prix Femina, is born. A historian notes: “The jury of this rival prize was made up entirely of women of letters, thus giving women the power for the first time to pass judgement on contemporary literature in a very public venue.” Over the years, ever theatrical, Harry attends the awards ceremonies in flowing Bedouin garb.

I follow her appearances in newspapers over the years. Colorful updates run in the smallest towns in America. She’s over her free-love period, she sighs in 1905. She tells her story. “I lost my father, and I foresaw that sooner or later I must support myself and my mother. I came to Paris at the age of seventeen, and I learned French in two years, at the same time writing articles and doing translations in German and English for any prices I could get.”

She’s blonde, and delicate. “Her face is mobile and animated — so much so that she complains that no two photographs of her look alike,” the reporter says. “This fact I verified myself. It is very curious.”

She speaks of her writing. “My books are from life,” she says. Then repeats, “My books are from life.”

She doesn’t divulge her old name, or explain her new one. In French, as in English, ‘harry’ can mean ‘to badger’, or ‘to harass’.

A 1914 book, The Little Daughter of Jerusalem, tells of her childhood. She watches her father at work on the fragments, trying to reveal more of the faded text.

Her 1919 book Siona à Paris, never translated into English or noticed by Shapira scholarship, tells of her arrival in Paris as a teenager, wracked with grief over her father’s death, for “he knew that no son would defend the memory of the poor deluded man…”

She goes to the library to read the book that Clermont-Ganneau had written, and then reveals she is in Paris to assassinate him.

She re-tells the story of her father acquiring, “in a mysterious and circumvented way,” the manuscript, “wrapped in mummy strips…”

She plans her approach, taking the revolver he had given her, thinking of Bedouin codes of vengeance. She learns the time and date when Clermont-Ganneau will be teaching at the Sorbonne.

Slipping into the classroom, revolver concealed in her sleeve, she sits at a desk. The door opens:

“He coughed, and looked, with a vivid surprised look, at this new listener, frail and pale in his black clothes. She too looked at him with all the solemn purity of her aching eyes.”

She’d seen him, she recalls, in Jerusalem when she was a girl:

“He had passed on horseback down the street of Christians, his head wrapped in a silk veil. And she had found him so beautiful…”

He’s old now, hunched, but still elegant, she thinks. He starts the class, as she finds herself unexpectedly moved, mesmerized, indeed, by his details of ancient worlds, gods, and civilizations:

“Is it possible that this man who loves the East, who understands the rhythm of words, wrote these slanders against her father!”

He’d been young, she supposes, and ambitious. He hadn’t known her father:

“He had ignored his nobility of soul and his righteousness. He had ignored, above all, how much this ugly gray book would hurt a little girl who had adored her papa all her life!”

The class is over. Clermont-Ganneau and the students leave, as Siona convulses in sobs.

Instead of a murderer, she became a writer?

When Siona à Paris was published, Clermont-Ganneau was still alive. Paul Souday, the eminent French critic, reviews her for the New York Times:

“Fortunately she changed her mind at the last moment; no doubt she reflected that Clermont-Ganneau had no personal grudge against Shapira, but had used his faculty for critical insight in the interests of science alone.”

Myriam Harry died in 1958. She seems not to have made any public comment on the Dead Sea Scrolls.