The Sign and the Seal. A quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant

WHAT HOUSE CAN YOU BUILD ME?

The installation of the Ark in the Temple of Solomon, which as I had already established must have taken place around the year 955 BC,(14) was described in the first book of Kings:

Then Solomon assembled the elders of Israel . . . And the priests brought in the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord to its place in the Temple . . . in the Holy of Holies . . . And it came to pass, when the priests were come out of the holy place, that the cloud filled the house of the Lord, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud: for the glory of the Lord had filled the house of the Lord. Then spake Solomon, 'The Lord said that he would dwell in the thick darkness. I have surely built thee a house to dwell in, a settled place for thee to abide in forever . . . But will God indeed dwell on the earth? behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I have builded?'(15)

According to the Scriptures, Solomon had later 'turned away his heart after other gods' and had worshipped with particular enthusiasm 'Ashtoreth the goddess of the Zidonians and . . . Milcom the abomination of the Amorites'. (16) Because of this tendency to apostasy I found it difficult to believe that the monarch whose legendary wisdom was said to have excelled 'all the wisdom of Egypt' (17) had ever really held Yahweh in especially high esteem. And for the same reason I did not think that he had been paying metaphysical tribute to the omnipotence and omnipresence of the God of Israel when he had expressed his doubts about the ability of the Temple to 'contain' the Ark. On the contrary, it seemed to me that when Solomon had uttered these curious words he had been giving voice to genuine fears of a pragmatic rather than of a spiritual nature. Might not the sacred relic still break free, even though it was anchored now to the very foundation-stone of the world? Might not the unpredictable energies pent up within it still be sufficiently potent and dangerous to burn through the thick darkness of the Holy of Holies and to destroy the great 'house' that had been erected around it? There was, I felt, a real sense in which the Temple appeared to have been built less as an earthly palace for a dearly beloved but incorporeal deity than as a kind of prison for the Ark of the Covenant. Within the Holy of Holies, above the two cherubim that faced each other across the relic's golden lid, Solomon had installed two additional cherubim of giant size grim guardians indeed, with wingspans of fifteen feet or more, all covered in gold.(18) Meanwhile the Holy of Holies itself the purpose of which, the Bible stated explicitly, had been 'to contain the Ark of the Covenant of Yahweh(19) had been a perfect cube, foursquare and immensely strong. Measuring thirty feet long, by thirty feet wide, by thirty feet high,(20) its floor, its four walls and its ceiling had been lined with pure gold, weighing an estimated 45,000 pounds,(21) and riveted with golden nails.(22) Nor was this golden cell the only feature of the Temple's construction that caught my attention. At least as interesting was the pedigree of the craftsman a foreigner who had been called in to complete all the other metalwork that Solomon had required:

And Solomon sent for Hiram of Tyre; he was the son of a widow of the tribe of Naphtali . . . and he was filled with wisdom, and understanding, and cunning to work all works in bronze(23)

The phrase he was the son of a widow had jumped out at me from the page as soon as I had set eyes upon it. Why? Because I knew that the very first mention in literature of the Grail hero Parzival had described him in almost exactly the same words as 'the son of the widowed lady'(24) Indeed, both Chr en de Troyes, the founder of the genre, and his successor Wolfram von Eschenbach, had gone to great lengths to make it clear that Parzival's mother had been a widow.(25) Could I be looking, I wondered, at yet another of the bizarre coincidences in which, through the use of dense and often deceptive symbolism, the fictional quest for the Holy Grail seemed to have been deliberately devised to serve as a cryptogram for the real quest for the lost Ark? I had long since satisfied myself that the Knights Templar had been key players in both and that, after the destruction of their order in the fourteenth century, many of their traditions had been preserved in Freemasonry. I was therefore intrigued to learn that Hiram of Tyre, who the Bible said had been called to Jerusalem by Solomon, was not only a widow's son like Parzival, but also a figure of immense significance to Freemasons who knew him as 'Hiram Abiff', and who made reference to him in all their most important rituals.(26) According to Masonic tradition Hiram was murderd by three of his assistants soon after he had completed the bronzework of the Temple. And this event was for some reason regarded as so laden with meaning that it was commemorated in the initiation ceremonies for Master Masons in which each initiate was required to play the role of the murder victim. In one authoritative study I found this description of the relevant part of the ceremonial (which is still in regular use today):

Blindfolded on the ground, the initiate hears the three murderers decide to bury him in a pile of rubble until 'low twelve' (midnight), when they will carry the body away from the Temple. To symbolise the burial of Hiram Abiff, the candidate is wrapped in a blanket and carried to the side of the room. Soon he hears a bell strike twelve times and is carried from the 'rubble' grave to a grave dug on the brow of a hill 'west of Mount Moriah' (the Temple Mount). He hears the murderers agree to mark his grave with a sprig of acacia, then set out to escape to Ethiopia across the Red Sea.(27)

Here, then, were more coincidences a minor one in the form of the sprig of acacia (the same wood that was used to make the Ark), and a major one in the Masonic tradition that Hiram's murderers had intended to flee 'to Ethiopia'. I had no idea how much weight I should attach to such details but I could not rid myself of the feeling that they must in some way be relevant to my quest. This suspicion deepened, furthermore, when I turned back to the Bible to find that one of the bronze items of Temple furniture that Hiram was said to have built was the Sea of cast metal, ten cubits from rim to rim, circular in shape and five cubits high; a cord thirty cubits long gave the measurement of its girth . . . It was a handsbreadth in thickness, and its rim was shaped like the rim of a cup, like a flower. It held two thousand baths.(28)

This 'Sea', I learned, had stood in the courtyard of the Temple. It had been a huge bronze basin, fifteen feet in diameter and seven and a half feet high. It had weighed around thirty tonnes when empty but had normally been kept full with an estimated 10,000 gallons of water.(29) Most authorities admitted frankly that they did not know what its function had been although some thought that it had symbolized the 'primordial waters' referred to in the book of Genesis(30) and others believed that it had been used by the priests for their ritual ablutions.(31) I, however, found neither of these hypotheses satisfactory and, of the two, the latter seemed the most improbable because the Bible stated quite plainly that Hiram had made ten smaller bronze basins for precisely this purpose (placed on wheeled stands, each basin held 'forty baths').(32) After reviewing the evidence, therefore, I entered the following speculation in my notebook:

Is it not possible that the bronze 'Sea' which Hiram made for the courtyard of Solomon's Temple was a throwback to the ancient Egyptian rituals on which the ceremonies of the Ark appear to have been closely modelled? In the festival of Apet at Luxor the 'Arks' containing effigies of the gods were always carried to water.(33) And this, too, is precisely what happens in Ethiopia today: at Timkat in Gondar the tabotat are carried to the edge of a 'sacred lake' at the rear of the castle.(34) So perhaps the bronze Sea was also a kind of sacred lake?

According to the Bible, the other items fashioned by Hiram for Solomon's Temple had included 'the ash containers, the scoops and the sprinkling bowls'(35) and also two bronze pillars; the height of one pillar was eighteen cubits, and a cord twelve cubits long gave the measurement of its girth; so also was the second pillar. . He set up the pillars in front of the vestibule of the sanctuary; he set up the right-hand pillar and named it Jachin; he set up the left-hand pillar and named it Boaz. So the work on the pillars was completed.(36)

Jachin and Boaz, I discovered, also featured in Masonic traditions.(37) According to the 'old ritual' these two great pillars had been hollow. Inside them had been stored the 'ancient records' and the 'valuable writings' pertaining to the past of the Jewish people.(38) And amongst these records, the Freemasons claimed, had been 'the secret of the magical Shamir and the history of its properties'.(39) My curiosity was aroused by this mention of the 'magical Shamir'. What had it been? Was it just a piece of Masonic arcana, or was it referred to in the Bible? After a painstaking search, I was able to confirm that the word 'Shamir' appeared only four times in the Old and New Testaments(40) thrice as a place name and once as the name of a man. Clearly, therefore, none of these could have been the 'magical' Shamir, the secrets of which the Masons claimed had been concealed in Hiram's bronze pillars. I did find the information that I was looking for, however not in the Scriptures but in the Talmudic-Midrashic sources at my disposal. Because Moses had commanded the Israelites not to use 'any tool of iron' in the construction of holy places,(41) Solomon had ordered that no hammers, axes or chisels should be used to cut and dress the many massive stone blocks from which the outer walls and courtyard of the Temple had been built. Instead he had provided the artificers with an ancient device, dating back to the time of Moses himself.(42) This device was called the Shamir and was capable of cutting the toughest of materials without friction or heat.(43) Also known as 'the stone that splits rocks',(44) the Shamir may not be put in an iron vessel for safekeeping, nor in any metal vessel: it would burst such a receptacle asunder. It is kept wrapped up in a woollen cloth, and this in turn is placed in a lead basket filled with barley bran . . . With the destruction of the Temple the Shamir vanished.(45)

I was fascinated by this odd and ancient tradition, which also claimed that the Shamir had possessed 'the remarkable property of cutting the hardest of diamonds'.(46) I then found a collateral version of the same story which added that it had been quite noiseless while it was at work.(47) All in all, I concluded, these characteristics (like many of the characteristics of the Ark of the Covenant) sounded broadly technological in nature, rather than in any way 'magical' or supernatural. And I also thought it significant that this peculiar device again like the Ark had been directly associated with Moses. Finally it did not seem to me entirely irrelevant that the Freemasons had maintained their own separate traditions about it traditions which stated that its secrets had been concealed inside the two bronze pillars placed 'in front of the vestibule of the sanctuary' by Hiram the widow's son. Without knowledge of those long-lost 'secrets', I realized that I could not hope to go any further with this line of inquiry. At the same time, however, I felt that the story of the Shamir deepened the mystery surrounding the real nature of the great stronghold on the top of Mount Moriah that had been built and explicitly dedicated as 'an house of rest for the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord'. With its bronze pillars and its bronze 'Sea', its giant cherubim and its golden inner shrine, Solomon's Temple had clearly been a special place, wonderfully made, the focus of superstition and religious dread, and the centre of Jewish faith and cultural life. How, then, could the Ark possibly have disappeared from it?

SHISHAK, JEHOASH AND NEBUCHADNEZZAR

An obvious answer to the last question which, if correct, would completely invalidate the Ethiopian claim was that the Ark could have been taken by force from the Temple during one of the several military catastrophes that Israel suffered after the death of Solomon. The first of these catastrophes occurred in 926 BC during the unsuccessful reign of Solomon's son Rehoboam.(48) Then, according to the first book of Kings, an Egyptian Pharaoh known as Sheshonq (or 'Shishak') mounted a full-scale invasion:

In the fifth year of king Rehoboam . . . Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem: And he took away the treasures of the house of the Lord, and the treasures of the king's house; he even took away all.(49)

There was nothing in this tantalizingly brief account to suggest that Shishak's booty had not included the Ark of the Covenant. But if the Ark had indeed been captured just thirty years after Solomon had installed it in the Temple then it seemed to me that the scribes would have said so and would in addition have lamented the loss of the precious relic. They had not even mentioned it, however(50) which to my mind implied one of two things: either the Ark had been secretly removed before the arrival of the Egyptian army (perhaps during the reign of Solomon himself as Ethiopian tradition insisted); or it had remained in situ in the Holy of Holies throughout the invasion. But the notion that the Pharaoh could have taken it looked most implausible. A further indication that this was so had been left by Shishak himself in the form of his vast triumphal relief at Karnak. I had already become quite familiar with that relief during my various visits to Egypt and I felt sure that it had made no mention of the Arc of the Covenant or, for that matter, of any siege or pillage of Jerusalem.(51) On checking further I was now able to confirm that this impression had been correct. One authoritative study stated unequivocally that the majority of the towns and cities listed as having been sacked by Shishak had in fact been in the northern part of Israel:

Jerusalem, target of Shishak's campaign according to the Bible, is missing. Although the inscription is heavily damaged, it is certain that Jerusalem was not included because the list is arranged into geographical sequences which allow no space for the name Jerusalem.(52)

What then could have happened at the holy city to explain the Scriptural assertion that Shishak had taken away 'the treasures of the house of the Lord, and the treasures of the king's house'? The academic consensus, I discovered, was that the Pharaoh had surrounded Jerusalem but that he had never actually entered it; instead he had been 'bought off with the treasures of Solomon's temple and palace.'(53) These treasures, moreover, could not possibly have included the Ark, even if it had still been there in 9126 BC; instead they would have consisted of far less sacred items, mainly public and royal donations dedicated to Yahweh. Such items, normally quite precious and made of silver and gold, were not stored in the Holy of Holies but rather in the outer precincts of the Temple in special treasuries that were always mentioned in the Old Testament conjointly with the treasuries of the king's house.(54) 'Occasionally,' as one leading biblical scholar put it, these treasuries were depleted either by foreign invaders or by the kings themselves when they were in need of funds. The treasuries thus constantly oscillated between a state of affluence and want . . . The invasion of Shishak [had], therefore, nothing to do with the Temple sanctums, and it would be entirely inaccurate to associate [it] with the disappearance of the Ark.(55)

Precisely the same caution, I discovered, also applied to the next occasion on which the Temple had apparently been looted. This had happened at a time when the unified state that David and Solomon had forged had been split into two warring kingdoms 'Judah' in the south (which included Jerusalem) and 'Israel' in the north. In 796 BC(56) Jehoash, the monarch of the northern kingdom, joined battle at Bethshemesh with his Judaean counterpart Amaziah:

And Judah was put to the worse before Israel, and they fled every man to their tents. And Jehoash king of Israel took Amaziah king of Judah . . . at Bethshemesh, and came to Jerusalem, and brake down the wall of Jerusalem . . . And he took all the gold and silver, and all the vessels that were found in the house of the Lord, and in the treasuries of the king's house.(57)

Once again, this pillage of the Temple had not involved the Holy of Holies or the Ark of the Covenant. As one authority on the period explained:

Jehoash did not even enter the Temple's outer sanctum, certainly not the inner one . . . The phrase 'the house of the Lord' mentioned in connection with Jehoash . . . is simply a shortened form of 'the treasuries of the house of the Lord'. This may be seen from the fact that the 'treasuries of the king's house' which are always contiguously mentioned with the 'treasuries of the house of the Lord' are also mentioned.(58)

So much then for Shishak and Jehoash. The reason that neither of them had claimed to have taken the Ark, and the reason that neither had been reported by the Bible to have done so, was now quite clear to me: they had got nowhere near the Holy of Holies in which the sacred relic had been kept and had helped themselves only to minor treasures of gold and silver. The same, however, could not be said for Jerusalem's next and greatest invader, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. He attacked and occupied the holy city not once but twice, and even on the first occasion, in 598 BC,(59) it was clear that he had penetrated deeply into the Temple itself. The Bible described this disaster in the following terms:

The troops of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon marched on Jerusalem, and the city was besieged. Nebuchadnezzar . . . himself came to attack the city while his troops were besieging it. Then Jehoiachin king of Judah surrendered to the king of Babylon, he, his mother, his officers, his nobles and his eunuchs, and the king of Babylon took them prisoner. This was the eighth year of King Nebuchadnezzar. The latter carried off all the treasures of the house of the Lord, and the treasures of the king's house, and cut in pieces all the golden furnishings that Solomon king of Israel had made for the sanctuary of Yahweh.(60)

What had Nebuchadnezzar's booty consisted of? I already knew that the 'treasures of the house of the Lord, and the treasures of the king's house' could not have included any truly sacred objects such as the Ark. As noted above, these phrases had very specific and distinct meanings in the original Hebrew and referred only to dispensable items stored in the royal and priestly treasuries. More significant by far was the statement that the Babylonian monarch had 'cut in pieces all the golden furnishings that Solomon king of Israel had made for the sanctuary of Yahweh.' The Hebrew word that the translators of the Jerusalem Bible had rendered as 'sanctuary' was, I discovered, hekal and its precise meaning was 'outer sanctum'.(61) In trying to envisage its location I found it useful to recall the basic layout of Ethiopian Orthodox churches which as I had learned on my trip to Gondar in January 1990 exactly reflected the tripartite division of the Temple of Solomon.(62) By co-ordinating this mental picture with the best scholarly research on the subject I was able to confirm beyond any shadow of a doubt that the hekal had corresponded to the k'eddest of Ethiopian churches.(63) This meant that the 'sanctuary of Yahweh' despoiled by Nebuchadnezzar had not been the Holy of Holies in which the Ark had stood but rather the antechamber to that sacred place. The Holy of Holies itself the inner sanctum had been known in ancient Hebrew as the debit and corresponded to the mak 'das in which the tabotat were kept in Ethiopian churches.(64) If the Ark had still been in the Temple at the time of Nebuchadnezzar's first attack, therefore and that, as it turned out, was a very big if then it was certain that the Babylonian king had not taken it. Instead he had contented himself with cutting 'in pieces' and carrying off the 'golden furnishings' that Solomon had placed in the hekal.(65) The other 'furnishings' that had been looted by Nebuchadnezzar and the list was quite specific were as follows:

the lamp-stands, five on the right and five on the left in front of the debit, of pure gold; the floral work, the lamps, the extinguishers of gold; the basins, knives, sprinkling bowls, incense boats, censers, of pure gold; the door sockets for the inner shrine that is, the Holy of Holies and for the hekal, of gold.(66)

Of course, in this translation, the terms 'inner shrine', 'debit" and 'Holy of Holies' were all used interchangeably to refer to the same sacred place i.e. the place in which the Ark had been installed by Solomon so many centuries before(67) Once I had satisfied myself that that was indeed the case, a single significant fact suddenly became clear to me: while not looting the Holy of Holies, Nebuchadnezzar had nonetheless removed its door-sockets. From this it was safe to deduce that the doors had been taken off their hinges and that the Babylonian monarch or the soldiers who had carried out his orders would thus have been able to look right into the debir. I realized immediately that this was an important, indeed a crucial, finding. Gazing into the inner sanctum the Babylonians should immediately have been able to see the two giant cherubim, overlaid with gold, that Solomon had placed as sentinels over the Ark and they should also have been able to see the Ark itself. Since they had shown no compunction in removing the gold from the furnishings of the hekal it therefore had to be asked why they had not immediately rushed into the debir to strip the far larger quantities of gold from its walls and from the cherubim, and why they had not taken the Ark as booty. The Babylonians had demonstrated that they held the Jews and their religion in complete contempt.(68) There was thus no mileage in assuming that they might have refrained from looting the Holy of Holies out of some sort of altruistic desire to spare the feelings of the vanquished. On the contrary all the evidence suggested that if they had indeed been confronted by rich pickings like the Ark, and the gold overlay on the walls and on the cherubim, then Nebuchadnezzar and his men would unhesitatingly have helped themselves to the lot. What made this even more probable was that it had been the normal practice of the Babylonians at this time to seize the principal idols or cult-objects of the peoples they had conquered and to transport them back to Babylon to place in their own temple before the statue of their god Marduk.(69) The Ark would have been an ideal candidate for this sort of treatment. Yet it had not even been stripped of its gold, let alone carried off intact. Indeed neither it nor the cherubim had been mentioned at all.

The logical conclusion [I wrote in my notebook] is that the Ark and the gold-covered cherubim were no longer in the debit. in 598 BC when the first Babylonian invasion took place and, indeed, that the walls, floor and ceiling of the debir had also been stripped of their gold prior to that date. This would seem to lend at least prima facie support to the Ethiopian claim since I have already established that Shishak and Jehoash did not get their hands on the Ark, or on the other precious contents of the debir, and since they were the only previous invaders to have acquired any sort of treasure from the Temple.

Of course the Babylonian assault on Jerusalem in 598 BC had not been the last that Nebuchadnezzar would mount and the conclusion that I had just scribbled in my notebook would be proved completely false if there were any evidence to suggest that he had taken the Ark the second time that he sacked the holy city. After the successful operation of 598 BC he had installed a puppet king, Zedekiah, on the throne.(70) This 'puppet', however, turned out to have ideas of his own and, in 589 BC, he rebelled against his Babylonian overlord.(71) The response was instantaneous. Nebuchadnezzar marched on Jerusalem once again and laid siege to it, finally breaching its walls and overrunning it in late June or early July of the year 587 BC.(72) Slightly less than a month later:(73)