God's Gold Read Online Free Page B

the Table of the Divine Presence, and the silver trumpets looted from Jerusalem—one of the greatest and most important lost treasures of history. My mind was in turmoil. I couldn’t sleep. I would have liked to close the offices of Minerva then and there to head straight to Jerusalem and Rome in search of answers. But reality bit and magazine deadlines pressed.
    Intrigue had turned into an obsession. Already I found myself processing the lost Temple treasure story through a critical series of scientific filters. Why did Rome destroy King Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem in AD 70? Was it done deliberately or just as an unavoidable by-product of war? If the Jewish loot really made it to Rome, did it survive the decline and fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century? When did the gold candelabrum—symbol of a displaced civilization—finally disappear from the pages of history?
    With so many unanswered questions, I pledged to unravel the truth about one of the most important, yet neglected, stories of history. During the next four years I would circle the Mediterranean twice on this quest, visiting four of the greatest cities of antiquity—Jerusalem, Rome, Carthage, and Constantinople—clarifying some questions, burying others as red herrings, and uncovering a web of facts more startling than any work of fiction. The journey drew me to dangerous places and people that reminded me of the archaeological proverb: treasure is trouble.

4
EXODUS AND EXILE
    Inspired in 2001 by the revelations of the Colosseum’s phantom inscription, I itched to jump on a plane and head for the Eternal City. Just as all roads led to Rome 2,000 years ago, so the threads of the Temple treasure now seemed to converge there. Preliminary research flagged Rome as the crucial link in the disappearance of the Jewish spoils—the Temple of Peace seemed to be the last place where they were spotted in public. Or so I thought at the time.
    But for now I would have to resist the lure of Rome. First, I needed to separate fact from fiction amid the epic story of the empire’s destruction of Israel in AD 70. At the moment the quest felt abstract: I was hunting down a monumental treasure without having clearly unraveled why Rome had attacked Israel in AD 66 and how the war unfolded.
    If I was going to track down the Temple treasure of Jerusalem successfully, I needed to evaluate its physical, spiritual, and monetary value to the Roman Empire and the Jews of ancient Israel. Without creating an historical, political, and psychological profile, the spoils would lack context. Imagine investigating a murder scene without dusting for fingerprints or taking samples for DNA analysis. You would have no forensic evidence—case closed. My attitude toward the Temple treasure was exactly the same.
    I needed to turn the clock back to the moment when the Temple fell, to reconstruct the final weeks of the siege and assess Titus’s rationale for razing Jerusalem. Had he plotted with his father, the emperorVespasian, to deliberately burn down the Temple so they could stuff the imperial coffers with Jewish blood money? If so, perhaps they liquidated all of the treasure. After the great fire of Rome in AD 64, the Eternal City was certainly an eyesore badly in need of a face-lift. Did the Temple treasure pay for these renovations?
    In art and literature the image of the Temple treasure of Jerusalem has assumed legendary status. Steven Spielberg and George Lucas famously presented the Ark of the Covenant as an omnipotent force of divine power in Raiders of the Lost Ark, capable of wiping out Nazi units at the lift of a lid. In this profile the movie moguls were deeply inspired by the ark’s biblical military prowess against enemies of the Israelites. More recently, National Treasure saw Nicolas Cage successfully hunt down Solomon’s treasure beneath the sewers of New York.
    A few books have flirted with the theme of Jerusalem’s