Vendyl Jones and the Temple Incense

On April 30, 1992, an amateur archaeologist named Vendyl Jones held a press conference outside a cave in the Judean Desert just north of Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls had been discovered four decades earlier. Jones and Marvin Antelman, a chemist at the Weizmann Institute of Science who also happened to be an Orthodox rabbi, announced that they had found a large stash of the ketoret, the incense offered twice daily in the Jerusalem Temple two thousand years ago.

Their 1,300-pound find was a reddish-brown substance with the consistency of peat moss and a faint smell of cinnamon. At the press conference, Antelman—clean-shaven and sporting a red cardigan—declared that he was “80 percent sure” that the red substance was the ketoret. Ten days later, after the mass spectrometry was completed, Antelman said that he had positively identified several ingredients of the ketoret as it is described in Exodus 30:34 and elaborated on by the Talmud (Keritot 6a), including myrrh, saffron, and galbanum. He now had “absolutely no doubt that this is the Temple Incense.”

By then, however, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) had already moved to shut down the excavation because Jones did not have a permit to dig.

Jews are more used to saying the ketoret than seeing or smelling it. The Talmud’s ingredient list is part of the prayers, which Sephardim recite daily and Ashkenazim read quickly at the end of Shabbat Musaf, where it stands in the way of the Kiddush.

Nevertheless, Jones’s story has seeped its way into the folklore of American Orthodoxy. Over the years, I’ve heard not one but two presentations at synagogues from true believers in his discovery. I had already heard about Jones from my father, who had read that he was searching for the Temple Ark.

As a child, I immediately thought of Indiana Jones, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg’s swashbuckling treasure hunter from the 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark. Needless to say, I wasn’t the only one. The media liked to claim that Vendyl was the real-life inspiration for Indy. Vendyl himself was ambivalent about the comparison:

I cannot help that my name is Jones and that I happen to be looking for, among other things, the Ark. . . . Admittedly, I have enjoyed the notoriety that the film created … however I want to make it clear once and for all, that I have never stood up and declared, “I am the real Indiana Jones.”

Nonetheless, he was often introduced before lectures and interviews with the composer John Williams’s instantly recognizable signature march music from the film. According to the filmmakers, Indiana Jones got his first name from George Lucas’s dog and would have been called Indiana Smith if Spielberg hadn’t preferred Jones. In any case, Vendyl—bald, bespectacled, bearded, and often (but not always) fedora free—lacked the panache of Harrison Ford’s character and never had a bullwhip. Also, Vendyl, unlike Indy, wasn’t really searching for the Ark of the Covenant—at least not primarily—but for a jar containing the purifying ashes of a Red Heifer. The Temple Incense was an accidental bonus find.

Like Harrison Ford’s character, though, Vendyl Jones was larger than life, a self-mythologizer who really had done at least many of the things he claimed. He was born in 1930 in Sudan, Texas. In his autobiography, A Door of Hope: My Search for the Treasures of the Copper Scroll, he writes that his mother read the Bible to him in utero—from Genesis through the Apocrypha. When he was about nine years old, he encountered a tantalizing passage in 2 Maccabees describing how, after the destruction of the Temple, the Prophet Jeremiah hid the “Tabernacle, the Ark, and the Altar of incense” in a “chamber in a cave,” the location of which will remain “unknown until God gathers his people together again and shows them mercy” (2 Maccabees 2:1–8). Jones remembered telling his mother that he would find the hidden Temple vessels.

By the 1950s, he was a Baptist pastor in Tennessee. But he found himself increasingly troubled by the supersessionism of the New Testament, particularly the idea—as he once told a reporter—that “Christianity replaced Judaism” and “Jesus replaced God.” On “what authority,” he wondered, “did these people have to come along and change anything?”

He began to study the Bible with Orthodox rabbis, who eventually taught him about the Seven Noahide Laws, a rabbinic concept that obligates non-Jews to be monotheists and center their lives around the basic moral principles articulated in God’s covenant with Noah. Jones left Christianity behind, became a Noahide, and established an organization—later called the Vendyl Jones Research Institutes—to promote understanding between Christians and Jews. Today, he is credited by many of the Noahide movement’s adherents as its founding figure; studying with Jones, one woman said, was like “receiving the Torah from Sinai.” When Jones visited the Lubavitcher Rebbe at 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn in 1990, the Rebbe praised his efforts effusively. (Although Jones himself remained a Noahide throughout his life, two of his children converted to Judaism.)

In 1967, on the verge of the Six-Day War, Jones and his family moved to Israel so that Jones could continue his studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. When war broke out, Jones claimed that he served, somewhat accidentally, as a forward spotter; Time Magazine reported that his color blindness allowed him to see Jordanian camouflage positions that others could not, which assisted the Israeli Defense Forces in their march to capture Jerusalem’s Old City.

Now that Israel controlled Qumran and Jones had the cachet of being a minor military hero, he started looking for the cave with the Temple vessels from 2 Maccabees. He was guided on his quest by the Copper Scroll, which had been discovered in Qumran in 1952. The Copper Scroll is physically unique among the Dead Sea Scrolls: Sometime around the first century CE, it was hammered out of three copper sheets that when riveted together were nearly eight feet long. The words engraved in the copper purport to guide the reader to sixty, or perhaps sixty-four, different treasures hidden in the Judean Desert. When it was discovered, it was badly oxidized and could not be unrolled, so it was cut with a high-speed saw into twenty-three concave strips, making it hard to read or photograph. Moreover, many of the letters in the scroll’s unique Hebrew script are close to indistinguishable from one another, not to mention that the geographical references are obscure.

Jones was particularly interested in the scroll’s mention of a kalal, a word that the Mishnah twice uses to refer to a vessel holding ashes of a Red Heifer (Parah 3:3, 10:3). Among other things, these ashes purified the Temple priests who had come into contact with a dead body. Without the Red Heifer’s ashes, restoration of the sacrificial service in the Temple—for which many Jews pray daily and of which Jones also dreamed—is a nonstarter.

The Copper Scroll states that the kalal is buried in the “cave of the column with two openings facing east, at the northern opening.” By 1968, Jones believed he had located the Cave of the Column, which was near a wadi mentioned in the scroll called nahal kippa that could perhaps be translated as the “wadi of the dome.” The cave had two entrances and a dome-like structure of sand and gravel on the top. Jones was able to obtain an excavation license through Pessah Bar-Adon, an archaeologist operating in the Qumran area who had read about him in Time. Jones’s excavations began in 1977 and proceeded sporadically. In 1982, Shlomo Goren, the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, visited the dig site and said that Jones was “working for the good of Israel and the good of the Jewish people around the world.”

Bar-Adon died in 1985, so Jones teamed up with another licensed archaeologist named Joseph Patrich. In 1988, Jones and Patrich found a small jug of balsam oil in a nearby cave, which Jones maintained was the anointing oil used by the priests in the Temple. Jones was digging again in 1992, but because he and Patrich had severed ties due to a dispute, he was excavating without a supervising archaeologist or a license. This time, he dug at a cave to the north of the Cave of the Column based on a reading of the Copper Scroll urged by his second wife, Zahava Cohen. It was there that Jones’s group found the red material, which Antelman identified as the ketoret within days of its discovery. The team also claimed that they found salt chips and ash nearby, which they theorized were the Sodom salt and Karshina lye, two ingredients the Talmud says were mixed with the spices comprising the incense.

Although the IAA shut down Jones’s dig for lack of a permit, he sent the material he had found to Terry Hutter, a palynologist (someone who analyzes traces of pollens in organic remains) who wrote a report in 1994 claiming that he had detected the presence of nine of the eleven spices in the ketoret identified in the Talmud. Hutter wrote that when he processed the mixture, “The aroma was so intense that I could almost taste it,” and it remained “in evidence” in his lab, “if even so slightly, for approximately two months.”

Jones also sent samples to Yehuda Getz, Chief Rabbi of the Western Wall, and Ovadia Yosef, the former Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel and a prominent halakhic decisor. Both rabbis asked Jones to burn some of the material along with the purported Sodom salt and Karshina lye. Observers reported that “hair and clothing retained the aroma” of the sample and that the “fragrance lingered in the vicinity for several days following the experiment.”

IAA archaeologists and other experts, however, were unimpressed with Jones’s discovery, believing it to be “ordinary red dirt.” Jones is reported to have replied, “If that’s the case, I’ll just take it home and put it in my garden.” He and his volunteers weighed the material and packed it up in cardboard boxes used to harvest grapes.

The Israeli authorities were right to be skeptical. It’s hard to know exactly what Jones found in the Judean Desert, but as explained by Daniel C. Browning in a 1996 article in The Biblical Archaeologist, there are many reasons to doubt that it was ketoret. For starters, scholars debate whether the Copper Scroll is an inventory of real buried treasures or a work of fiction, and even if the scroll’s treasures are real, they are likely ordinary caches—mostly of silver and gold—belonging to the Dead Sea Sect, not Temple artifacts. A kalal, for that matter, is just a jar or urn; the word is not exclusively used to refer to a vessel containing Red Heifer ashes. Moreover, the grammatically preferable reading of the passage in the scroll about the kalal is that there is a book in the kalal, not ashes, and a silver nugget under the book. Likewise, the scroll makes no mention of the anointing oil or incense. And what would Temple artifacts be doing in Qumran anyway, which is more than twenty miles from Jerusalem?

Jones had an answer to this, but it was not one that would impress archaeologists or historians. He had found an intriguing mention of a luach nechoshet (copper scroll) listing Temple treasures in what was alleged to be a transcription of a lost ancient work called Masekhet Keilim, which is found in Emek Ha-Melekh, a seventeenth-century kabbalistic work by Naftali Hertz Bacharach. He went on to speculate that there was an ancient tunnel running from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea Valley through which Jeremiah and his colleagues transported the Temple’s treasures, inscribing the inventory on the Copper Scroll. Jacob Neusner, then a leading historian of Jewish late antiquity, was quoted in the press as calling Jones’s quest for the ashes “a wonderful, romantic idea and absolutely crackpot.”

What about the red substance that Jones found and the analyses of it conducted by Antelman and Hutter? Zohar Amar, a professor at Bar-Ilan University, calls both reports “research in the service of an idea.” For one, the identity of many of the spices in the ketoret mentioned in the Torah and in the Talmud are up for debate, so even if the presence of certain spices was definitively identified, it would not prove that the substance was ketoret. Amar theorizes that given some of the compounds present, Jones may instead have discovered an ancient soap-making factory. But Kenneth McMurtrey, another chemist who tested Jones’s find, concluded that it was ordinary soil, likely similar or identical to other soil samples from the region.

What’s more, Antelman, the original chemist, was, if anything, a more colorful and far less trustworthy character than Jones. In 1974, when living in Boston, he published To Eliminate the Opiate, a meandering chain of conspiracy theories tying together the seventeenth-century messianic pretender Shabbetai Tzvi, his ersatz quasi-successor Jacob Frank, the Illuminati, the Society of the Jacobins, Reform and Conservative Judaism, Marxists, Bundists, and others. As noted recently by Jay Michaelson, Antelman’s book is now read only by antisemitic conspiracy theorists, including Candace Owens. Two years later, as the self-appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Rabbinic Court of America, Antelman got together with four other rabbis and excommunicated Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (in absentia) for his support of Israeli land concessions to Palestinians. As Antelman wrote afterward, the cherem was read in Hebrew “in a traditional sing-song melancholy manner,” a shofar was blown, and “candles . . . symbolizing the illumination of Henry Kissinger’s soul were individually extinguished.” And this wasn’t the only excommunication performed by Antelman’s court. As for his work as a scientist—Antelman had a PhD in chemistry, after all—he also held a patent claiming that AIDS could be cured with a single injection of tetrasilver tetroxide, which might be better used as a swimming pool disinfectant.

Questing after biblical treasure is a perennial industry, and there is always a market for artifacts. Jones was not the first biblical treasure hunter to declare a dubious find, and he certainly won’t be the last. The sixteenth-century Dutch humanist Erasmus, satirizing the all-too-regular surfacing of wooden slivers of Jesus’s cross, wrote, “If all the fragments were gathered together, they would seem to be sufficient loading for a good large ship.” The late twentieth century alone witnessed a surge of sensational assertions by enterprising pseudoarchaeologists. One of them, Ron Wyatt, a nurse anesthetist who died in 1999, said he discovered Noah’s Ark, the place of the Red Sea crossing, Mount Sinai, and the Ark of the Covenant. Unfortunately, his camera failed when he tried to photograph the Ark of the Covenant, and, anyway, he claimed that the IAA instructed him that no evidence of the Ark could be made public. (What the IAA actually said was that Wyatt’s claims “fall into the category of trash which one finds in tabloids.”)

But there are genuine spiritual seekers too, and Jones, whose sincerity is hard to doubt, ought to be counted  among them. He hoped to find something so extraordinary that it would herald a new messianic age, which, he believed, was in any case coming soon. And there’s no question that people like Jones, as well as those less scrupulous, are drawn as if by a magnet to places where the Bible is a geographical reality. The Land of Israel is a locus for all kinds of adventurers eager to roll up their sleeves and dig in the dirt. And so, they come: scholars and dilettantes, pilgrims and grave robbers, visionaries and crackpots, seekers and opportunists—each hoping to leave their mark in the soil of the land where heaven meets earth.

In the years after the ketoret press conference, Jones kept on digging, or at least trying to. When he was forbidden from excavating archaeological sites, he used radar and thermal remote sensing technology instead. In 1995, he was north of Qumran performing geophysical surveys to discover the site of the ancient biblical city of Gilgal, from the time of Joshua, where the Bible says the Tabernacle stood for a time. In these years, he was also commuting between Texas and Israel. When he died in 2010, he was buried in the Holy Land to whose soil and people he was so devoted.

As for the boxes of the red stuff that Jones packed up, I’ve looked into their present whereabouts without success. I once heard a rabbi tell of a Havdalah service at Jones’s property in Texas where some of the incense was burned. He thought it smelled heavenly and found the experience intensely spiritual. But I suppose it’s a matter of perspective. A friend of mine recently told me that at his day school in Los Angeles, one teacher hosted a ketoret-burning demonstration every year, during which he tried to reassemble the spices based on talmudic sources. Afterward, my friend told me, the school stank for days.