The Scroll begins with the story of Miriam, a young Jewish woman who survived the last terrible moments at the killing grounds of Masada, and with only the scroll of her divorce and a few coins.After watching her mother die at Roman hands, she shepherds the last surviving children through the desert to the village of Tekoa. There, the inhabitants, who knew nothing but suffering from the uprising, reject her and the extremism they believe she represents. She leaves the children and heads for Jerusalem, where she is captured by the city's merciless Roman overlords and cast into the arena. But at the last moment she is ransomed, in keeping with Jewish custom, by Jacobides, a wealthy Alexandrian Jew. Hoping to find her first husband Joseph, she agrees to accompany Jacobides to Alexandria. There, Jacobides' son Menahem falls in love with Miriam. Seeing her as the opportunity to do exactly the opposite of what his father would have wished for him, the young man urges Miriam to allow him to accompany her back to her home in Judea. Losing hope of finding Joseph, Miriam marries Menahem and for 20 years, settles for nothing more than to forget all she had been through. But when their son Gabriel murders a Roman soldier and has to flee, Miriam's old life comes back to haunt her.Samuel, one of the children Miriam had left behind at Tekoa, finds her dying among Jerusalem's ruins He takes the scroll of her divorce, which she has so carefully kept all through the years as the only reminder of her past life. Samuel loves the rebel cause, and resolves to use Miriam's divorce document to spark a new rebellion against Rome. He seeks out Gabriel's daughter Rebecca who – like her grandfather Menahem – rejects her privileged position for a dangerous fascination with the rebel life. She is the perfect "sleeper agent."Rebecca is sent to the oasis city of Ein Gedi, where she lives a quiet life, until the day the signal comes for her to act. The townspeople take shelter in nearby caves, believing Jewish freedom-fighters will come to their rescue. But, but in the end, everyone dies of starvation. Everyone, that is, but the baby girl to whom Rebecca gave birth in the cave. The baby is rescued by a 14-year-old girl named Judith. Pledging to see the baby live, she climbs up from the Dead Sea, out of the abyss, to the high mountains and a new life.
