Ark of the Covenant

• 1. A Chest Nobody Can Find

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  The Ark of the Covenant is also called the Ark of the Testimony and the Ark of God. It was a gilded wooden chest, and the Israelites held it to be the most sacred object they possessed. Yet no one today can say where it is. A church, a tribe, and several groups of treasure hunters on different continents have each pointed somewhere else, and no verified evidence settles the matter.

  That gap between reverence and whereabouts drives this documentary. What was inside the chest, and why did it matter so much? Why did the Israelites carry it into battle, and what happened on the day they lost it? How do archaeologists and biblical scholars explain where the idea of such an object came from? And how did one chest come to be honored by Jews, Samaritans, Christians and Muslims, and to carry spiritual meaning in the Baháʼí Faith, while also starring in modern adventure films?

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• 2. Built at Sinai

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  Forty days on Mount Sinai gave Moses more than stone tablets. According to the Book of Exodus, God also showed him the pattern for the tabernacle and its furnishings, including a chest of shittim wood, which is another name for acacia. The biblical account places the work about a year after the exodus from Egypt, while the people were camped at the foot of the mountain. Moses handed the job to two craftsmen, Bezalel and Oholiab.

  Exodus is precise about the result. The chest was to measure two and a half cubits long and one and a half cubits wide and high, roughly 131 by 79 by 79 centimetres. Gold covered it entirely, and a gold molding ran around its edge. Four gold rings sat at the corners, holding acacia poles that were also overlaid with gold. A decorated lid called the Seat of Mercy sat on top. God was said to speak with Moses from between the two cherubim on that cover.

  Inside lay the Tablets of the Law, which Exodus and the First Book of Kings identify as the Ten Commandments. Exodus, Numbers and the Epistle to the Hebrews add two more items, Aaron's rod and a pot of manna.

  Moving the Ark was a specialized duty. The Kohathites, one of the Levite houses described in the Book of Numbers, were responsible for the most holy things in the tabernacle. When the camp set out, they entered with Aaron and draped the Ark in the screening curtain. Over that they laid fine leather, and over the leather they spread a cloth of solid blue. The poles, once placed in their rings, were never to be taken out.

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• 3. Carried Into Battle

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  About 2,000 cubits, or 800 metres, separated the Ark from the marching Israelites, because the Levites carried it out in front. For 40 years of desert wandering it traveled that way, and at each camp it rested in the tent of meeting inside the Tabernacle. When Joshua led the people to the banks of the River Jordan, the Ark went first, and its movement signaled the advance. The river ran dry the moment the feet of the priests carrying it touched the water. It stayed dry until the priests and the Ark had climbed out again and everyone had crossed. Twelve stones were taken from the spot where the priests stood, as memorials.

  At Jericho the procedure was stranger still. Armed men and seven priests with seven rams' horn trumpets led the Ark around the city once a day for six days. On the seventh day they circled seven times. Then came a great shout, and the wall fell down flat, and the people took the city. After a defeat at Ai, Joshua lamented in front of the Ark. Later he read the Law between Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal while the people stood on either side of it.

  Shiloh became the Ark's home once the conquest of Canaan was finished. It also appears at Bethel under the care of Phinehas, a grandson of Aaron, where the Israelites consulted it before attacking the Benjaminites at the Battle of Gibeah. Back at Shiloh it was looked after by Hophni and Phinehas, two sons of the priest Eli.

  At Eben-Ezer, the Philistines had already beaten Israel when the elders decided to bring the Ark to the next battle. The result was a heavier defeat, with 30,000 men lost, the deaths of Hophni and Phinehas, and the capture of the Ark. A messenger reached Shiloh with his clothes torn and earth on his head. Eli fell dead on hearing the news. His daughter-in-law, in labor at that moment, named her son Ichabod, explained as meaning that the glory had departed Israel. She died at his birth.

  In Ashdod the Philistines placed the Ark in the temple of Dagon. The next morning the idol lay face down before it. Set upright again, Dagon was found the following morning bowed over once more and broken. The people of Ashdod were struck with tumors, and a plague of rodents spread over the land, which may have been bubonic plague. The tumors followed the Ark to Gath and then to Ekron.

  After seven months, the Philistines took their diviners' advice and sent the Ark back with an offering of golden images of the tumors and the mice. It came to the field of Joshua of Beit Shemesh, where the people made sacrifices. Then curiosity cost them. According to 1 Samuel 6, seventy people who gazed at the Ark were struck down, though some translations give fifty thousand and seventy. The men of Beit Shemesh asked Kiriath-Jearim to take it away. It went to the house of Abinadab, whose son Eleazar was sanctified to guard it, and it stayed there for twenty years.

  Under Saul, the Ark was with the army before his first meeting with the Philistines, but the king was too impatient to consult it. First Chronicles 13 adds that people in Saul's days were not in the habit of consulting it at all.

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• 4. Dancing Before the Ark

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  Uzzah reached out a hand to steady the cart, and it was the last thing he did. The cart carried the Ark away from Kiriath-Jearim at the start of David's reign over the United Monarchy, amid great rejoicing. God struck Uzzah dead for touching it, and the place was named Perez-Uzzah, literally the outburst against Uzzah. Frightened, David turned the Ark aside to the house of Obed-edom the Gittite instead of taking it to Zion. It stayed there three months.

  Word came that God had blessed Obed-edom because of the Ark's presence, so David had the Levites bring it to Zion. David himself, wearing a linen ephod, danced before the Lord with all his might in sight of the crowd gathered in Jerusalem. His first wife Michal, Saul's daughter, rebuked him scornfully for it. In Zion he set the Ark in a tent he had prepared, made sacrifices, handed out food, and blessed the people and his own household. He used that tent as a personal place of prayer.

  Levites were appointed to minister before the Ark, but the prophet Nathan advised David against building a temple for it. The Ark went with the army during the siege of Rabbah. When David fled Jerusalem during Absalom's conspiracy, it traveled with him until he ordered the priest Zadok to take it back.

  Abiathar escaped a worse fate after he joined Adonijah's conspiracy against David. Solomon dismissed him from the priesthood but spared his life, because he had once borne the Ark. Solomon also worshipped before it after the dream in which God promised him wisdom.

  For Solomon's Temple, builders prepared a special inner room called Kodesh Hakodashim, the Holy of Holies. At the dedication, the Ark, holding the original tablets, was placed inside. When the priests came out, a cloud filled the Temple, "for the glory of the Lord had filled the house of the Lord". Zion was consecrated because it held the Ark, so when Solomon married Pharaoh's daughter he housed her in a separate house outside Zion.

  King Josiah later had the Ark brought back to the Temple, which suggests that one of his predecessors had removed it. The passages sit in 2 Chronicles 33 and 34 and in 2 Kings 21 to 23.

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• 5. Hidden Before Babylon

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  In 587 BC the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem, and ancient texts disagree about whether the Ark was still there to be lost. The Greek third Book of Ezra, called 1 Esdras, says the invaders carried off "the vessels of the ark of God" along with the king's treasures. It never says they took the Ark itself.

  Rabbinic literature splits on the question. Some rabbis held that the Ark must have gone to Babylon. Others held that it was hidden beforehand so it could never be carried there. A late 2nd-century work, the Tosefta, records the second view. In it, King Josiah of Judah stored away the Ark together with the jar of manna, a jar of holy anointing oil, Aaron's rod that budded, and a chest the Philistines had given Israel.

  The Talmud in Yoma goes further. It suggests the Ark left the Temple near the end of the First Temple era, and that the Second Temple never housed it. One view sends it to Babylon when Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem and exiled King Jeconiah with the upper classes. Another says Josiah hid it, expecting the Temple's destruction. One Talmud account mentions a priest who grew suspicious of a tampered stone in a chamber used for storing wood, which hints at concealment.

  Some rabbinic authorities, including the Radak and Maimonides, proposed that Solomon designed tunnels beneath the Temple to protect the Ark, and that Josiah later used them. A related suggestion keeps the Ark underground in the Holy of Holies. Excavating that area has produced little because of political sensitivities.

  The Second Book of Maccabees, written around 100 BC, tells the best-known story. Warned by God before the Babylonian invasion, the prophet Jeremiah took the Tent of Meeting, the Ark and the incense altar to the mountain from which Moses saw the promised land. That is Mount Nebo, in what is now Jordan. He sealed everything inside a cave. Some companions later tried to mark the way and could not find it, and Jeremiah reprimanded them. "The place shall remain unknown", he said, "until God finally gathers his people together and shows mercy to them."

  A third tradition comes from the noncanonical Treatise of the Vessels, which names Hezekiah as one of the kings who had the Ark and other Temple treasures hidden in a time of crisis. It lists six hiding places said to be recorded on a bronze tablet. They are a spring named Kohel or Kahal in a valley with a stopped-up gate, a spring named Kotel, a spring named Zedekiah, an unidentified cistern, Mount Carmel, and locations in Babylon.

  Many scholars credit Hezekiah with writing all or part of the Book of Kohelet, known to Christians as Ecclesiastes. Its enigmatic epilogue mentions almond blossoms, which would echo Aaron's rod, along with locusts, silver and gold. It then speaks of a pitcher broken at a fountain and a wheel broken at a cistern. Some read this as a veiled reference to the Ark story.

  Scholars disagree about whether pilgrims used the pure spring water of the Pool of Siloam for ritual purification. A stepped pilgrimage road between the pool and the Temple was built in the first century CE and has been partially excavated. As of 2016, the west side of the pool remained unexcavated.

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• 6. Scholars and Spades

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  A large elevated podium found at Kiriath-Jearim has complicated the biblical timeline. Archaeologists found strong signs of worship there in the 8th and 7th centuries BC, long after the Ark was supposedly moved to Jerusalem. The podium is linked with the Northern Kingdom rather than the Southern Kingdom, and it may have been a shrine.

  Thomas Römer reads this as a hint that the Ark reached Jerusalem much later, possibly under King Josiah, who reigned from about 640-609 BCE. That could explain why the Ark features so prominently in the story before Solomon and so little afterward. He also points to 2 Chronicles 35:3, which places a move of the Ark in Josiah's reign. Yigal Levin objects. He sees no evidence that Kiriath-Jearim was a cult center in the monarchical era, or that it ever housed a temple of the Ark.

  K. L. Sparks believes the Ark story was first written independently around the 8th century BC, as a text called the Ark Narrative. In his view it was joined to the main biblical account just before the Babylonian exile.

  The Ark's design raises the further question of where the idea came from. Römer suggests it may have carried sacred stones like those kept in the chests of pre-Islamic Bedouins. These might have been a statue of Yahweh, or two statues showing Yahweh and his companion goddess Asherah. Scott Noegel finds that comparison unconvincing. Bedouin chests, he says, lacked a box, a lid and poles. They were not a god's throne or footstool, and they had no gold overlay or kerubim figures. Anyone could touch them, and they traveled on horses or camels.

  Noegel proposes the ancient Egyptian solar barque as a better model, since Egyptian barques had every feature the Bedouin chests lacked. The Egyptians also placed written covenants beneath the feet of statues, which parallels the tablets inside the Ark.

  Levin thinks some biblical texts suggest the Ark was only one of many arks at regional shrines before worship was centralized in Jerusalem. Raanan Eichler disagrees. Clifford Mark McCormick has gone further and questioned whether the Ark ever existed. Eichler, David A. Falk, Roger D. Isaacs and Adam R. Hemmings defend its historicity and antiquity. They cite linguistic evidence and close parallels with similar artifacts from New Kingdom Egypt.

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• 7. Sacred Across Faiths

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  Jeremiah, speaking in the days of Josiah, foretold a time when people would no longer mention the Ark of the Covenant, recall it, or use it. The Tanakh first names the Ark in Exodus and returns to it in Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, the books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles, Psalms and Jeremiah. Rashi read the prophecy as a promise that God's Presence would rest on all the people together, "as if the congregation itself was the Ark of the Covenant."

  Samaritan tradition holds that the Ark was kept at a sanctuary on Mount Gerizim.

  In the New Testament the Ark appears in the Letter to the Hebrews and in the Revelation to St. John. Revelation 11:19 describes the prophet seeing God's temple in heaven opened, "and the ark of his covenant was seen within his temple."

  Christian writers also read the Ark as a symbol. Thomas Aquinas and other Church Fathers saw its contents as pointing to Jesus. The manna stood for the Eucharist, Aaron's rod for his eternal priestly authority, and the tablets for the Lawgiver himself. Aquinas read the wood overlaid with gold as the two natures of Christ, true man and true God.

  The Gospel of Luke builds its accounts of the Annunciation and the Visitation on eight points of literary parallelism that compare Mary to the Ark. Catholic scholars link the pregnant Woman of the Apocalypse in Revelation 12:1-2 to Mary, whom they call the Ark of the New Covenant. Gregory Thaumaturgus gave that reading in the third century. Ambrose, Ephraem of Syria and Augustine followed in the fourth. The Catechism of the Catholic Church calls Mary "the ark of the covenant, the place where the glory of the Lord dwells." Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, addressed her as an Ark "clothed with purity instead of gold".

  The Quran mentions the Ark in Surah Al-Baqara 248. A prophet tells the people that the sign of Saul's kingship is that the Ark will come to them, carrying reassurance from their Lord and relics of the families of Moses and Aaron, borne by angels. Uri Rubin says the Ark has a religious basis in Islam and in the Baháʼí Faith, which gives it special significance there.

  In Israel, Yom HaAliyah, or Aliyah Day, falls on the tenth of the Hebrew month of Nisan. The national holiday marks the Israelites crossing the Jordan into the Land of Israel while carrying the Ark.

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• 8. Claimants Around the World

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  In Axum, a treasury near the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion is said to hold the Ark under guard, according to the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Every Ethiopian Orthodox church keeps replicas of the tablets, called tabots. Each tabot sits in its own holy of holies and is dedicated to a saint, with Saint Mary, Saint George and Saint Michael among the most popular.

  The Kebra Nagast tells how Menelik I brought the Ark to Ethiopia with divine help, while a forgery was left in the Temple in Jerusalem. It was translated into Geʽez in 1321, after first being written in another language, probably Coptic or Greek, and then rendered into Arabic. It is often said to have been composed to legitimise the Solomonic dynasty, established in 1270, but the source disputes that. The belief itself is older. Abu al-Makarim, writing in the last quarter of the twelfth century, noted that "The Abyssinians possess also the Ark of the Covenant". He added that the liturgy was celebrated upon it four times a year.

  Graham Hancock's controversial 1992 book The Sign and the Seal reports an Ethiopian belief that the Ark spent several years in Egypt. It then traveled up the Nile, stayed on the islands of Lake Tana for about four hundred years, and finally reached Axum. Archaeologist John Holladay called the theory "garbage and hogwash". Edward Ullendorff, a former professor of Ethiopian Studies at the University of London, said he examined the Axum ark in 1941. His verdict was blunt: "They have a wooden box, but it's empty."

  On the 25th of June 2009, the patriarch Abune Paulos said he would announce the next day the unveiling of the Ark. The following day he said he would not unveil it after all, but could attest to its current status.

  The Lemba people of South Africa and Zimbabwe tell a different story. They say their ancestors carried the Ark south, calling it the ngoma lungundu, or voice of God, and hid it in a deep cave in the Dumghe mountains. On the 14th of April 2008, a UK Channel 4 documentary followed Tudor Parfitt's research into the claim. He noted that the Lemba object matched the Ark in size, was carried on poles by priests, could not touch the ground, and was used as a weapon of great power. His 2008 book, The Lost Ark of the Covenant, also suggests the Ark went to Arabia and cites Arabic sources placing it in Yemen.

  Y-DNA studies in the 2000s found a partly Middle-Eastern origin for some Lemba men, but no specific Jewish connection. Lemba tradition says the Ark stopped at a place called Sena, perhaps Sena in Yemen, before crossing the sea to East Africa. According to oral tradition, it self-destructed, and priests built a new one from a core of the original. A missionary named Harald Philip Hans von Sicard found that replica in a cave in the 1940s, and it eventually reached the Museum of Human Sciences in Harare.

  In the 2nd century, Rabbi Eliezer ben Jose claimed to have seen the Ark's mercy-seat lid somewhere in Rome, with a bloodstain he was told came from the Day of Atonement. A related tale places the Ark in the Basilica of Saint John Lateran, where it survived the plundering of Rome by Alaric I, king of the Visigoths, and Gaiseric, king of the Vandals. It was supposedly lost when the basilica burned in the fifth century.

  Between 1899 and 1902, the British-Israel Association of London dug at the Hill of Tara in Ireland, hunting for the Ark. They believed it lay at the grave of the Egyptian princess Tea Tephi, who by Irish legend arrived in the 6th century BC and married King Érimón. Irish nationalists, including Maud Gonne and the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, campaigned to stop the digging before it destroyed the hill. Douglas Hyde and W. B. Yeats protested in the newspapers, and Gonne led a campaign in 1902. Archaeologist Conor Newman ran a non-invasive survey from 1992-1995 and found no evidence of the Ark.

  Many Malaitans say the Ark lies buried deep in the jungle of their island. Their family tradition holds that they descend from a lost Jewish tribe linked to Zedekiah the high priest, who they say arrived in the year 66 AD to bury it. Mike Edery has argued that a Torah code from the Baal Shem Tov reveals the location on Malaita. In 2013 the journalist Mathew Fishbane visited and interviewed Malaitans who told him how the Ark arrived. He did not find it.

  Fiction has been less cautious. Philip Kaufman conceived the Ark as the main plot device of Steven Spielberg's 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Indiana Jones finds it in the Egyptian city of Tanis in 1936. In the Danish family film The Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar, from 2006, the Ark is the main treasure, and its power comes from static electricity stored in separated metal plates like a giant Leyden jar. In Harry Turtledove's 2019 novel Alpha and Omega, archeologists find the Ark, and the characters must cope with the proven existence of God.

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