Once again, the Ark refused to work for them during this unauthorized weaponization, and it was then captured by the Philistines. When Eli, the Israelite priest in charge, heard the news, he dropped dead with shock. The Philistines, in turn, hung on to it for only seven months, during which time it caused them nothing but trouble. They tried putting it into the temple of their god, Dagon, and found that the statue of Dagon kept breaking, falling in front of the Ark. Before they knew it, the Philistines were afflicted with plagues of boils, mice, and … er, hemorrhoids.
Keen to be able to sit comfortably again, the Philistines decided to return the Ark to the Israelites, though it first stopped off in Beth-shemesh, where 70 or so townsmen came to look at it and got struck dead. Eventually, however, it made it home, pulled by a couple of oxen, and was put in a Tabernacle at Kiriath-Jearim for 20 years, until the legendary King David came to be in charge.
David had it transferred to Zion, which would become Jerusalem, but on the way a guy tried to steady it when it toppled, and got zapped by it for his trouble. In the end, though, it was put in its permanent Tabernacle there. David wanted to build a new temple to hold it, but God talked him out of that, and so the people held their services at the Tabernacle, where they made sacrifices to the Ark, and were given out food in return.
The priests who worked with the Ark – the Levites – had to wear special gear to do so, and it was more like armour than anything else, with a special breastplate and a rope tied around their waists. This latter was so that if the Ark zapped them, their bodies could be pulled back out of the Tabernacle without risking anyone else’s life.
The Ark was still carried as a mix of standard and weapon by the Israelite army, but David took it with him when he legged it during a conspiracy against him. He then sent it back in the care of Zadok the priest. Zadok would later crown Solomon king, and, as a result, would later have the anthem written by Handel for British royal coronations named after him.
King Solomon, when not flirting with the Queen of Sheba, and getting mines erroneously named after him, had a prophetic dream in which God promised him wisdom and this prompted him to regularly worship at the Ark. He also had it placed in a special chamber, the Holy of Holies, in the temple he built. When the temple was dedicated and the Ark installed, the temple was filled with a cloud like the one Moses had stayed in on Mount Sinai.
For some reason Solomon decided that the presence of the Ark in the city made the entire city so holy that he couldn’t let his wife live there, and had to leave her in a house out in the countryside. At some point, however, the Ark was removed from the temple, as the later King Josiah puts it back there (in 2 Chronicles 35).
In 597 BC, the Babylonians invaded and trashed the Israelite kingdom. They ravaged Jerusalem, and looted Solomon’s Temple. What happened to the Ark from here on in depends on who you want to believe. According to the Greek version of the book of Ezra, the invaders ‘took all the holy vessels of the Lord, both great and small, and the Ark of God, and the king’s treasures, and carried them away into Babylon’. However, according to the Second Book of Maccabees, the prophet Jeremiah had been sent a vision by God that warned him to take the Tabernacle and the Ark to safety. Jeremiah, therefore, took the Ark to ‘the mountain from the top of which Moses saw God’s promised land’.
Once there, Jeremiah stashed the Ark, the Tabernacle tent and a few other bits and bobs in a cave, whose entrance he then blocked up. And that’s the point at which the Ark vanishes from Biblical scripture. Ordinarily you could say this is when it vanished from history, but outside of scripture it has never really appeared in any historical documentation.
Technically, there are two other references to the Ark later in the Bible, but the first (in Hebrews) is a back-reference to the Ark prior to its disappearance, and the other (in the book of Revelations) is a description of the Ark in Heaven, of which the Ark built by Moses was only a physical copy.
PREVIOUS SEARCHES IN FACT AND FICTION
Searching for the Ark of the Covenant actually began right at the time when Jeremiah hid it, circa 597 BC. According to the same Maccabees text, some of Jeremiah’s friends decided to put markers to show their own people where the Ark was hidden, so that it could be recovered safely once the Babylonian threat had gone. However, they couldn’t find the cave, and when they mentioned this to Jeremiah, he was annoyed with them and told them: ‘The place shall remain unknown until God finally gathers his people together and shows mercy to them. The Lord will bring these things to light again, and the glory of the Lord will appear with the cloud, as it was seen both in the time of Moses and when Solomon prayed that the shrine might be worthily consecrated.’
Needless to say, he didn’t bother to mention to them where he had put it, and none of them had had the sense to just follow him.
The Knights Templar are said to have searched for this, as well as other Biblical and historical artefacts, both on the Temple Mount and on Mount Sinai in the 12th century, and to have possibly brought it back to Paris, or Malta, or Warwickshire … This motivation for their activities, however, is ascribed by modern writers. The earliest Templar connection is in Louis Charpentier’s 1966 The Mysteries of Chartres Cathedral, in which Charpentier claimed the Templars brought the Ark back and buried it in a vault at Chartres.
The idea of the Ark being in Ethiopia first made its way to Europe in the 16th century, and first appeared in English thanks to James Bruce’s travels in search of the source of the Nile in the 18th century. An 1813 edition of his book contained the first partial English translation of the Kebra Nagast, which tells how the ancient king Menelik switched out the Ark for a fake, and brought it south to Ethiopia.
In 1798, however, an antiquarian called J. Salmon wrote in A Description of the Works of Art of Ancient and Modern Rome, Particularly In Architecture, Sculpture & Painting, Volume One, that the Ark had in fact been taken to Rome (probably in AD 70), and had been stored in the Basilica of St John Lateran, in Rome, but had been destroyed by a fire in the 14th century. (In fact it burnt to the ground twice in that century, in the Templar-quashing year of 1307, and again in 1361.) There’s a certain sense to this Regency theory, as the Romans did sack the Temple in AD 70, and there is an apparently Ark-like rectangular object being carried out of the Second Temple on the triumphal Arch of Titus. The Basilica in question wasn’t built until the 4th century, but the site had previously hosted the Emperor Constantine’s palace, and before that a Praetorian Cavalry unit. The main thing going against Salmon’s theory is that the image on the Arch of Titus has later been shown to be a different artefact, the shew-bread table, used for making offerings of bread as part of rituals in the Temple.
In 1899 a loose aggregation of what were called British Israelists got into the Ark-hunting business. These were a group, originating around 1870, who believed that all European peoples were descended from the Tribes of Israel, and that the British Royal Family, despite all the historical evidence, were direct descendants of the Biblical King David. Oddly, they didn’t rush off to the Middle East in search of the Ark, but decided instead to dig up the Hill of Tara, an Iron Age hill fort in Ireland. They poked around there unsuccessfully for the next three years, before the Irish Antiquities authorities managed to put a stop to them, but not before they had done considerable damage to the site. (In 1919 the Israelists would form an official group, which in turn founded the Ark-themed publisher, Covenant Press, in 1921.)
Later in the 1920s, there was a period of belief that the Ark had been found in Tutankhamen’s tomb, in the form of a perfectly preserved large rectangular box, carrying staves on either side. However, this proved to be a portable Anubis shrine, and is only half the size of the Ark’s dimensions.
Oddly, despite the Nazi attempts to locate the Holy Grail, and the plot of a certain Hollywood movie, the Nazis never did actually go looking for the Ark. The Ark’s imminent rise to popular fame would actually be mostly due to a completely different type of subject matter: the rise of
pseudoscience books promoting the ‘ancient astronaut’ theory, that ancient myths were actually tellings of how aliens had interacted with ancient civilizations. So, according to the likes of Brad Steiger, Erich von Däniken and other writers, artefacts like the Ark could have been examples of advanced technology, indistinguishable from magic.
In particular George Sassoon (son of the famous poet Siegfried) and Rodney Dale decided to cast the Ark of the Covenant as a nuclear-powered alien machine designed to feed the Israelites for 40 years, and went to the trouble of designing its workings and figuring out what the chemical composition of the magic food manna should have been. They originally published this as an article in the 1 April 1976 edition of New Scientist. Note the date. They then expanded it into a paperback called The Manna Machine in 1978.
That got the Ark noticed by Spielberg, which got it the position of Indiana Jones’s MacGuffin and launched the modern era of Ark hunting. Once Raiders of the Lost Ark brought it into the public consciousness, suddenly lots of people wanted to find it.
Hardly had the end credits rolled on Raiders than Ron Wyatt – former anaesthetist and Seventh-Day Adventist turned searcher for Noah’s Ark – claimed to have found the Ark of the Covenant. In 1982 he said that he had found a network of tunnels under the hill of Gethsemane, which were filled with items from Solomon’s Temple, including the Ark. He wasn’t however, able to provide any photographic proof or bring it out with him. He also claimed that Jesus’s blood had drained through a crack in the rock and onto the Ark.
In the late 1980s, British travel journalist Graham Hancock followed the trail of the Ark to Ethiopia, and wrote up his tale in The Sign and the Seal in 1992. Hancock’s theory is that the Ark went to Egypt first, then travelled down the Nile to Lake Tana and eventually went to Axum.
In 1998, Bob Cornuke, who had founded a group called the Biblical Archaeology Studies and Exploration Institute, also decided to embark on his own exploration of the Ethiopia link. Cornuke researched the story that priests of the time of Jeremiah took the Ark back to Egypt, a reversal of the Exodus, to keep it out of Babylonian hands. It spent a century on Elephantine Island (now sited on Lake Nasser, and home to an unfinished luxury hotel and a lot of crocodiles), and then was taken to Lake Tana Kirkos in Ethiopia. Cornuke found that the monks on Tana Kirkos still carried out the same rituals as priests of the Old Testament era, and was shown items used alongside the Ark. Cornuke was told by the Tana Kirkos monks that the Ark remained with them for 800 years, before being moved around AD 400 to the then capital, Aksum, when the Ethiopians became Christian.
Just to be really awkward, there’s a fourth variant of the Ark’s trek down into Africa, but this time further than Ethiopia. In the mid-2000s, writer and Professor of Modern Jewish History, Tudor Parfitt, heard about the tales of Lemba people of South Africa, whose folklore says they brought the Ark – known to them as the ‘Voice of God’ – south to the Dumghe Mountains, where they hid it in a cave. Intrigued, Parfitt decided to follow the trail, backed by a Channel 4 film crew from the UK. He followed the trail of the Ark from the temple mount to the Yemen, home of the Queen of Sheba. From the city of Sena in Yemen, Parfitt thinks it was ferried across to East Africa, and possibly to Great Zimbabwe, and wrote up his findings in a book, The Lost Ark of the Covenant.
Of course the Ark has become popular in fiction since the release of Raiders of the Lost Ark. It has made cameo appearances in two of the Indiana Jones sequels – The Last Crusade and Kingdom Of the Crystal Skull – as well as in series such as The Librarians, Warehouse 13 and even Da Vinci’s Demons, in which a replica prop is visible in the Vatican’s Secret Archives.
The Danish film Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar in 2005 has the treasure be the Ark, powered by static electricity. This isn’t as daft an idea as it sounds, as the presenters of Mythbusters found when they decided to see if the Ark, as described in the Bible, could give an electric shock if it was filled with a Bagdad Battery (a clay jug filled with acid, and an iron nail inside a copper cylinder as the terminals – a device found in the 1940s and suspected to have been used for electroplating in ancient times). They found that it could indeed give a nasty shock.
It’s also associated with the Nazi Ahnenerbe organization in Daniel Easterman’s 1985 novel, The Seventh Sanctuary, which places it in Saudi Arabia.
Over the past couple of decades, the Ark has also been the subject of various treasure and archaeology-themed documentary series, on both sides of the Atlantic, such as Mystery Investigator, Raiders of the Lost Past, and even Ancient Aliens, getting back to that Manna Machine April Fool theory.
THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE
Despite what Raiders of the Lost Ark tells us, the stones bearing the Ten Commandments in the Ark were not actually the original ones written by the finger of God, but replacements – albeit also inscribed by God – after Moses got annoyed and broke the originals. Bear this in mind, because the whole story of the Ark is a story of copies and duplicates, basically.
Actually, the Hebrew word translated as ‘Ark’ in ‘Ark of the Covenant’ really means closet or cupboard, but somehow Cupboard of the Covenant, or Raiders of the Lost Closet just don’t have the same ring.
More recent archaeological work in Israel has uncovered many smaller clay chests and boxes of varying style and size, but all designed to contain a stone piece with words of the Law of God on them, which could be accessed by a priest. In other words, every village at least, if not every house, would have one of these – several have been found in what were once gatehouses – and of course Jerusalem had the largest such closet, or Ark, in the kingdom, in the main temple.
There are two basic problems with the Ethiopian theory, both date-related. One problem is that the Kebra Nagast only dates from the 13th century, 1,800 years after the Ark was last mentioned by its original owners. The story is written so long after the events described that it’s talking about what has already passed into legend and myth.
Now, it’s true that the Kebra Nagast is inspired by earlier tales that existed before that, but only as far back as the 1st century AD, and that’s still centuries after the events. Then there’s the other date problem, which is that the version told in the Kebra Nagast is actually set around 950 BC – about 350 years before the Ark was threatened by the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem.
The Ethiopian story gets round the problem of the Ark still being in the Temple of Solomon after Menelik I supposedly took it to Ethiopia by saying that it was swapped out for a replica. Apparently the Ark’s owners didn’t notice that their superpowered weapon filled with the actual power of God that could strike people dead had been replaced by a regular wooden box.
As for the Lemba story, linking the Ark to southern Africa, their folklore says that the Voice Of God was a box of the same dimensions as the Ark, and could only be carried by priests, who must carry it by means of poles. Like the Ark, it was forbidden to touch the ground. The Voice of God was also said in Lemba folklore to be a weapon that could sweep aside enemy armies and unwary Lemba with heavenly fire – just like the Ark. The idea that the Ark was taken to Yemen does agree with some texts written by Arab converts to the then-new religion of Islam in the 8th century.
Interestingly, the Buba clan of the Lemba have a DNA marker which links them to the population of the Levant, which suggests some of their descendants did come from there. According to the Lemba, however, the Ark fell apart after its arrival in Zimbabwe and was replaced by a replica.
The replica, at least, really exists, and is stored in the Harare Museum of Human Science, having been discovered in the 1940s. It’s definitely not the original Ark, according to both Lemba tradition and radiocarbon dating, which dated it to 1350.
There is also the issue, which must be addressed at some point, of whether the Ark ever existed at all. There’s no real reason either to doubt or believe the Old Testament story – and there’s certainly archaeological evidence for a lot of other physical objects that are mentioned i
n there – such as the Solomon’s Temple, the great Menorah, the Shewbread table, etc. What there isn’t, where the Ark of the Covenant is concerned, is corroborating tales from other contemporary cultures.
You’d think that if the Israelites were carrying around a box that could deliver food, kill people with bolts of light, and knock down city walls, somebody else would have mentioned it. In particular, you’d think that the Philistines would have mentioned capturing it and hanging onto it for seven months. Nobody does mention it, however; not even in the context of being glad to get rid of it after it brought those plagues of hemorrhoids.
Scientifically, it has been proved that the Ark could have held and delivered an electrical charge, albeit of barely one volt. This is a far cry from being able to demolish cities, bring down plagues, and knock dozens of people dead at a stroke. It’s more than enough, however, to really impress worshippers and make them think they’ve been stung by the power of God. That said, the Bible doesn’t actually specify that it’s the power in the Ark that knocked down the walls of Jericho – it could have been the trumpets, or a group of sappers working at the back while all the defenders were watching the daily processions.
Of course, just because the technology makes this possible, doesn’t mean the original Ark was ever used as anything more than simply a ritual altar and to hold the Word of God in, inscribed on stone, just like all the other, smaller, arks. After all, the Romans had all the pieces of technology to make a gramophone, but simply never put them together that way.
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