Image: Water from the Gihon Spring flowing through Jerusalem’s Siloam Tunnel: Did the term “gold” in the Copper Scroll designate clear, high-quality water? In the modern cultural background, one may also hear an echo of the phrase “Jerusalem of gold, of copper, and of light.” Source: Wikipedia.

From “Waters of Gold” to a Water Registry: The Linguistic Sources of the Copper Scroll

The use of “gold” as a metaphor for exceptional quality, purity, and supreme value is familiar in modern Hebrew expressions such as “the golden age,” “golden hands,” and “a person of gold.” Yet the roots of this usage are far older, appearing already in the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature.

The hydraulic interpretation of the Copper Scroll—which views the text as a survey of water installations and regional infrastructure—sometimes encounters the objection that interpreting “gold” and “silver” as classifications of water is an artificial modern allegory. The ancient sources do not prove by themselves that these words carried a technical meaning in the Scroll. They do show, however, that using the names of metals to express different degrees of quality, purity, and value was natural and deeply rooted in the linguistic world in which the Scroll was composed.

In the Hebrew Bible,........

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