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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Oded Golan, a dark-haired antiquities collector with gentle brown eyes, is a controversial figure in the world of Biblical archeology. To his
promoters and admirers, including Hershel Shanks, the editor of the widely read Biblical Archaeology Review, Golan may be responsible for some of the most spectacular finds in archeological history. Others, including Amir Ganor, the head of the theft unit of the Israel Antiquities Authority, believe that these remarkable artifacts are fakes. Golan, they say, is a central figure in a larger scheme in recent decades to infiltrate fake antiquities, connected directly to the Bible, into some of the leading collections in the world, making millions of dollars and disrupting the delicate chain of transmission that links Western civilization to its sacred founding texts.
Golan's apartment, which is on the third floor of a modest residential building in Tel Aviv, is a loftlike space, with a dark-gray futon on the floor, a white baby-grand piano, and large glass display cabinets. When I visited him last September, Golan, who is fifty-two, spoke like a man who had just been awakened from a dream.
"I can look at my family, and the whole recent history of Israel is reflected in their lives," Golan said, sitting behind a modern wooden desk. His grandfather Ben-Zion Berkovitch, he said, was a socialist rabbi and a successful attorney. His grandmother was a dogmatic atheist. Golan has been, by turns, a student of industrial engineering at the Technion (Israel's equivalent of M.I.T.), an Army officer, a tour operator in Egypt, a dabbler in high-tech ventures, and an investor in Tel Aviv real estate. When I asked to see his collection of antiquities, he pressed a button near his desk, and a curtain rose to reveal a well-lit vitrine containing pottery animals, vases, and altar stands.
"Here you can see, let's say, twenty animals, vessels in the shape of animals, most of them from the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.," Golan said proudly, pointing to a row of clay vessels. "That's a pig over there. A lion. It's a very, very rare one." It is his practice, he said, to repair the items in his collection so that the repair will be easily visible to a trained eye. "I can tell you immediately that this leg is a new one," he went on, pointing to a clay ox. "This has one horn that is a new one. Do you see? The left one is ancient, the right one is a new one. I can see it immediately. But you wouldn't recognize it."
The most famous item from Golan's collection is the ossuary, or stone burial box, of James, son of Joseph, a Jew who died in the first century in Jerusalem. The James ossuary, as it became known, was unveiled at a press conference in the fall of 2002, and was shown on CNN and in newspapers and magazines around the world; it was acclaimed by some scholars as the most important archeological find of the last two millennia. On its side was a short inscription in Aramaic--Ya'akov bar Yosef akhui d'Yeshua'--which was widely translated as "James son of Joseph brother of Jesus." It was quickly put forth that the person whose bones had been stored in the ossuary was the man referred to in Galatians 1:19 as "James the Lord's brother," whom Christian believers call James the Just. Like other significant items from Golan's collection, the ossuary is now locked in a closet in Jerusalem, in the headquarters of the Israel Antiquities Authority, the government agency responsible for protecting the nation's antiquities as well as for policing the trade. The James ossuary was recovered during a police raid on Golan's apartment last July; since October, 2002, Golan has been under investigation by the Antiquities Authority, which believes that he is at the center of a forgery ring that may have done more damage to Biblical history and archeology than anyone since the master forger Moses Wilhelm Shapira, who produced thousands of fake Biblical objects in Jerusalem more than a century ago.
Golan claims that he bought the James ossuary in the nineteen-seventies. He has not been charged with any crime, and says that the authorities have done "damage for many generations to come." He maintains that, without the involvement of dealers and collectors like him, many objects of great historical importance like the James ossuary would be lost forever, adding that he believes the investigation was "driven by the personal ambitions of several Antiquities Authority officials." Proclaiming his innocence--he maintains that he is merely a collector, and has sold only a handful of artifacts over the past thirty years--Golan then related a story about his first major discovery, which he made as a child, during a trip with his parents to Tel Hazor, an archeological site near the Sea of Galilee.
"Hazor was the biggest city in Israel during the mid-second millennium B.C.," Golan said. "I found a small clay fragment, which I could immediately identify as written in cuneiform." When he arrived home in Tel Aviv, Golan said, he telephoned the archeologist Yigael Yadin, and told him about the fragment. "He came to my parents' apartment," Golan said, "and he found that the fragment was part of a dictionary written in two languages, both in cuneiform. One is Akkadian, the other is Sumerian--from the seventeenth century B.C., if I'm not wrong. It's interesting how a dictionary was developed, because it was very functional. It was purely a commercial dictionary for traders, and the words are actually like 'good price,' 'bad price,' 'high price,' 'low price,' things like that.
"But the more fascinating story behind it," he went on, "is that Yadin brought several aerial photographs of the mound, and he asked me, 'Oded, tell me where did you find it? Because this dictionary probably belonged to the palace at Hazor, which I am looking for.' He even mentioned Yavin, the king of Hazor, who is mentioned in the Bible."
Unable to remember where, exactly, he had found the shard, the boy turned to his fertile imagination to aid the archeologist. "I said to myself, 'If I was the king of Hazor, where would I put my own palace?' " Golan recalled. "So I told Yadin that I thought it was probably very close to the place where I found it, and I pointed to a specific place."
A curious look passed over Golan's face as he recollected the scene. "You know, several years ago I went to Hazor, and I found that the Hebrew University had been working there for years, at the place where I pointed with my finger," Golan said. "And I spoke to some people, and they said that Yadin, in his so-called will, his scholarly testament, had mentioned that he believed that the palace of Hazor should be at that place.
"And the most incredible part of the story is that the palace is there," Golan said. He fixed me with a wide-eyed stare. "They found the biggest palace in the world at exactly the spot where I pointed, where I would have put my own palace as a boy, if I were the king of Hazor."
A Box of Bones --
The existence of the James ossuary--a limestone box, about twenty inches long, twelve inches high, ten inches wide, and trapezoidal in shape--was publicly revealed in Washington, D.C., on October 21, 2002. The host of the press conference was Hershel Shanks, whose Biblical Archaeology Review is an influential popular magazine about the archeology of the Biblical period. A Harvard Law School graduate and former Justice Department lawyer who became interested in archeology by studying the Bible, Shanks presented the ossuary as a world exclusive: "evidence of jesus written in stone" read the cover of the magazine's November / December, 2002, issue. "Ossuary of 'James, Brother of Jesus' Found in Jerusalem." The magazine said that the ossuary came from an unnamed collector; an Israeli journalist soon identified Golan as the ossuary's...
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