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

28 Exodus 16:35. There has been a great deal of scholarly debate about whether the Israelites really did spend forty years in the desert (making Moses approximately 120 years old when the wanderings ended) or whether the period was shorter than this. Likewise the vast numbers of the Israelites given in the Bible (600,000 men on foot, plus their families) have been hotly disputed on ecological grounds since Sinai could never have sustained such a population. Both these points are irrelevant to my argument. For the record, however, I suspect that the Israelites spent a good deal less than forty years in the wilderness: four years sounds far more likely. And I suspect that their numbers were small a few hundreds or thousands at the most.

29 Numbers 31:2-11.

30 Numbers 22:1.

31 Numbers 20:28.

32 Numbers 20:24-8.

33 Numbers 27:12-23.

34 Deuteronomy 34:4-6, 10-12.

35 Deuteronomy 31:14-15.

36 Joshua 3:3-4 (King James Authorized Version translation). Emphasis added.

37 Joshua 3:6, 14-17; Joshua 4:18, 21, 23.

38 Joshua 6:11, 13-16, 20-1.

39 E.g. Joshua 7:3 ff. which tells of battle being started without the Ark and of the resulting defeat; Joshua 7:6 which inserts the Ark back into the narrative; and Joshua 8:1 It which tells of the ultimate Israelite victory. See also Joshua 10:10 ff., which almost certainly recounts the participation of the Ark in another significant victory. Similarly Joshua 10:29-30 ff., especially verse 42.

40 See, for example, Joshua 18:1-10; 19:51; 21:2; 22:9; Judges 18:31; 21:19; and 1 Samuel 1:3-9 and 24; 3:21.

41 See Julian Morgenstern, 'The Ark, the Ephod and the Tent of Meeting', Hebrew Union College Annual, vol. XVII, 1942-3, reprinted by KTAV Publishing House, New York, 1968, pp. 235-6: 'It [the Ark] was not carried into ordinary battles.'

42 1 Samuel 4:1-2 (amalgam of King James Authorized Version and Jerusalem Bible translations).

43 1 Samuel 4:3 (Jerusalem Bible translation).

44 I Samuel 4:4-5 (King James Authorized Version translation).

45 1 Samuel 4:6-9 (Jerusalem Bible translation).

46 1 Samuel 4:10-11.

47 1 Samuel 4:13, 15-17 (King James Authorized Version translation); and 1 Samuel 4:18-19 (Jerusalem Bible translation).

48 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edn, 1991, vol. XIV, p. 786.

49 1 Samuel 4:22.

50 1 Samuel 5, complete text.

51 1 Samuel 6:1.

52 1 Samuel 6:2 (Jerusalem Bible translation).

53 1 Samuel 6:7 (King James Authorized Version translation).

54 1 Samuel 6:12 (King James Authorized Version translation).

55 1 Samuel 6:13-14, 19 (King James Authorized Version translation).

56 See for example 1 Samuel 6:19, Jerusalem Bible translation. See also the same verse in the New English Bible, Oxford and Cambridge University Presses, 1970, p. 308, and in the Holy Bible: New International Version, The Bible Societies/ Hodder & Stoughton, UK, 1988. This latter states: 'But God struck down some of the men of Bethshemesh, putting seventy of them to death because they had looked into the Ark of the Lord.' See also Handbook to the Bible, Lion Publishing, London, 1988, p. 234.

57 Two of the biblical translations (Jerusalem Bible and New English Bible) imply that the men were killed because they had not rejoiced when they saw the Ark of Yahweh; the King James Authorized Version and the New International Version, on the other hand, specifically say that they were killed because they looked into the Ark. This latter interpretation is supported in the Handbook to the Bible, op. cit., p. 234 and by Julian Morgenstern in 'The Ark, the Ephod and the Tent of Meeting', op. cit., p. 241.

58 1 Samuel 6:20 (New English Bible translation).

59 1 Samuel 6:15.

60 1 Samuel 7:1. A Christian church dedicated to 'the Virgin Mary Ark of the Covenant' now stands at Kiriath-Jearim. See Chapter 3 above.

61 1 Samuel 7:1. The Jerusalem Bible states that a certain Eleazar was appointed `to guard the Ark of Yahweh'. The New English Bible states that he was its 'custodian'.

62 Julian Morgenstern, 'The Ark, the Ephod and the Tent of Meeting', op. cit., p. 241, footnote 143.

63 See Jerusalem Bible, op. cit., Chronological Table, p. 343.

64 2 Samuel 6:3-4; 6-7.

65 2 Samuel 6:9-10 (New English Bible translation).

66 2 Samuel 6:10 (New English Bible translation).

67 2 Samuel 6:11 (Jerusalem Bible translation).

68 Louis Ginzberg, The Legnds of the Jews, op. cit., vol. VI, p. 275.

69 2 Samuel 6:12 (King James Authorized Version translation).

70 E.g. 1 Chronicles 15:15.

71 2 Samuel 6:15.

72 2 Samuel 6:5.

73 1 Chronicles 16:1. See also 1 Chronicles 17:45.

74 1 Chronicles 28:2.

75 Jerusalem Bible, op. cit., Chronological Table, p. 344.

76 1 Kings 6:38 states that the Temple took eleven years to build.

77 1 Kings 8:1, 3, 4, 5, 6 (amalgam of King James Authorized Version and Jerusalem Bible translations).

78 Some details of what is known about this mysterious disappearance are given in Chapter 1 above. The phrase 'thick darkness' is from 1 Kings 8:12.

79 See for example Professor Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?, Johnathan Cape, London, 1988, p. 156.

80 As in the case of Moses's insubordinate sister Miriam. See Numbers 12. This incident is discussed further in Chapter 13 below.

81 Exodus 12:40.

82 The date of the Exodus, which Moses led in his old age, is generally put at between 12500 and 1230 BC (see, for example, Jerusalem Bible, op. cit., Chronological Table, p. 343). For a discussion of the dates of Tutankhamen's short rule see Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, Tutankhamn: Life and Death of a Pharaoh, Penguin, London, 1989, p. 105.

83 Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, Tutankhamen, op. cit., pp. 15 and 20.

84 Exodus 25:11.

85 Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, Tutenkhamen, op. cit., p. 131. See also Nicholas Reeves, The Complete Tutankhamun, Thames & Hudson, London, 1990, pp. 102 and 10g. It is interesting to note that the sarcophagus itself also bore images of these tutelary deities in high relief see page 10y.

86 Exodus 25:18.

87 For a discussion see Geoffrey Wigoder (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of Judaism, Jerusalem Publishing House, Jerusalem, 1989, pp. 157-8.

88 Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, Tutankhamen, op. cit., p. 185.

89 Ibid., p. 185. See also John Anthony West, Ancint Egypt, Harrap Columbus, London, 1989, p. 268, and Jill Kamil, Luxor, Longman, London and New York, 1989, p. 28.

90 Alan Moorehead, The Blue Nile, Penguin, London, 1984, p. 17.

91 I Chronicles 15:15, Jerusalem Bible translation. The King James Authorized Version reads: 'And the children of the Levites bare the Ark of God upon their shoulders with the staves thereon, as Moses commanded.'

92 See, for example, Edward Ullendorff, 'Hebraic-Jewish Elements in Abyssinian (Monophysite) Christianity', Journal of Semitic Studies, vol. I, no. 3,1956, p. 223, footnote 6. Ullendorff says that tabot is 'derived from the Jewish Pal. Aramaic tebuta (tebota) which in turn is a derivation from the Hebrew tebah.'

93 E. A. Wallis Budge, The Queen of Sheba and her Only Son Menelik: being the 'Book of the Glory of Kings' (Kebra Nagast), Oxford University Press, 1932, pp. 14-15.

94 Ibid., p. 14.

95 I am grateful to Dr Kitchen for his help and advice at various stages of this project. I first came into contact with him after he met and was interviewed on 12 June 1989 by Caroline Lasko (a freelance researcher then working with me). He subsequently was kind enough to be available for further meetings and to write to me on various salient points. For his authoritative views on the ancient Egyptian origins of many aspects of early Judaism the reader is referred to his paper 'Some Egyptian Background to the Old Testament', Tyndale House Bulletin, no. 5-6, Cambridge, April 1960. As regards the Ark of the Covenant and its relationship to the arks from Tutankhamen's tomb, see in particular pp. 10-11.

96 E. A. Wallis Budge, From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, Oxford University Press, 1934, p. 40.

97 A. H. Sayce, Fresh Light from the Ancint Monumnts, Religious Tract Society, London, 1884, p. 67. See also p. 68.

98 Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, Tutankhamen, op. cit., p. 186. See also Shalom M. Paul and William G. Dever (eds), Archaeology, Keter Publishing House, Jerusalem, 1973, part III, p. 252: 'Some scholars have compared the Ark to the chests (the lower pan ofwhich was genera*, boat-shaped) which were brought out of the temple by the Egyptian priests at festivals, and on which statues of the gods were placed.' Emphasis added.

99 Julian Morgenstern, 'The Book of the Covenant', op. cit., p.121.

100 J. A. West,AncientEgypt, op. cit., p. 236.

101 Ibid.

102 Ibid.

103 Lady Flavia Anderson, The Ancient Sean: Fire from theSun,RILKO Books, London, 1987, pp. 113-14.

104 I made the following entry in my notebook: 'The arks carried in the Apet ceremonies though later transformed into chests initially took the form ofboats. It is therefore not difficult to see how the word tebah came to be used in biblical Hebrew for the ark of Noah and for Moses's ark of bullrushes. That a different name (Aron) was subsequently used for the Ark of the Covenant could simply be a function of the fact that the Ark itself had disappeared from Jerusalem by the time that the books of the Old Testament came to be officially codified and that the biblical scribes, setting down the oral history of the Jewish people, had been confused or uncertain about some of the key details of the religious tradition from which the lost relic had hailed. If my theory is correct, of course, it was not "lost" at all, but instead had been taken to Ethiopia where its original name (Taper or Tabot) has continued to be used right up to the present day.' I later discovered that the Scottish explorer James Bruce had considered similar issues in vol. I of his Travels. He passed through Luxor (then known to Europeans as Thebes) on his way to Ethiopia and speculated that the name 'Thebes' must have been derived from 'Theba, which was the Hebrew name for the Ark when Noah was ordered to build it Thou shalt "make thee an Ark (Theba) of gopher-wood". The figure of the temples in Thebes do not seem to be far removed from the idea given us of the Ark.' Though he did not proceed, as I had done, to link Tapet (the ancient Egyptian name for Thebes) to robot, I was intrigued that he followed this particular linguistic trail. It further convinced me that his principal aim in going to Ethiopia had been to search for the Ark of the Covenant and not, as he pretended, to discover the source of the Nile. See James Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile in the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771,1772 and 1773, Edinburgh, 1790, vol. I. pp. 394-5.

105 Geoffrey Wigoder (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Judaism, op. cit., p. 504.

106 Jerusalem Bible, op. cit., Chronological Table, p. 343.

107 Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, translated by H. St J. Thackeray, Heinemann, London, 1930, vol. IV, books I-IV, p. 253.

108 Ibid., pp. 257-9.

109 Acts 7:22.

110 Philo Judaeus, De Vita Mosis, translated by F. H. Colson, Heinemann, London, 1935, vol. VI, pp. 287-9.

111 This is attested to at some length in both Philo and Josephus, op. cit.

112 What we know about the life of Moses confirms that 'he had studied the various branches of Egyptian magic', E. A. Wallis Budge, From Fetish to God, op. cit., p. 8.

113 'All the pharaohs were magicians as part of their office', C. Jacq, Egyptian Magic, Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, Chicago, 1985, p. 12. And see in general pp. 9-13.

114 Acts 7:22.

115 Luke 24:19.

116 That knowledge of words of power is indeed referred to in the phrase 'mighty in words' rather, say, than oratory becomes clear when we remember that Moses later told Yahweh, 'never in my life have I been a man of eloquence.' The deity replied that the prophet should use his half-brother Aaron as his mouthpiece: 'I know that he is a good speaker.' Exodus 4:10-17.

117 E. A. Wallis Budge, Egyptian Magic, Kegan Paul, Trench, Tr London, 1901, p. 5.

118 Josephus, op. cit., footnote c, pp. 276-7. See also Jerusalem Bible, op. cit., footnote 3a, p. 63.

119 Exodus 3:2.

120 Exodus 3:7-10.

121 Exodus 3:13.

122 J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, Macmillan, London, 1987 edn, p. 261.

123 Exodus 3:14 and Exodus 3:6.

124 See Irving M. Zeitlin, Ancint Judaism, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1984, pp. 58-9. See also Handbook to the Bible, Lion Publishing, London, 1988, p. 157. The meaning of the Hebrew verb `to be' goes beyond 'to exist' and conveys the notion `to be actively present'. For a fuller discussion see F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds), The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 1354. See also Geoffrey Wigoder (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of Judaism, op. cit., pp. 289-90.

125 E.g. Exodus 4:20; Exodus 17:9.

126 Exodus 4:2.

127 Exodus 4:3-4.

128 E. A. Wallis Budge, Egyptian Magic, op. cit., p. 5, and From Fetish to God, op. cit., pp. 119 and 129.

129 Exodus 7:11-12.

130 Exodus 7:20-2.

131 Exodus 8:1-7.

132 Exodus 836-19.

133 Exodus 8:21-32.

134 Exodus 9:1-7.

135 Exodus 9:8-1 I.

136 Exodus 10:1-20; Exodus 10:21-3.

137 Exodus 12:23-30.

138 Exodus 12:31-3.

139 Exodus 14:21-2.

140 Exodus 14:23.

141 Exodus 14:7-9.

142 Budge, Egyptian Magic, op. cit., p. 10.

143 Budge, From Fetish to God, op. cit., p. 8.

144 Ibid., p. 43: 'It is impossible to think that the highest order of the priests did not possess esoteric knowledge which they guarded with the greatest care.'

145 See, for example, Lucie Lamy, Egyptian Mysteries, Thames & Hudson, London, 1981, p. 86.

146 Luciano Canfora, The Vanished Library: A Wonder of the Ancient World, Hutchinson, London, 1989, p. 21.

147 Herodotus, The History, David Green (trans.), University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1988, p. 132.

148 W. B. Emery, Archaic Egypt, Penguin, London, 1961, p. 206.

149 See the paper 'Mathematics and Astronomy' in J. R. Harris (ed.), The Legacy of Egypt, Oxford University Press, 1971.

150 This may be deduced from measurement of a variety of ancient Egyptian structures. Sir William Flinders Petrie, the nineteenth century archaeologist (who was highly sceptical in general of theories suggesting advanced knowledge in ancient Egypt) was satisfied that the proportions of the Great Pyramid at Giza (c. 2550 8c) 'expressed the transcendental number pi with very considerable precision'. See A. J. West, The Traveller's Key to Ancient Egypt: A Guide to the Sacred Places of Ancient Egypt, Harrap, London, 1987, p. 90.

151 Reported in Mystic Placer, Time-Life Books, Amsterdam, 1987, p. 65.

152 See R. El-Nadoury, 'The Legacy of Pharaonic Egypt', in Gneral History of Africa II, UNESCO, Paris, 1981.

153 See the paper on 'Medicine' in J. R. Harris (ed.), The Legacy of Egypt, op. cit.

154 See Chapter 5 above,

155 Quoted in Robert Lawlor, Sacred Geometry: Philosophy and Practice, Thames & Hudson, London, 1982.

156 See William Anderson, The Rise of the Gothic, Hutchinson, London, 1985, p. 65.

157 Dates from J. A. West, Ancint Egypt, op. cit., pp. 249-50. 158 Ibid., pp. 249-50.

159 Ibid., p. 252.

160 Ibid., p. 424-

161 J. R. Harris, 'Technology and Materials', in The Legacy of Egypt, op. cit., p. 103.

162 J. A. West, Ancient Egypt, op. cit., p. 251.

163 Ibid., p. 1 cog.

164 Quoted in ibid., p. 40.

165 Ibid., pp. 112-23, for all measurements and weights. See also A. J. Spencer, The Great Pyramid, P. J. Publications, London, 1989.

166 A. Abu Bakr, 'Pharaonic Egypt', in the UNESCO General History of Africa II, op. cit.

167 Mystic Places, op. cit., pp. 49-50.

168 Ibid., p. 62.

169 Ibid., p. 62. For a full and up-to-date presentation of the pyramidologists' point of view see Peter Lemesurier, The Great Pyramid Decoded, Element Books, Dorset, UK, 1989.

170 Peter Lemesurier, The Great Pyramid Decoded, op. cit., p. 7.

171 Mystic Places, op. cit., p. 59, and Lemesurier, op. cit., p. 3. In fact, as Lemesurier points out, the alignment is fractionally off true by nearly five minutes of arc, or one-twelfth of a degree. But this would be to ignore the astronomical evidence that the cause even of this minute error is to be found in the gradual movement of the earth's own axis rather than in any inaccuracy on the par1 of the building's original surveyors.

172 See Mystic Places, op. cit., P. 47;J. A. West, Ancient Egypt, op. cit., p. 123; and A. J. Spencer, The Great Pyramid, op. cit.

173 Herodotus, op. cit., 2. 125, p. 186.

174 Quoted in J. A. West, Ancient Egypt, op. cit., p. 107.

175 Ibid., Introduction, p. xi. As well as the sheer magnitude of the 1ask involved in building the Great Pyramid, other factors also contributed to my deepening suspicion that the ancient Egyptians must have known something that modern civilization did not. In the late nineteenth century, for example, Sir William Flinders Petrie, certainly the most eminen1 archaeologis1 of his generation, spent months at Giza carefully measuring the edifice principally with a view to demolishing some of the wilder speculations of the pyramidologists. This he largely succeeded in doing (he claimed subsequently that he had provided 'the ugly little fact which killed the beautiful theory'). However, even he was forced to admit on several occasions that some of the achievements of the pyramid's builders were quite baffling. Commenting on the precision with which the 115,000 ten-ton casing blocks were laid around 1he core masonry, he wrote: 'Merely to place such stones in exact contact would be careful work, bu1 to do so with cemen1 in the joint seems almost impossible; it is to be compared to the finest opticians' work on a scale of acres.' Petrie's remark is quoted in J. A. West's Ancint Egypt, op. cit., p. 90.

Chapter 13 Treasures of Darkness

1 Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hennes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind, Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 22-3.

2 See New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, Hamlyn, London, 1989, p. 28.

3 Ibid., p. 27. See also E. A. Wallis Budge, Egyptian Magic, Kegan Paul, Trench, Triibner, London, 1901, p. xi: 'the world itself came into existence through the utterance of a word by Thoth.' Soon after I had learned this it occurred to me tha1 the whole concept was eerily analogous to the well known biblical passage which stated: 'In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things came 10 be, not one thing had its being but through him' (John 1:1-3). Intrigued by this coincidence I looked further and discovered, to my considerable surprise, that the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures allowed a number of other close parallels to be drawn between Thoth, the pagan moon-god of the Egyptians, and Yahweh, the God of Moses. One of the most striking of these concerned the Ten Commandments given to Moses on Mount Sinai and supposedly inscribed on the tablets of stone that were contained within the Ark of the Covenant: 'Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image ... Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain ... Remember 1he sabbath day and keep it holy .. Honour thy father and thy mother ... Thou shalt not kill ... Thou shalt not commit adultery ... Thou shalt not steal ... Thou shalt not bear false witness ... Thou shal1 not covet thy neighbour's wife.' (Exodus 20:3-17). I had always thought that this exacting legal code was unique to early Judaic culture. This assumption, however, was overturned when I found the following remarkably similar formulae in Chapter CXXV of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead a chapter which consisted of a series of negative confessions 1hat the soul of 1he deceased was obliged 10 make before Thoth in his capacity as divine judge and scribe: 'Not have I despised god ...Not have I killed ... Not have I fornicated ... Not have I despoiled the things of the god ... not have I defiled the wife of a man ... Not have I cursed god . Not have I borne false witness' (see E. A. Walks Budge, The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Papyrus ofAni, British Museum Publications, London, 1895, pp. 195-204). Perhaps the most striking parallel of all, however, occurred in a rubric to one part of the Book of the Dead which stated: 'This chapter was found on an alabaster brick, under the feet of the Majesty of this venerable place, the God Thoth, and it was written by 1he God himself.' I already knew, of course, that the Ark of the Covenant had frequently been referred to in the Bible as the 'footstool of God' (e.g. 1 Chronicles 28:2) and that it had contained the stone Tablets of the Law written by Yahweh's own finger. I could therefore only conclude that the match between the thinking and behaviour of Yahweh and Thoth and also between the beliefs that people had held about the two deities was much too close to be entirely fortuitous. Neither, I reasoned, was it possible that the biblical passages had influenced the writers of the Book of the Dead since, of the two documents, the latter was by far the most ancient (some of its contents, I knew, went back as far as the fourth millennium BC; the most archaic sections of the Bible, by contrast, were at least 2,000 years younger).

4 Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes, op. cit., p. 33.

5 Ibid., p. 23. See also E. A. Wallis Budge, From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, Oxford University Press, 1934, pp. 121-2, and the New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, op. cit., p. 27.

6 New Larousse Encyclopaedia ofMythology, op. cit., p. 27.

7 John Anthony West, The Traveller's Key to Ancint Egypt: a Guide to the Sacred Places of Ancient Egypt, Harrap Columbus, London, 1987, Pp. 74-5.

8 E. A. Wallis Budge (trans.), The Egyptian Book of the Dead, op. cit., Introduction, p. cxviii.

9 E. A. Wallis Budge, From Fetish to God, op. cit., p. 157. See also

M. V. Seton-Williams, Egyptian Legends and Stones, Rubicon Press, London, 1990, p. 16.

10 This story is to be found in its fullest form in Plutarch, De 'side et Osiride. See M. V. Seton-Williams, op. cit., pp. 24-9. See also E. A. Wallis Budge, From Fetish to God, op. cit., pp. 177 ff.

11 W. B. Emery, Archaic Egypt, Penguin, London, 1987, p. 192.

12 E. A. Wallis Budge (trans.), The Egyptian Book of the Dead, op. cit., Introduction, pp. xii and xiii.

13 W. B. Emery, Archaic Egypt, op. cit., p. 38. Emphasis added.

14 16k1., P. 175-91.

15 Ibid., pp. 177 and 31.

16 Ibid., p. 26.

17 Instructions given to Sin on the day of creation by Marduk, chief figure in the Mesopotamian pantheon. Quoted in the New Larousse Encyclopaedia ofMythology, op. cit., p. 57.

18 Ibid.

19 E. A. Wallis Budge, From Fetish to God, op. cit., p. 155

20 W. B. Emery, Archaic Egypt, op. cit., p. 31.

21 This is Emery's view also. See ibid., p. 122-3.

22 Plato, Timaeus and Critics, Penguin Classics, London, 1977, p. 34).

23 Ibid., pp. 35-8 and 137-8.

24 Ibid., p. 38.

25 Ibid. See 'Appendix on Atlantis' by Sir Desmond Lee, p. 158.

26 Ibid., p. 158.

27 Ibid., Q. 40.

28 See Edmond Sollberger, The Babylonian Legend of the Flood, British Museum Publications, London, 1962. See also The Epic of Gilgamesh, Penguin Classics, London, 1960.

29 Peter Marshall, journey Through the Maldives, Camerapix Publishers International, London, 1991, p. 191.