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

Cease ye, so that the uncircumcised people may not boast themselves over us and may not say unto us, 'Their glory is taken away, and God hath forsaken them.' Reveal ye not anything else to alien folk . . . And . . . the elders of Israel made answer and said unto him, 'May thy good pleasure be done, and the good pleasure of the Lord God! As for us, none of us will transgress thy word, and we will not inform any other people that the Ark hath been taken away from us.' And they established this covenant in the House of God the elders of Israel with their King Solomon unto this day.(2)

In other words, if the Kebra Nagast was to believed, there had been a massive cover-up. The Ark had been removed to Ethiopia during the lifetime of Solomon himself; all information about this tragic loss had, however, been suppressed, which was why no mention was made of it in the Scriptures. There was, I thought, much to recommend this argument. It made a great deal of sense to suppose that the Jewish king would indeed have sought to keep from the common herd any knowledge of the loss of the Ark. But at the same time I had serious problems with some other aspects of the Kebra Nagast account notably those concerning the Queen of Sheba's Ethiopian credentials, her alleged love affair with Solomon, the birth of their son Menelik, the notion that the latter had brought the Ark to Ethiopia, and the implication that this had happened in the tenth century BC:

1 There appeared to be no justification for the Kebra Nagast's audacious claim that the Queen of Sheba had been an Ethiopian woman. It was not absolutely impossible that she might have been (in his Antiquities of the Jews, for example, Flavius Josephus had described her as 'the queen of Egypt and Ethiopia'(3). On balance, however, historical research did not suggest that she had started her journey in the Abyssinian highlands when, as the Bible put it, she had travelled to 'Jerusalem with a very great train, with camels that bare spices, and very much gold, and precious stones.'(4) 2 If the evidence linking the Queen of Sheba to Ethiopia was thin, then evidence for the very existence of her son Menelik was even thinner. I had known for some time that historians considered the supposed founder of Ethiopia's 'Solomonic' dynasty to be a purely legendary figure and I had learnt nothing in two years of research to persuade me that they were mistaken about this rather crucial point. 3 In particular it seemed to be inconceivable that an advanced culture and a centralized monarchy of the kind described in the Kebra Nagast could have existed in the Abyssinian mountains in the tenth century BC. 'At the time when Solomon was reigning,' as E. A. Wallis Budge had put it, 'the natives of the country which we now call Abyssinia were savages.'(5) This was the orthodox view and my research had uncovered nothing that would enable me to refute it. 4 Even more fatal to any kind of literal acceptance of the Kebra Nagast was the evidence that I myself had collected in Ethiopia. Of all the many traditions that I had encountered in that country, by far the purest and most convincing had indicated that the Ark of the Covenant had been brought first of all to Lake Tana, where it had been concealed on the island of Tana Kirkos. Memhir Fisseha, the priest whom I had interviewed there (see Chapter 9), had told me that the relic had remained on the island for eight hundred years before it had finally been taken to Axum at the time of Ethiopia's conversion to Christianity. Since that conversion had occurred around AD 330, the implication of the strong folk memory preserved on Tana Kirkos was that the Ark must have arrived in Ethiopia in 470 BC or thereabouts in other words about five hundred years after Solomon, Menelik and the Queen of Sheba.

These, of course, were not the only difficulties that I had with the account given in the Kebra Nagast. Something else that bothered me greatly, for example, was the practical question of how Menelik and his companions could possibly have removed so precious and so heavy an object as the Ark from the Temple of Solomon without attracting the attention of the zealous Levites who guarded the Holy of Holies. And I had several other reservations too, all of which, together with those listed above, had forced me to agree with the academic experts that the Kebra Nagast was indeed a remarkable document but that it had to be taken with a very large pinch of salt. This, however, did not make me want to dismiss the great epic entirely. On the contrary, in common with many other legends, I felt that there was every possibility that its elaborate fictional superstructure might have been erected above a solid foundation of historical truth. In short, while reluctantly rejecting the lovely idea of the romance between Solomon and Sheba, and the cheeky suggestion that the Ark had been stolen from the Temple by their son Menelik, I saw no reason to conclude that the relic might not have been brought to Ethiopia by some other means, thus creating an enigma which the Kebra Nagast had much later gone on to explain in its own peculiarly original and colourful way. Indeed, I was satisfied that the social and cultural evidence in Ethiopia itself very strongly supported that country's claim to be the last resting place of the Ark. And, since I now also knew that no other country or place had a stronger claim, I was more inclined than ever to believe that the Ark really was there. Nevertheless, the final pieces of the jigsaw puzzle remained to be put in place. If the Queen of Sheba had not been Solomon's lover, and if she had never borne him a son called Menelik as the legends claimed, then who in fact had brought the Ark to Ethiopia and when, and under what circumstances?

THE LADY DOTH PROTEST TOO MUCH, METHINKS . . .

In my attempt to answer these questions I kept at the forefront of my mind the very acceptable notion, put forward in the Kebra Nagast, that the removal of the Ark of the Covenant from the Holy of Holies could have been the subject of a cover-up of a conspiracy of silence involving the priestly elite and the king. But, if not Solomon, then which king? Part of the definition of a 'cover-up', of course, is that it should be difficult to detect. I therefore did not expect that evidence of the sort that I was seeking would be easily extracted from the Old Testament. That great and complex book had guarded its secrets well for more than two thousand years and there was no reason to suppose that it would simply surrender them to me now. I began by typing up every single mention of the Ark of the Covenant that had ever appeared in the Bible. Even with access to the best scholarship on the subject it was a hard task to track them all down, and when I had finished I had before me a document more than fifty pages long. Strikingly and significantly, only the last page contained references that related to the period after Solomon's death; all the others concerned themselves with the story of the Ark during the wanderings in the wilderness, the conquest of the Promised Land, the reign of King David, and the reign of King Solomon himself. The Bible, as I was well aware, contains a hotch-potch of material produced by several different schools of scribes over hundreds of years. Many of the references to the Ark, I knew, were very old indeed; but others were relatively late. None of those in the first book of Kings, for example, were codified before the reign of Josiah (640-609 BC).(6) This meant that the account of the Ark's installation in Solomon's Temple in I Kings 8, although undoubtedly based on ancient oral and written traditions, had been the work of the priests who had lived long after the event. And exactly the same observation applied to all the relevant references in the book of Deuteronomy, since this, too, was a late document that dated only from the time of King Josiah.(7) Therefore, if the Ark had been secretly removed from the Holy of Holies before the destruction of the Temple in 587 BC, it seemed to me probable that the traces of any cover-up would be found in Kings and in Deuteronomy if they were to be found anywhere for in compiling these books the scribes would have had an opportunity to tamper with the facts in order to create the desired impression that 'the glory' had not departed from Israel. On close examination of the texts I came across a passage in Chapter 8 of the first book of Kings that seemed somehow out of character, that jarred in a curious way with the rest of the description of the great ceremony that had surrounded the deposition of the Ark in the Holy of Holies. That passage read as follows:

The priests brought in the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord to its place, the inner shrine of the house, the Most Holy Place, beneath the wings of the cherubim. The cherubim spread their wings over the place of the Ark; they formed a screen above the Ark and its poles. The poles projected and their ends could be seen from the Holy Place immediately in front of the inner shrine, but from nowhere else outside; they are there to this day.(8)

Why, I wondered, had the biblical scribe responsible for this passage found it necessary to assert that the carrying poles of the Ark could, in his day, still be seen projecting out of the inner shrine? What would have been the point of such a statement unless the relic had in fact not been there at the time that these words were written (approximately 610 BC according to the authorities?)(9) The oddly defensive tone had, I thought, the ring of one of those emphatic declarations of innocence that guilty parties sometimes make in order to obscure the truth. In short, like the famous lady in Shakespeare's Hamlet, the author of Kings 8 had aroused my suspicions by 'protesting too much'.(10) I was pleased to discover that I was not alone in this intuition. In 1928 the leading biblical scholar Julian Morgenstern had also been struck by the strangeness of the words 'they are there to this day'. His conclusion, in an erudite paper published in the Hebrew Union College Annual, was that the scribe must have intended:

to convince his readers that the staves of the Ark, and therefore, of course, the Ark itself, were present in the innermost part of the Temple, even though they could not be seen by the people at large, or, for that matter, by anyone other than the High Priest, when he entered the Holy of Holies once a year, on Yom Kippur . . . The fact that [the scribe] seems to have felt compelled to insist in this manner that the Ark was still present in the Temple in his day . . . indicates that he must have had to contend with a prevalent and persistent doubt of this, a doubt founded in all likelihood upon actual fact.(11)

Nor was this all. The very next verse of the same chapter of the book of Kings insisted:

There was nothing in the Ark except the two stone tablets Moses had placed in it . . . the tablets of the covenant which Yahweh had made with the Israelites when they came out of the land of Egypt; they are still there today.(12)

And the book of Deuteronomy, written at the same time, said almost exactly the same thing the tablets of stone were placed in the Ark by Moses, 'and there they have remained ever since'.(13) Morgenstern's analysis of these words was that they 'must have been inserted for some particular purpose'.(14) And, after referring to the original Hebrew text, he concluded that this purpose could only have been to provide: a direct and positive affirmation, almost, it would seem, in the face of a doubt or question, that the tablets of the Ten Commandments were still present in the Ark in the days . . . of the author of this verse.(15)

Deuteronomy and the first book of Kings had, of course, dealt with widely different periods of Israelite history. Crucially, however and the point is so important that it will bear repetition they had both been compiled at the same time. That time, as I had already established, had been the reign of King Josiah, i.e. from 640 to 609 BC. My curiosity aroused, I turned to the typescript in which I had set down all the biblical references to the Ark. I remembered that there were very few in the whole of the Old Testament which related to the period after the death of Solomon. Now I discovered that there were in fact only two: one had been written during Josiah's reign; the other quoted the words of Josiah himself; and both appeared on the last page of my document.

JOSIAH AND JEREMIAH

I had already come across Josiah in my research. When I had been investigating the antiquity of the religious customs of the black Jews of Ethiopia I had learned that it had been during his reign that the institution of sacrifice had finally and conclusively been centralized on Jerusalem and banned in all other locations (see Chapter 6). Since the Falashas themselves still practised sacrifice in Ethiopia (having altars in all their villages), I had concluded in my notebook that their ancestors must have been converted to Judaism at a time when it was still acceptable for those far away from the:

centralized national sanctuary to practise local sacrifice. This would suggest that the conversion took place before King Josiah's ban i.e. no later than the seventh century BC.

My research had moved on into areas that I had not even dreamt of when I had originally written those words in 1989, and now I was confronted by a peculiarly interesting set of circumstances. Sitting in my hotel room in Jerusalem in October 1 1990 I therefore opened my notebook again and listed the following points:

In I Kings 8 and Deuteronomy there are signs of efforts being made to convince people that the Ark was still in its place in the Temple; this looks like an attempt to cover up the truth i.e. that the relic was in fact no longer there. The relevant passages were written in the time of King Josiah. From this I conclude that the Ark may have been removed from the Temple during Josiah's reign; it is more likely by far, however, that its loss was discovered then but that it had actually occurred somewhat earlier. Why? Because Josiah was a zealous reformer who sought to emphasize the paramount importance of the Temple in Jerusalem and because the raison d' e of the Temple was as 'an house of rest for the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord'. It is virtually inconceivable that such a monarch would have permitted the ultimate symbol of Judaism, the sign and the seal of Yahweh's presence on earth, to be taken out of the Holy of Holies. The logical deduction, therefore, is that the Ark must have been spirited away before Josiah came to power i.e. before 640 BC. The religious customs of the Falashas include local sacrifice, a practice that was only conclusively banned during Josiah's reign. On the basis of this and other data it has been my opinion for some time that the ancestors of the Falashas must have migrated to Ethiopia before 640 BC. Surely these matters cannot be unconnected?

The chain of evidence looked convincing: the Ark was removed from the Temple before 640 BC; the ancestors of the Falashas migrated to Ethiopia before 640 BC; was it therefore not reasonable to assure that the ancestors of the Falashas might have taken the Ark with them? This struck me as a fairly logical hypothesis. It did not, however, establish when before 640 BC the supposed migration from Jerusalem had taken place. Neither did it entirely rule out the possibility that the Ark could have been removed during Josiah's reign. Given the known religious integrity and traditionalism of that monarch the latter notion looked like a very long shot indeed. Nevertheless it had to be considered if only because, as I already knew (see previous chapter), certain Jewish legends had furnished him with a valid motive. In the last years of his reign, those legends said, he had foreseen the destruction of the Temple by the Babylonians and had hidden 'the Holy Ark and all its appurtenances in order to guard them against desecration at the hands of the enemy.(16) Moreover he was believed possibly by miraculous means to have concealed the relic 'in its own place'.(17) I was now as satisfied as I ever would be that the Ark had not been buried in the Temple Mount or anywhere else in the Holy Land. Nevertheless I still had to ask myself: was this possible? Could Josiah really have foreseen the fate of the Temple and taken steps to safeguard the Ark? I looked into this scenario but concluded that, unless the Jewish king had possessed a truly remarkable gift of prescience, there was just no way that he could have predicted the events of 598-587 BC. He died in 609 BC, five years before Nebuchadnezzar the author of Jerusalem's destruction inherited the Babylonian throne.(18) Moreover, Nebuchadnezzar's predecessor Nabopolassar had shown little or no military interest in Israel and had concentrated instead on wars with Assyria and Egypt.(19) The historical background to Josiah's reign therefore did not support the theory that he might have concealed the Ark of the Covenant. More damning by far, however, was the very last mention of the sacred relic in the Old Testament, which cropped up in a passage in the second book of Chronicles a passage that described Josiah's campaign to restore traditional values to Temple worship:

Josiah removed all the abominations throughout the territories belonging to the sons of Israel . . . And he set the priests in their charges, and . . . said unto the Levites that taught all Israel, which were holy unto the Lord, 'Put the Holy Ark in the house which Solomon the son of David king of Israel did build; it shall not be a burden upon your shoulders.'(20)

It was immediately obvious to me that these few short verses, particularly the words emphasized in italics above, were of vital importance to my quest. Why? Quite simply because Josiah would have had no need to ask the Levites to put the Ark in the Temple if it had already been there. Two inescapable conclusions emerged from this:

(1) The king himself could not have been responsible for the removal of the relic because he plainly thought that it had been taken by its traditional bearers, the Levites; and (2) the date of the Ark's disappearance from the Temple could now be fixed to some time before Josiah had made this little speech.

And when exactly had that speech been made? Happily the book of Chronicles provided a very precise answer to this question: 'in the eighteenth year of the reign of Josiah'(21) in other words in 622 BC.(22) What Chronicles did not do, however, was give any indication at all that the Levites had complied with the king's order; indeed, far from the colourful ceremony that one might have expected to accompany any reinstallation of the Ark in the Temple, there was no follow-up either in this book or in any other part of the Bible to Josiah's strange command. On the contrary, it was clear that his words had fallen on deaf ears or on the ears of people who were not in a position to obey them. Chronologically, as I have already observed, Josiah's speech contained the last reference to the Ark of the Covenant in the whole of the Old Testament. I now turned to examine the penultimate reference. This occurred in the book of Jeremiah, in a chapter composed by Jeremiah himself around the year 626 BC,(23) and took the form of a prophetic utterance addressed to the people of Jerusalem:

And when you have increased and become many in the land, then it is Yahweh who speaks no one will ever say again 'Where is the Ark of the Covenant of Yahweh?' There will be no thought of it, no memory of it, no regret for it, no making of another. When that time comes, Jerusalem shall be called: 'The throne of Yahweh'; all nations will gather there in the name of Yahweh and will no longer follow the dictates of their own stubborn hearts.(24)

Like Josiah, I knew that Jeremiah had been credited in certain Jewish legends and in the apocryphal book of Maccabees with hiding the Ark (in his case on Mount Nebo immediately before the destruction of the Temple see previous chapter). The words quoted above, however, had infinitely greater value as historical testimony than the legends or the Apocrypha because they had been spoken at a known date by a real person, Jeremiah himself.(25) Moreover, in the context of everything else that I had learned, there could be no doubt about the meaning of these words, or about their wider implications. To put matters as plainly as possible, they corroborated the impression given in Josiah's speech that the Ark was no longer in the Temple by 622 BC and they pushed back to at least 626 BC the likely date at which it had gone missing. I say at least to 626 BC because that, as noted above, was the year in which Jeremiah had uttered his prophecy. It was clear, however, that in doing so he had been responding, at least in part, to some prevalent and probably by then quite long-established anguish over the loss of the Ark. This was the only possible explanation for the verse which stated: 'And when you have increased and become many in the land, then... no one will ever say again "Where is the Ark of the Covenant of Yahweh?" Obviously if people had not been saying such things in 626 BC, and for some considerable while beforehand, then there would have been no need for Jeremiah to have made such a remark. In reaching this judgment I was pleased to discover that I had the full support of one of the world's leading biblical scholars, Professor Menahem Horan of Jerusalem's Hebrew University. In his authoritative treatise on Temples and Temple Service in Ancient Israel, this learned academic had considered the passage in question and had reached the following conclusion:

This verse follows upon words of consolation and itself contains a message of consolation and mercy. What the prophet promises here is that in the good days to come there will no longer be any need for the Ark implying that its absence should no longer cause any grief. These words would, of course, be devoid of any significance if the Ark [had] still ... been inside the Temple at the time.(26)

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 ac. 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 BC(32) '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: