The Talpiot Find

by John Evan Garvey

Prepare to think.

The Talpiot Find challenges and entertains the reader with its offbeat approach to the familiar archaeological-find-rewrites-history theme. Readers will confront the Big Questions in a no-big-deal atmosphere and will find themselves musing more than once "I never thought of it that way before." While following the thought-journey of a very likable protagonist with a bias for humor and irony, readers will explore whether their own world-view is based on a need for comfort and feeling useful, or on a desire for everything to make sense.

Grad-student Marc isn't hoping for a spectacular archaeological discovery to catapult his career right from the start. He just wants to graduate. His assignment on this dig site in the Talpiot district of Jerusalem, near the alleged Jesus ossuary tomb, hardly seems likely to produce anything of note, much less spectacular. An ancient garbage pit had been discovered the previous summer while the dig team excavated a twelfth-century well. Marc is now down in the well methodically uncovering unexceptional pottery sherds and animal bones left over from meals consumed twenty-six centuries ago. But then he finds a human skeleton. When the human bones turn out to be as old as the rubbish around them, the archaeologists wonder if the person, apparently dumped into the pit, was a murder victim. And then Marc finds clay tablets, right next to the skeleton, carbon-dated to the same time frame as the skeleton and the surrounding trash. The tablets turn out to be sort of a spectacular find, a portion of Torah written in ancient Hebrew Canaanite, seventh century BCE. Are they related at all to the skeleton, and the murder? Or is their location just coincidental? What are the tablets doing in a garbage pit? Bearing the tetragrammaton, they should have been placed in a genizah. Why were they discarded? In a garbage pit? Near a corpse? Of a murder victim?

A subplot set in ancient Jerusalem during the reign of King Josiah follows a slave manager as he completes tasks given him by Shaphan, the head scribe of the Temple, concerning a mysterious scroll that he must bury and an odd set of clay tablets that he, inexplicably, must discard in a garbage pit.

219 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 11, 2011

About the author

John Evan Garvey is an artisanal publisher who loves the whole process of researching and writing a book, typesetting it with unique touches, designing the covers, and creating promotional materials like video trailers, webpages and ads. It's an artistic process that blends visual arts with creative writing and social-media technology to create a something, a gestaltic virtual 'thing' that traditional publishing can't quite match because traditional publishers leave the artisan's soul out of the corporate process. Each book he creates is a canvas, a sculpture, he's painstakingly worked into its final form.

John, currently living in Burbank, California, is originally from southern New Jersey, a small town named Vineland after the Norse Vikings' name for North America, Vinland, and where the grape-juice company, Welch's, was founded in 1869. His upbringing was conservative evangelical, and his educational background reflects that. In his early 30s, he stepped outside of faith, creating a rift between himself and his family and friends, which is still in place. It's because of this dramatic change in world-view and the resultant separation from his extended family that John's writing so often probes the nature of faith and the unfamiliar realm of non-faith. He has a desire to share what he's learned and to continue learning about the mystifying realms of particle physics and the cosmos.