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familiar with this camera . . .”
    “I own one. Keep talking.”
    “So, I looked at the photos and the earth around the stone did not appear to be disturbed at all . . . and usually you can tell. Or, at least, the diggers can. Old compacted dirt is different than new compacted dirt. So it appears to be very real.”
    “The people I talked to at the dig . . . What’s a
tel
? She said she was at a
tel
.”
    “It’s a hill, a mound, that covers the site of an ancient city.”
    “Okay. The people working on this
tel
said that there are several people there who can read Egyptian hieroglyphics, and they had a hieroglyphics dictionary, too, and that they’re pretty sure it’s about some guy called Semen and about Solomon—”
    “It’s not semen. Semen is—”
    “I know what semen is. Just tell me.”
    —
    S O , SHE TOLD HIM .
    “There was a pharaoh named Siamun. Not semen. He became pharaoh around 986 BCE, which was about the middle of the reign of King David,” Yael said. “That’s according to the traditional dates. He overlapped with King Solomon, who was David’s sole surviving heir . . . after he finished killing off David’s other sons, anyway. If you believe the Bible.”
    “Do you believe in it? The Bible?”
    She shrugged. “Some parts of the histories, yes. Most of it is foundation myths, tall tales, and literature. Do you believe in Moby Dick?”
    “
Moby Dick
is a novel, not a history,” Virgil said.
    “Do you believe in the details about whaling ships and whaling boats and all that? All the detail in the novel?”
    “Some of it, I guess. Yeah, most of it.”
    “That’s the Bible,” Yael said. “I believe some of it.”
    “So . . . what does the stele have to do with this?” Virgil asked.
    “It’s a triumphal stele, that may have been in secondary use—”
    “What does that mean?”
    “It means that it might have been brought from somewhere else, thousands of years ago. It was originally a pillar, then got thrown down and broken up, and finally might have been used as a foundation stone or a cutting block or something, by people who didn’t know what it was,” she said. “This
tel
is only about five klicks east of Beth Shean, which was an Egyptian administrative city, off and on, over the centuries. Anyway, there is an inscription on it. . . .”
    The inscription, Yael said, was in two languages: an extremely primitive form of Hebrew, and in hieroglyphics.
    “The problem is, mmm, Hebrew is a more or less phonetic language, but in the very earliest versions, there are some unfamiliar letters that are not yet fully evolved, and perhaps the phonics, the
sounds
made by the individual letters, had not yet completely solidified.”
    “Okay . . .”
    “Okay . . . so the stele seems to describe a routine victory by Siamun, over a not-very-big city. We don’t know which one. That part of the stone is missing.”
    “So what?”
    “So . . . the Hebrew version, on the other side of the stele, seems to describe exactly the same victory, in very much the same words, but this time, the victory is ascribed to Solomon.”
    Virgil thought about that for a moment, then said, “I don’t know what that means, either.”
    “Well, there are a lot of odd things about Solomon,” Yael said. Then: “That police officer wants you.”
    Virgil looked up at Jones’s house, where one of the cops beckoned to him. He leaned past Yael and called, “Give me two minutes.”
    The cop waved and went back inside.
    —
    V IRGIL SAID to Yael, “Keep going.”
    “If you read the Bible closely, and if the Bible is correct, you realize that David was not a rich and powerful king. He ran a small kingdom—in the beginning, you could walk from one end of it to the other in a single day, and it was mostly rural and poor. It got much larger during his reign, but never particularly rich. It was almost like David was the leader of a motorcycle gang, instead of a real king.”
    Virgil