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

Nebuzaradan, commander of the guard, an officer of the king of Babylon . . . burned down the Temple of Yahweh, the royal palace and all the houses in Jerusalem. The . . . troops who accompanied the commander of the guard . . . broke up the bronze pillars from the Temple of Yahweh, the wheeled stands and the bronze Sea that were in the Temple of Yahweh, and took the bronze away to Babylon. They took the ash containers, the scoops, the knives, the incense boats, and all the bronze furnishings used in worship. The commander of the guard took the censers and the sprinkling bowls, everything that was made of gold and everything made of silver. As regards the two pillars, the one Sea and the wheeled stands . . . there was no reckoning the weight in bronze in all these objects.(74)

This, then, was the detailed inventory offered in the Bible of all the objects and treasures broken up or carried off to Babylon after Nebuchadnezzar's second attack on the city. Once again, and significantly, the Ark of the Covenant was not included and nor was the gold that Solomon had used to line the Holy of Holies and to overlay the great cherubim that had stood within that sacred place. Indeed absolutely nothing else was mentioned at all and it was clear that the bulk of the loot taken in 587 BC had consisted of bronze salvaged from the pillars and the 'Sea' and also from the wheeled basins that Hiram had made four centuries earlier. A fact that argued very strongly in favour of the basic veracity of the list was that it was entirely consistent with the biblical account of what had previously been stolen from the Temple in 598 BC. On that occasion Nebuchadnezzar had left the bronze items in place but had removed the 'treasures of the house of the Lord, and the treasures of the king's house' and had also stripped off all the gold from the furnishings of the hekal. This was why, eleven years later, Nebuzaradan's haul of gold and silver had consisted only of a few censers and sprinkling bowls:(75) he had not been able to find anything more valuable for the simple reason that all the best items had been looted and taken to Babylon in 598 BC. Since I had already satisfied myself that those items had not included the Ark, and since the relic had not been amongst the second lot of booty either, I felt increasing confidence in my conclusion that it must have disappeared at some stage prior to the Babylonian invasions. By the same token the other oft-cited explanation for the loss of the relic namely that it must have been destroyed in the great fire that Nebuzaradan had started(76) also looked increasingly untenable. If the Ark had indeed been taken away before 598 BC perhaps to Ethiopia then it would of course have escaped the destruction of the Temple. But was it safe, from this chain of reasoning, to deduce that it had gone to Ethiopia? Certainly not. Researching the matter further I found that Judaic traditions offered several alternative explanations for what had happened any of which, if sufficiently strong, might prove fatal to the Ethiopian case and all of which therefore had to be considered on their merits.

'DEEP AND TORTUOUS CACHES . . .'

The first point that became clear to me was that the Jews as a people had only become conscious of the loss of the Ark and conscious that this loss was a great mystery at the time of the building of the Second Temple. I was already aware that in 598 BC Nebuchadnezzar had sent into exile in Babylon a large number of the inhabitants of Jerusalem.(77) In 587 BC, after the burning of Solomon's Temple,

Nebuzaradan, commander of the guard, deported the remainder of the population left behind in the city, the deserters who had gone over to the king of Babylon, and the rest of the common people . . . Thus Judah was deported from this land.(78)

The trauma of the banishment, the humiliations of the captivity, and the firm resolve that Jerusalem should never be forgotten, were soon to be immortalized in one of the most poignant and evocative pieces of poetry in the whole of the Old Testament:

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof,

For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?

If I forget thee, 0 Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.

If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.(79)

This physical exile of an entire people was not to last for very long. Nebuchadnezzar had begun the process in 598 BC and had completed it in 587. Slightly less than half a century later, however, the empire that had expanded so dramatically under his rule was utterly crushed by Cyrus the Great, king of Persia, whose triumphant armies entered Babylon in 539 BC.(80) This Cyrus, who has been described as 'one of the world's most astonishing empire-builders',(81) adopted an enlightened approach towards his subject peoples. There were others, like the Jews, who had also been held captive in Babylon. He made it his business to set them all free. Moreover, he permitted them to remove their confiscated idols and cult objects from the temple of Marduk and to carry these home with them.(82) The Jews, of course, were unable to take full advantage of this latter opportunity, because their principal cult object, the Ark of the Covenant, had not been brought to Babylon in the first place. Nevertheless a large number of the lesser treasures that Nebuchadnezzar had seized were still intact, and these the Persians handed over with all due ceremony to the appropriate Judaean officials. The Old Testament contained a detailed report of the transaction:

King Cyrus took the vessels of the Temple of Yahweh which Nebuchadnezzar had carried away from Jerusalem and dedicated to the temple of his god. Cyrus king of Persia handed them over to Mithredath, the treasurer, who counted them out to Sheshbazzar, the prince of Judah. The inventory was as follows: thirty golden bowls for offerings; one thousand and twenty-nine silver bowls for offerings; thirty golden bowls; four hundred and ten silver bowls; one thousand other vessels. In all, five thousand four hundred vessels of gold and silver. Sheshbazzar took all these with him when the exiles travelled back from Babylon to Jerusalem.(83)

That return journey took place in 538 BC.(84) Then, in the spring of 537 BC, the Second Temple began to be built above the razed foundations of the First.(85) The work was finally completed around 537 BC,(86) and although this was a cause for great rejoicing there were also reasons for sorrow. The removal of the Ark of the Covenant from the First Temple whenever it had occurred had clearly been kept secret from the public (not a difficult task since no one but the High Priest was supposed to enter the Holy of Holies). Now, however, after the return from Babylon, it was impossible to disguise the fact that the precious relic had gone, and that it therefore could not be installed in the inner sanctum of the Second Temple. This great change was explicitly admitted in the Talmud, which stated: 'In five things the First Sanctuary differed from the Second: in the Ark, the Ark-cover, the Cherubim, the Fire, and the Urim-and-Thununim.'(87) The Urim and Thununim had been mysterious objects (here referred to collectively as a single object) that had possibly been used for divining and that had been kept in the breast-plate of the High Priest in the time of Moses. They were not present in the Second Temple. Neither was the celestial fire that had always been associated with the Ark of the Covenant. And of course the Ark itself was also missing together with its thick golden cover and the two golden cherubim that had been mounted upon it.(88) The secret, therefore, was out: the most precious relic of the Jewish faith had vanished, apparently into thin air. Moreover the people knew that it had not been brought into captivity with them in Babylon. So where could it possibly have gone? Almost at once theories started to circulate and, in the normal way of things, some of these theories quickly took on the character of revealed truths. The majority supposed that Nebuchadnezzar's looters had failed to find the Ark because, before their arrival, it had been carefully hidden somewhere within Mount Moriah itself, where the Second Temple now stood on the site previously occupied by the First. According to one post-exilic legend, for example, Solomon had foreseen the destruction of his Temple even while he was building it. For this reason he had 'contrived a place of concealment for the Ark, in deep and tortuous caches'.(89) It was this tradition, I felt sure, that must have inspired the author of the Apocalypse of Baruch to suggest that the relic had been swallowed by the earth below the great 'foundation stone' known as the Shetiyyah. I knew, of course that no reliance could be placed on that relatively late and apocryphal work. Nevertheless I was aware that other accounts existed which likewise identified some secret cavern within the Temple Mount as the last resting place of the Ark. Reinforcing the notion that that cavern might have been located directly beneath the Holy of Holies, the Talmud expressed the view that 'the Ark was buried in its own place.'(90) And this entombment, it seemed, had been the work of King Josiah, who had ruled in Jerusalem from 640 to 609 BC,(91) i.e. until just a decade before the first Babylonian seizure of the city. Near the end of his long reign, the story went, foreseeing 'the imminent destruction of the Temple', 'Josiah hid the Holy Ark and all its appurtenances, in order to guard them against desecration at the hands of the enemy.'(92) This, I found, was quite a pervasive belief. Not all the sources, however, agreed that the place of concealment had been in the immediate vicinity of the Holy of Holies. Another parallel, recorded in the Mishnah, suggested that the relic had been buried 'under the pavement of the wood-house, that it might not fall into the hands of the enemy.'(93) This wood-house had stood within the precincts of Solomon's Temple, but its precise location had been forgotten by the time that the Jews returned from their exile in Babylon and thus 'remained secret for all time'.(94) Nevertheless the Mishnah reported that a priest had once been working in the courtyard of the Second Temple and there, by accident, he had stumbled upon 'a block of pavement that was different from the rest':

He went and told it to his fellow, but before he could make an end of the matter his life departed. So they knew assuredly that there the Ark lay hidden.(95)

An entirely separate account of the concealment of the relic was put forward in the second book of Maccabees (a work excluded from the Hebrew Bible, but included in the canon of the Greek and Latin Christian churches, and in the Apocrypha of the English Bible).(96) Compiled at some time between 100 BC and AD 70 by a Jew of Pharisaic sympathies (who wrote in Greek),(97) the opening verses of 2 Maccabees 2 had this to say about the fate of the Ark:

The prophet Jeremiah . . . warned by an oracle [of the impending destruction of the Temple of Solomon], gave instructions for the tabernacle and the Ark to go with him when he set out for the mountain which Moses had climbed to survey God's heritage. On his arrival Jeremiah found a cave dwelling, into which he brought the tabernacle, the Ark and the altar of incense, afterwards blocking up the entrance.(98)

In the opinion of the scholars who produced the authoritative English translation of the Jerusalem Bible from which the above quotation is taken Jeremiah's supposed expedition to hide the Ark was nothing more than an inspirational fable devised by the author of the second book of Maccabees as part of a deliberate attempt to re-awaken the interest of expatriate Jews n the national homeland.(99) The editors of the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church likewise regarded the passage as being of no historical value.(100) And since it was written some five hundred years after the death of Jeremiah himself it could not even be said to be a particularly ancient tradition(101) although its author had attempted to dress it up as such by claiming that he had based his account on a document found in 'the archives'.(102) It was a fact, however, that the prophet Jeremiah (unlike the author of Maccabees) had lived at around the time of the destruction of Solomon's Temple which meant that he could, just conceivably, have played some role in the concealment of the Ark. Moreover 'the mountain which Moses had climbed to survey God's heritage' Mount Nebo(103) was a known place that stood barely fifty kilometres to the east of Jerusalem as the crow flies.(104) Culturally appropriate because of its associations with the founder of Judaism, this venerated peak thus also looked like a feasible hiding place in terms of its geographical location. The Maccabees story had therefore not been entirely dismissed by later generations of Jews; on the contrary, although never incorporated into the Jewish canon of Scripture, it had been substantially elaborated upon and embellished in the folklore where, for example, the knotty problem of exactly how Jeremiah (who had been very much at odds with the priestly fraternity in the Temple)(105) had managed to get the sacred items out of the Holy of Holies and across the Jordan valley to Nebo was solved by providing him with an angel for a helper!(106) After looking back through all the Jewish traditions that I had surveyed concerning the last resting place of the Ark, I entered the following summary in my notebook:

Outside of the Talmud, the Mishnah, the Apocalypse of Baruch, the second book of Maccabees, and various rather colourful legends, there is nothing of any substance in Jewish tradition concerning the whereabouts of the Ark of the Covenant. Since it now seems certain that it was not looted by Shishak or Jehoash or Nebuchadnezzar, it therefore follows that the only alternatives to the claim that it is in Axum are (a) very sketchy, (b) historically dubious, and (c) lacking in any current vitality (by contrast religious feeling in Ethiopia continues to be massively focussed upon the belief that the relic is indeed there). All this makes the Ethiopian case look more and more credible. Nevertheless the Jewish 'alternatives' cannot be dismissed out of hand simply because they seem to be a bit flimsy. ACTION: find out whether any archaeologists have excavated at Mount Nebo, or in and around the Temple Mount which are the only two locations proposed by the Jews as the last resting place of the Ark.

I wrote that note in my hotel room in Jerusalem on the night of Saturday 6 October 1990. Two days later, on the morning of Monday 8 October, I attempted to go back to take a second look at the Temple Mount, and to visit some excavations that I knew were in progress just outside the sacred precincts, perhaps a hundred metres to the south of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. As I approached, however walking along the city wall from David's Tower to the Dung Gate the sound of gunfire and of people screaming forewarned me that something had gone seriously wrong.

DEATH ON THE MOUNT

What I had walked into subsequently came to be known as the 'Temple Mount massacre', and although it represented the coming to a head of years of hatred between the Jews and the Arabs of Jerusalem, its proximate cause was a demonstration by an ultra-conservative Zionist group known as the 'Temple Mount Faithful'. The large banner that they carried as they marched up to the Moghrabi Gate bore a Star of David and a provocative inscription in Hebrew which summarized the key issue for all concerned. That inscription read:

TEMPLE MOUNT THE SYMBOL OF OUR PEOPLE IS IN THE HANDS OF OUR ENEMIES

What the demonstrators hoped to do was to enter the Temple Mount itself through the Moghrabi Gate, march up to the Dome of the Rock, and there lay the cornerstone for a proposed Third Temple. This ambition, obviously, was packed with political dynamite: since work began on the construction of the Dome of the Rock in the seventh century AD, the whole of the Temple Mount area had been a sacred site of immense importance to Islam as well as to Judaism. Moreover, much to the chagrin of groups like the 'Temple Mount Faithful', it is the Muslims who are in possession of that site which has contained no Jewish place of worship since the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in AD 70. Wishing to defend this status quo against what must have looked to them like a genuine threat an estimated five thousand militant Arabs had gathered inside the walls of the Temple Mount and had armed themselves with stones which they planned to hurl down at the approaching Zionists. The atmosphere was thus highly charged with emotion when the Temple Mount Faithful began their march on Monday 8 October. And what added enormously to the tension was the location of the Moghrabi Gate through which they intended to pass. Opening out into the main compound less than fifty metres from the front porch of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, this gate is built into the southern end of the Western Wall the exposed exterior of which, known as the 'Wailing Wall', is today the single most important Jewish holy place. Dating back to Second Temple times, it is part of a retaining buttress built by Herod the Great in the late first century BC. It escaped demolition by the Romans in AD 70 (because, said the Midrash, the 'Divine Presence' hovered over it) and, in later years, it became a potent symbol of the nationalist aspirations of the Jewish people scattered during the diaspora. Even after the formation of the State of Israel it continued to be administered by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and it was not until the Six Day War of 1967 that it was finally incorporated into Israel proper. A large plaza was then cleared in front of it and dedicated as a formal place of worship where, to this day, Jews from all over the world gather to lament the fact that they have no Temple. To avoid a potentially catastrophic confrontation with Islam, however, Jewish worship in any form continues to be banned on the Temple Mount itself, which remains under the exclusive control of the Muslims of Jerusalem and which directly overlooks the Wailing Wall.(107) By choosing to try to enter the Temple Mount through the Moghrabi Gate, therefore, the Temple Mount Faithful were asking for trouble. Access was in fact denied to them by the Israeli police but, as they turned away, the five thousand Arabs who had gathered inside began to rain down showers of stones not only on the heads of the zealots who had participated in the march but also on the large numbers of other Jews then making their devotions at the Wailing Wall. In this way something that had started life as an apparently symbolic demonstration was very rapidly transformed into a full-scale riot in which eleven Israeli worshippers and eight policemen were hurt, and in which twenty-one Arabs were shot dead and one hundred and twenty-five seriously injured. By the time I arrived on the scene the worst of it was over: piles of stones lay amongst pools of blood at the base of the Wailing Wall; the wounded were being ferried away in ambulances; and the police dressed in riot gear and armed to the teeth appeared to be in full control. The Temple Mount itself; having just been stormed by the security forces, was off-limits. So too was the area of excavations immediately to the south that I had intended to visit. Hundreds of angry and excited Jews, a few of them proudly wearing blood-stained bandages, milled around in a decidedly bellicose mood and soon a wild celebration began in front of the Wailing Wall although exactly why anyone should have rejoiced over the brutal killing of a score of Arab youths was something that I just could not understand. Disgusted and depressed I eventually left the area, climbing up the steps that led into the Jewish Quarter of the old city and crossing into the Street of the Chain along which I had walked a few days previously on my first visit to the Temple Mount. Here I saw further gratuitous violence as the police, carrying guns and truncheons, rounded up Palestinians whom they suspected of having been amongst the rioters. One young man, protesting his innocence in a high-pitched and terrified voice, was repeatedly punched and slapped; another ran at break-neck speed into a narrow alley where he was cornered and beaten before being dragged away. Altogether, it had been a most unpleasant morning and it cast a blight over the rest of my stay in Jerusalem. This was so not only because of the human suffering that current events had now directly linked to the place where the Ark had once stood, but also because the Temple Mount and the excavations to the south of it remained sealed off by the security forces until long after I had left Israel. Despite these inauspicious omens, however, I was determined not to waste any of the few days remaining to me in that unhappy country, and I therefore continued with my investigation as best I could.

DIGGING UP SACRED PLACES

The immediate question that I was seeking to answer was the one that I had jotted down in my notebook on the night of Saturday 6 October: had any efforts been made by archaeologists to dig at the Temple Mount, or at Mount Nebo, in order to test the Jewish traditions about the last resting place of the Ark? I began with the excavations that I had tried unsuccessfully to visit on the morning of 8 October. Though I could not now gain access to them, I was able to meet with some of the archaeologists involved in them and to research their findings. What I learned was that proper digging had started here in February 1968 some eight months after Israeli paratroopers had seized control of Jerusalem in the Six Day War. And although all the excavations were safely outside the sacred precincts of the Temple Mount they had been a focus of controversy from the very beginning. According to Meir Ben-Dov, Field Director of the dig, early opposition came from members of the Higher Muslim Council, who suspected a plot against their interests. 'The excavations are not in fact a scientific venture,' they complained, 'their Zionist objective is rather to undermine the southern wall of the Temple Mount, which is likewise the southern wall of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, as a way of destroying the mosque.'(108) To Ben-Dov's surprise, Christians were at first almost equally unhelpful. 'They suspected', he explained, 'that the purpose of the excavation was to lay the groundwork for building the Third Temple and the whole business about an archaeological venture was just a cover for an invidious plot. All I can say is that until you actually hear these rumours with your own ears, they sound like the product of a demonic imagination. Yet more than once whether in jest or otherwise people whose exceptional intelligence and abilities as historians and archaeologists are beyond question have come straight out and asked me: "Don't you intend to reinstitute the Temple?" '(109) The strongest opposition of all came from the Jewish religious authorities whose agreement to the dig was required by the government before any work could begin. Professor Mazar of the Archaeological Institute of the Hebrew University led the negotiations with the Sephardi and Ashkenazi Chief Rabbis both of whom turned him down flat when he first approached them in 1967:

The Sephardi Chief Rabbi, Rabbi Nissim, explained his refusal by the fact that the area of our proposed dig was a holy place. When asked to elucidate his answer further, he intimated that we might prove that the Wailing Wall was not in fact the western wall of the Temple Mount. Besides, what point was there in taking the chance and conducting a dig for scientific purposes when they were irrelevant anyway? On the other hand the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi, Rabbi Unterman, agonized over halakhic problems (questions of Jewish law). 'What will happen,' he mused aloud, 'if, as a result of the archaeological excavation, you find the Ark of the Covenant, which Jewish tradition says is buried in the depths of the earth?' 'That would be wonderful!' Professor Mazar replied in all innocence. But the venerable Rabbi told the learned Professor that that was precisely what he feared. Since the Children of Israel are not 'pure' from the viewpoint of Jewish religious law, they are forbidden to touch the Ark of the Covenant. Hence it is unthinkable to even consider excavating until the Messiah comes!(110)