The Sign and the Seal

by Graham Hancock

  On this basis I felt that it was entirely safe to conclude that I would have to peer back into the period before 626 BC if I was to have any prospect of establishing the actual date on which the Ark had disappeared. Moreover I did not think that it would be at all fruitful to devote time to a close study of the earlier years of King Josiah’s reign – i.e. from 626 BC back to 640 BC. As I already knew, that monarch had sought unsuccessfully to have the relic reinstalled in the Temple in 622 BC; it was therefore hardly likely that he would have been responsible for its removal in the first place. The guilty party must have been one of his predecessors – any one, in fact, of the fifteen kings who had ruled in Jerusalem since Solomon had placed the Ark in the Holy of Holies in 955 BC.27

  Search and find

  I was looking at a period of 315 years – from 955 BC down to Josiah’s accession to the throne in 640 BC. In this time Jerusalem and the Temple had been at the centre of an enormously complex series of events. And although these events were described at great length in several books of the Bible, the Ark of the Covenant had not been mentioned once: between Solomon and Josiah, as I had previously established, the sacred relic had been enshrouded in a thick blanket of silence.

  I resorted to a modern research tool to find out just how thick that ancient blanket really was. On the desk in my hotel room in Jerusalem was a computerized edition of the King James Authorized Version of the Bible that I had brought with me from England.28 For the period that I was now interested in I knew that it would be useless to run a search-and-find programme on the words ‘Ark’ or ‘Ark of the Covenant’ or ‘Ark of God’ or ‘Holy Ark’ or any similar epithets: they simply did not appear. I did, however, have one other option, and that was to look for phrases that had been regularly associated with the Ark earlier in the Scriptures, and also for reports of afflictions of the type routinely caused by the Ark.

  In the realm of afflictions I settled on the word ‘leprous’, because, in Chapter 12 of the book of Numbers Moses had punished Miriam for criticizing his authority by using the powers of the Ark to make her ‘leprous’.29 In the realm of phrases I chose ‘between the cherubims’, because the God of Israel had been believed to dwell ‘between the cherubims’ mounted on the Ark’s golden lid and because, prior to the reign of Solomon, this formula had always been used in connection with the Ark and never in any other way.30

  I started by running the word ‘leprous’. My electronic Bible of course picked it up in Chapter 12 of the book of Numbers, which described what happened to Miriam. After that it occurred only twice more in the whole of the Scriptures: in the second book of Kings, where there was a plainly irrelevant reference to ‘four leprous men’ sitting by a gate in the northern Israelite city of Samaria;31 and in the second book of Chronicles – where it cropped up in a passage that looked very relevant indeed.

  That passage, in 2 Chronicles 26, described how King Uzziah – who had ruled Jerusalem from 781 to 740 BC32 – ‘transgressed against the Lord his God, and went into the Temple of the Lord to burn incense upon the altar of incense.’33 At once the High Priest Azariah and some of his assistants rushed in after the monarch hoping to dissuade him from committing this act of sacrilege at the very entrance to the Holy of Holies:

  Then Uzziah was wroth, and had a censer in his hand to burn incense: and while he was wroth with the priests, the leprosy even rose up in his forehead before the priests in the house of the Lord, from beside the incense altar.34

  It seemed that Uzziah had not actually entered the Holy of Holies (although the text was somewhat ambiguous on this point), but he had certainly stood very close to it. Moreover he had been holding a metal incense burner in his hand – and that, since the two sons of Aaron had been struck down at the foot of Mount Sinai for offering ‘strange fire before the Lord’,35 had always been a dangerous thing to do within striking distance of the Ark.36

  On this basis, therefore, I felt that there was at least a prima facie case for concluding that the ‘leprous’ sores on Uzziah’s forehead had been caused by exposure to the Ark (and I was later to discover that others had thought so too – an illustration from an eighteenth-century English Bible reproduced in the present work clearly shows the unfortunate king standing beside the Ark at the very moment that he is ‘smitten’).

  If the monarch’s affliction was caused by the Ark [I wrote in my notebook] then this means that it was still present in the Holy of Holies in 740 BC (Uzziah’s reign ended in that year as a result of what had happened to him37). This narrows the field enormously, since the implication is that the relic could only have been removed in the century between that date and the beginning of Josiah’s reign – i.e. at some point between 740 BC and 640 BC.

  Of course I was well aware that the Uzziah incident had little value as historical evidence: it was a tantalizing hint – a clue if you like – but it was quite impermissible to conclude from it that the Ark had definitely still been in the Temple in 740 BC. I needed something stronger if I was to be satisfied that that had indeed been the case – and I found what I was looking for when I ran a search for the phrase ‘between the cherubims’.

  As noted above, in biblical passages referring to the period before the reign of Solomon, these words had been used exclusively in connection with the Ark, and in no other way whatsoever. Although it would be necessary to keep a close eye on the context, I therefore felt that any recurrence of these words after the deposition of the relic in the Temple in 955 BC would constitute strong evidence that it had in fact still been present in the Holy of Holies on the date – or dates – that the phrase had been used.

  Accordingly I programmed my computer to search for the words ‘between the cherubims’. A few seconds later I knew that they had been cited only seven times in the entire post-Solomonic period.

  Two of these citations, in Psalm 80:1 and in Psalm 99:1, clearly referred to the cherubim of the Ark. Unfortunately they were impossible to date with any degree of accuracy:38 there was a small chance that they were pre-Solomonic, but the balance of scholarly opinion held that the relevant verses were likely to have been composed in the ‘early years of monarchy’39 – i.e. during Solomon’s lifetime or within a century or so of his death.

  The words ‘between the cherubims’ also cropped up three times in the book of Ezekiel,40 which was a late work written after the year 593 BC.41 In this context, however, all the uses of the phrase were irrelevant to my investigation because: (a) the ‘cherubims’ referred to had been seen by Ezekiel in a vision that came to him while he sat in his house;42 (b) they were described as having ‘four faces’ and ‘four wings’ each, whereas the cherubim of the Ark had each only one face and two wings;43 and (c) they were clearly living creatures of enormous size, not the relatively compact figurines of solid gold that had faced each other across the ‘mercy seat’.44 Indeed, at the end of Ezekiel’s vision, his cherubims ‘lifted up their wings and mounted up from the earth in my sight … and the sound of the cherubims’ wings was … even … as the voice of the Almighty God when he speaketh.’45

  In my hunt for references that might prove the continued presence of the Ark in the Jerusalem Temple at particular periods, therefore, Ezekiel’s cherubims were of no consequence and could safely be ignored. This meant that out of all the occurrences of the phrase that I had instructed my computer to search for I was now left with only two that might be of any help to me at all. These appeared in Chapter 37 of the book of Isaiah and in Chapter 19 of the second book of Kings.46 Both recounted the same event, both were of great importance, and both clearly and unambiguously referred to the Ark of the Covenant – though they did not mention it by name. This is what they said (the Isaiah version, the older of the two, is in the left-hand column; the Kings version is in the right-hand column):

  Hezekiah went up unto the house of the Lord, and … prayed unto the Lord, saying, O Lord of Hosts, God of Israel, that dwellest between the cherubims, thou art the God, even thou alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth.47
Hezekiah went up into the house of the Lord, and … prayed before the Lord, and said, O Lord God of Israel, which dwellest between the cherubims, thou art the God, even thou alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth.48

  As the reader will no doubt have observed, both passages not only spoke of the same event but also did so in almost exactly the same language. Indeed the verses in Kings came very close to being a verbatim repeat of the verses in Isaiah. Those verses, scholars were agreed, had been written by Isaiah himself.49 And, since a great deal was known about the life, times and activities of this famous prophet, it was possible to put a fairly precise date on his account of Hezekiah’s prayer to the God of Israel that dwelled ‘between the cherubims’.

  Isaiah was called to the prophetic office in 740 BC50 – the very year in which King Uzziah had died after being smitten with leprous sores in the incident described earlier.51 He then continued his ministry throughout the reigns of Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah (respectively 740–736 BC, 736–716 BC and 716-687 BC).52 Of crucial significance to my investigation was a fact upon which academic opinion was unanimous: the verse in which my computer had flagged the phrase ‘between the cherubims’ had been written by Isaiah in 701 BC – the year in which the Assyrian King Sennacherib had tried and failed to capture Jerusalem.53

  Indeed, it had been on Isaiah’s direct advice that Hezekiah – the Judaean monarch – had refused to surrender the city to the Assyrians.54 Sennacherib’s response had been to send a letter threatening death and destruction, and Hezekiah had actually been carrying this letter55 when he had gone up ‘unto the house of the Lord, and … prayed unto the Lord, saying, O Lord of Hosts, God of Israel, that dwellest between the cherubims, thou art the God, even thou alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth.’

  Hezekiah’s prayer had continued as follows:

  Incline thine ear, O Lord, and hear; open thine eyes, O Lord, and see: and hear all the words of Sennacherib, which hath sent to reproach the living God. Of a truth, Lord, the kings of Assyria have laid waste all the nations and their countries.… Now therefore, O Lord our God, save us from his hand, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that thou art the Lord, even thou only.56

  Miraculously, the Lord complied. First he sent his prophet Isaiah to Hezekiah with this message:

  Thus saith the Lord concerning the king of Assyria, He shall not come into this city, nor shoot an arrow there, nor come before it with shields, nor cast a bank against it … For I will defend this city to save it for mine own sake.57

  Yahweh was as good as his word. That very night

  The angel of the Lord went forth, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians a hundred and fourscore and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses. So Sennacherib king of Assyria departed.58

  There could be no doubt about the historicity of these events: the Assyrians had surrounded Jerusalem in 701 BC and they had suddenly lifted their siege and fled.59 Scholars believed that this had happened because they had been afflicted by an outbreak of bubonic plague.60 Strangely, however, there was no evidence that anyone in Jerusalem itself had gone on to contract this easily transmissible disease. In the context of everything that I had learned hitherto, therefore, I could not help but wonder whether the Ark of the Covenant might not in some way have been involved in Sennacherib’s undoing. The mass slaughter that had taken place did sound very much like the sort of ‘miracle’ that, in earlier times, the relic had so frequently performed.61

  But this was only an intuition, a hunch of my own. It had no status whatsoever as evidence of the continued presence of the Ark in the Temple in 701 BC. What did have that status was Isaiah’s pure and eloquent testimony that King Hezekiah had prayed for his deliverance to the ‘God of Israel, that dwellest between the cherubims’. The monarch uttered this prayer inside the Temple.62 Moreover the full text of the first verse of the passage containing this citation not only stated that he had carried Sennacherib’s threatening letter with him – as noted above – but also added that he had ‘spread it before the Lord’.63 In just such a fashion, though in an earlier era, ‘Solomon … came to Jerusalem and stood before the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord … and offered peace offerings.’64 In just such a fashion, though in an earlier era, ‘David and all the house of Israel played before the Lord on all manner of instruments made of fir wood, even on harps, and psalteries, and on timbrels, and on cornets, and on cymbals.’65 And in just such a fashion, though in an earlier era, ‘the Lord separated the tribe of Levi, to bear the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord, to stand before the Lord to minister unto him, and to bless his name.’66

  To cut a long and convoluted story very short indeed, the fact that Hezekiah had spread Sennacherib’s letter out ‘before the Lord’, and then had prayed to the ‘God of Israel, that dwellest between the cherubims’ made it quite certain that the Ark of the Covenant had been in the Holy of Holies at that time. There was no other way in which this passage could be interpreted. And because it did so effectively prove the continued presence of the relic within the Temple long after the reign of Solomon it also dealt a fatal blow to the Kebra Nagast’s claim that the Ark had been stolen by Menelik while Solomon was still alive.

  I was not sure whether I should rejoice over this discovery or whether I should lament it. I always find it slightly depressing when a beautiful myth is discredited. And although I still hoped to vindicate the central contention of the Kebra Nagast – namely that the Ark had indeed gone to Ethiopia (although of course not by the hand of Menelik) – I had absolutely no idea how I was going to do this.

  Rather dispiritedly, therefore, I turned back to the piles of research papers and books spread out all around me in my hotel room in Jerusalem. The good news, I supposed, was that my investigation had come a long way. I had satisfied myself that the Ark had not been removed from the Temple either during or after the reign of King Josiah, which had begun in 640 BC. Moreover it was now clear that it had still been in its place in the Holy of Holies in 701 BC, the date of Hezekiah’s prayer. This left just sixty-one years in which it could have disappeared, and even that period could be narrowed down somewhat. Why? Because it seemed obvious that Hezekiah himself would not have allowed the sacred relic – before which he had prayed so efficaciously – to be carried off by anyone.

  Hezekiah had died in 687 BC and Josiah had taken the throne in 640 BC. Between them there were only two monarchs – Manasseh (687–642 BC) and Amon (642–640 BC).67 It followed that the loss of the Ark must have occurred during the reigns of one or other of these two kings.

  The sin of Manasseh

  As I immersed myself in the biblical texts once again it quickly became apparent that the guilty party could only have been Manasseh, who was castigated unmercifully by the scribes because:

  He did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord, after the abominations of the heathen … For he … reared up altars for Baal … and worshipped all the host of heaven, and served them. And he built altars in the house of the Lord … for all the host of heaven … And he made his son pass through the fire, and … used enchantments, and dealt with familiar spirits and wizards: he wrought much wickedness in the sight of the Lord to provoke him to anger … And he set a graven image of the grove that he had made in the house, of which the Lord said to David and to Solomon his son, In this house, and in Jerusalem, which I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel, will I put my name for ever.68

  What was this ‘graven image of the grove’ that Manasseh had made? And where exactly in the Temple had he put it?

  To find an answer to the first question I temporarily abandoned the King James Authorized Version of the Bible (from which the above quotation is taken) and turned to the more modern Jerusalem Bible which informed me that the ‘graven image of the grove’ was in fact a ‘carved image of Asherah’, an arboreal pagan deity.69 The answer to the second question was self-evident: the ‘house’ in which Yahweh had said that he would put his ‘name for ever’ was
the Holy of Holies of the Temple – the debir, the dense golden cell that Solomon had ‘designed … to contain the Ark of the Covenant of Yahweh.’70

  The implications of what I had just learnt were enormous. Manasseh, who had done ‘that which was evil in the sight of the Lord’, had introduced an idol into the Holy of Holies of the Temple. In taking this momentous step backwards towards paganism it was inconceivable that he could have allowed the Ark of the Covenant to remain in its place – since the Ark was the sign and the seal of Yahweh’s presence on earth and the ultimate symbol of the fiercely monotheistic Judaic faith. At the same time it was improbable that the apostatizing king would actually have destroyed the sacred relic: on the contrary, with his predilection for enchantments and wizardry, he would have regarded that as a most unwise thing to do. The most likely scenario, therefore, was that he would have ordered the Levites to remove the Ark from the Temple before he installed his ‘Asherah’ in the inner sanctum. And this would have been an order that they would have been more than happy to comply with: as faithful servants of Yahweh they would have done anything within their power to avoid the pollution of the object that they regarded as the ‘footstool’ of their God71 – and they could hardly have imagined any worse pollution than for it to have to share the Holy of Holies with the graven image of some alien deity. As priests they would not have been in a position to prevail militarily against a powerful monarch like Manasseh; their best course of action would have been to bow to the inevitable and to carry the Ark away to a place of safety.

  There were even indications in the Bible that the relic’s enforced departure from the Temple might have resulted in some kind of mass public protest against the king – a protest that he had ruthlessly suppressed. This was only guesswork on my part, of course, but such a hypothesis did help to explain why Manasseh was said to have ‘shed innocent blood … in such great quantity that he flooded Jerusalem from end to end.’72