The Key Quest Continues

The greatest quest, of course, is to figure out what Dan Brown will make of the title, The Solomon Key. In Secrets of the Widow’s Son, I surely tried to exhaust all the possibilities of what this could mean.

But it’s like so many other things: the minute you think they’re settled, they are back in chaos. I now have a new, very plausible idea of what a “Solomon Key” might be.

It started when I went to a local book sale where most books are $1 or 50 cents. For that price, I was willing to try out a book called The Jewish Caravan, edited by L.W. Schwartz. It’s an interesting collection of Jewish writing from all ages. I opened it almost at random to read a passage written by Flavius Josephus.

I had read about Josephus, but had not read his own words. He was a native of Jerusalem who rose to prominence in the priestly class of Pharisees and was in a position of influence when the Romans sacked Jerusalem in 70 AD, destroying the (second) Temple of Solomon.

I won’t go into the details, but I realized right away that there is nothing like reading Josephus himself rather than relying on second-hand accounts. So I began to Google in search of his actual works. I found some, but one Google led to another, until I got to this page:

http://www.ldolphin.org/destruct2.html

where, well down in the text, it says:

A Temple Legend

“Flavius Josephus also recorded a legend that sprung up about the Temple. While the Temple was on fire and there was tremendous looting, killing and rape many rushed to the Temple to die rather than become Roman slaves. When the flames leaped through the roof and the smoke had risen in thick columns one of the priests supposedly climbed to the top of the main tower. He had in his hand the key to the sanctuary. When he reached the top he cried out, ‘If you, Lord, no longer judge us to be worthy to administer Your house, take back the key until You deem us worthy again.’ As the legend goes, a hand appeared from heaven and took the key from the priest.”

Ohmygosh, ohmygosh!

This isn’t exactly “Solomon’s Key,” but it is a key to the inner sanctum of the Temple of Solomon, and it also represents the compact of the Jews with God. Could this be what Dan Brown was thinking of when he picked the title for his next book? Suppose, symbolically or even literally, that he is going to talk about the key to the Holy of Holies?

What you find when you get one of these revelations is, they turn your receptors on and then you begin to notice other things that you would have ignored. So, there I was, flipping cable channels a few nights later, when I stumbled across the last flickering 20 minutes of a movie called Pi. Later on, it came around again and I taped it. It is a 1998 film directed by Darren Aronofsky. It is notable for having been produced for only $60,000 and grossing $3 million at the box office.

Pi is a strange black-and-white arty film that portrays a paranoid computer geek, Max Cohen, whose homebuilt supercomputer, Euclid, is asked to investigate patterns in the irrational number pi. Pi can be calculated for thousands of digits beyond 3.14159 . . . and no one knows what will be found as larger, faster computers keep pushing the digits farther out.

The study of pi can lead to other things in math. Max gets interested in exactly the kind of thing a Da Vinci Code fan would be familiar with, such as the Golden Ratio, Phi, as well as the various geometrics of it, such as the famous spirals found in nature (e.g., a nautilus shell). Max even does some drawing that relates the spiral to the famous Vitruvian Man, as drawn by good ole’ Leonardo Da Vinci. (This is a little bogus, but just keep chanting the Dan Brown mantra: It’s A Work Of Fiction, After All.)

Well, Euclid melts down, but spits out a 216-digit sequence of numbers. Two groups dog Max, trying to tap his brain. One is a bunch of evil corporate people who see the code as a way to predict the stock market. The other is a sect of Hasidic Jews who believe the code is a sacred name of God. This comes from the fact that the Hebrew characters can also be taken as numbers, so that the Torah becomes a massive numeric code unto itself.

As the Rabbi explains when trying to get Max to give up the code, the Jews had a long tradition where, on the holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur, the high priest would enter the Holiest of Holies and intone just one word, the 216-digit code. If the priest was pure in heart and recited it correctly, he emerged. If not, he died on the spot. The Rabbi again relates the story of the destruction of the Temple by the Romans, and the priest giving up the key to God as the Temple burned.

“We have been looking for that key ever since,” says the Rabbi. “It’s the key to the Messianic age. It can take us one step closer to the Garden of Eden.”

Remembering that Dan Brown has already established in Da Vinci Code the notion of a bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, personified currently by Sophie Neveu, then a key to the sacred DNA may be what is in the offing. But, ideas of that nature have been circulating for years in novels, so Dan Brown will have to tread carefully.

Or does anyone else care to give conjecture a try?