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

the religion of Solomon could only have entered Ethiopia from the west through Egypt and the Sudan along the ancient and well-travelled trade routes provided by the Nile and Takazze rivers.

For some time before reaching that conclusion I had been profoundly dissatisfied with the large body of academic opinion which held that the Falashas were the descendants of Jews from southern Arabia who had arrived in Ethiopia after AD 70 (see Chapter 6). Now, as I followed up the bibliography that the social anthropologist Shalva Well had dictated to me in Jerusalem, I discovered that a number of other theories had been put forward to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy. Though repeatedly ridiculed by the masters of Ethiopian studies like Professor Edward Ullendorff,(25) some of the dissenting voices had suggested that the ancestors of the Falashas could well have been converted to Judaism by migrants from the Jewish colony on the island of Elephantine.(26) No doubt there had been extensive commercial and cultural contacts between Yemen and Ethiopia during this period; the reality was, however, that several quite substantial Jewish communities had been established in Egypt for hundreds of years before any Jews had settled in south Arabia. Given the profoundly Old Testament character of Falasha religion, therefore, logic suggested that the Jewish faith must have been carried south-eastwards from Egypt and into Ethiopia in a gradual process of 'cultural diffusion'.(27) To be sure, there were no absolutely unassailable historical facts linking the Falashas to Elephantine. I did, however, come across a great many tantalizing clues and coincidences which seemed to me to be highly suggestive of such a link. All the evidence was circumstantial and none of it actually proved my theory that the Ark had reached Ethiopia in the fifth century BC after spending two hundred years in the Jewish Temple on Elephantine. Viewed in the context of everything else that I had learned, however in Israel, in Egypt and in Ethiopia itself my latest findings took on a different and entirely more persuasive aspect. Set out below, as I recorded them in my notebook, are the principal conclusions that I reached and the evidence on which they were based:

1 The fact that the Jewish community at Elephantine practised sacrifice and that it continued to do so long after King Josiah's reforms is surely highly significant. One of the proofs of the antiquity of Judaism in Ethiopia is the extremely archaic character of Falasha religion, in which animal sacrifice of precisely the kind carried out at Elephantine plays a crucial role.(28) This adds weight to the hypothesis that the Falashas are the 'cultural descendants' of Jewish migrants from Elephantine and therefore provides strong support for the thesis that the Ark of the Covenant may have been brought to Ethiopia from that island. 2 In its heyday the Jewish Temple on Elephantine had its own well established priesthood. In the vowel-less language of the papyri these priests are referred to as KHN.(29) This word, of course, becomes kahen when the vowels 'a' and 'e' are added. Falasha priests are also called Kahen.(30) 3 One of the names given to the Jewish Temple on Elephantine was MSGD.(31) It meant 'place of prostration'.(32) To this day the Falashas in Ethiopia have no synagogues; neither do they have a temple; they do, however, call their simple houses of worship Mesgid(33) (i.e. MSGD with the vowels 'e' and 1' added). In this context it is also worthy of note that it was exactly in a prostrate position, knees to the ground, that King Solomon once prayed before the Ark of the Covenant of Yahweh.(34) 4 In his interview with me in Jerusalem Raphael Hadane said that the Jewish Temple built by his forefathers 'at Aswan' had been exempted from a great destruction that had been inflicted upon Egyptian temples by a 'foreign king':

'he did not destroy our temple. So when the Egyptians saw that only the Jewish temple was not destroyed they suspected that we were on the side of the invader. Because of this they started to fight against us and they destroyed our temple and we were forced to flee.'

In 525 BC a foreign king did invade Egypt and did indeed destroy many temples.(35) His name was Cambyses and he was the ruler of the expansionist Persian Empire that had been founded by his father Cyrus the Great. The Elephantine papyri preserve this recollection of him:

when Cambyses came into Egypt he found this [Jewish] Temple built. They [the Persians] knocked down all the temples of the gods of Egypt, but no one did any damage to this Temple.(36)

The Persians remained in power in Egypt until very close to the end of the fifth century BC. During this period the Jews on Elephantine co-operated closely with them. It was after their protection had been effectively removed that the Jewish Temple on that island was finally destroyed.(37) Raphael Hadane's folk traditions about the origins Of the Falashas are therefore borne out by established historical facts. 5 Hadane also reported that his people especially venerated the island of Tana Kirkos the same island to which I was told the Ark had been brought in the fifth century BC. Moreover, Memhir Fisseha, the Christian priest whom I interviewed on that island, told me that the Ark had been kept there 'inside a tent' for eight hundred years before being taken to Axum.(38) It seems to me hardly surprising that a tent or 'tabernacle' might have been used on Tana Kirkos to shelter the Ark. If my theory is correct then the Jews who brought the relic there had just experienced the destruction of their own Temple on Elephantine and would have known also of the earlier destruction of Solomon's Temple by Nebuchadnezzar. They could well have decided that it was time to abandon formal temples for ever and to return to the pure tradition of the desert wanderings when the Ark had always been housed in a tent. 6 Last but not least, Raphael Hadane told me that the ancestors of the Falashas reached Ethiopia not only by way of Aswan (i.e. Elephantine) but also that they passed through the city of Meroe 'where they remained for a short while'. These same two places were also named by Solomon Alemu, the Falasha priest whom I interviewed at the village of Anbober in January 1990. Can it be a coincidence that, after being lost to history for more than 1,500 years, the ruins of Meroe were finally unearthed by guess who? Answer: they were discovered in 1772 by the Scottish explorer James Bruce.(39)

THE LAND OF THE DESERTERS

All this, I felt, very strongly suggested that I was on the right track and the fact that the site of ancient Meroe had been discovered by none other than my old friend James Bruce only served to quicken my enthusiasm for the chase. The Scottish explorer, I was sure, had made his epic journey to Ethiopia in order to locate the Ark of the Covenant (see Chapter 7). How appropriate therefore that he should also have located the fabled city through which the sacred relic had passed on its journey to the Abyssinian highlands. But had it really passed that way? There was still, it seemed to me, one vital question that I had not yet satisfactorily answered: why should the Jews of Elephantine have migrated to the south with the Ark of the Covenant after they left the island? Why not head north back towards Israel, for example? I found that there were several possible explanations for this, all of which could have played a role. For a start, by the fifth century BC, the Jews in Jerusalem had got used to living without the Ark. Solomon's Temple was long gone and a new one had been built to replace it. This Second Temple, furthermore, was administered by an entrenched priesthood which would definitely not have welcomed competitors from Elephantine. By the same token, the Elephantine Jews would have felt alien and out of place in the theological environment afforded by Jerusalem in the fifth century BC. Religious thinking had moved on, God was no longer thought of as the quasi-corporeal deity who had dwelled 'between the cherubims', and the forms of worship in which the Ark had once occupied centre stage had been largely abandoned. The return of the relic would, therefore, have led to many potentially catastrophic problems. It would have been quite obvious to the Elephantine priesthood that in order to avoid these problems they would have to stay away from Jerusalem. But where could they go instead? Clearly, they could not remain in Egypt, since the Egyptians had turned against them and destroyed their Temple. Nor, for the same reason, could they have been sure of safe passage if they had chosen to travel north in order to leave that country. A logical solution, therefore, would have been to turn towards the south. It was not without good reason that the Governor of Aswan and Elephantine was titled 'Governor of the Door of the Southern Countries'.(40) In order to take their precious relic to safety the Jews would only have needed to open that metaphorical 'door' and head off into those 'Southern Countries', which were known collectively as 'Ethiopia' a Greek word meaning 'burnt faces' applied at that time to all areas in which dark-skinned people lived.(41) The fugitives would by no means have been venturing forth into a terrifying terra incognita. On the contrary, there was direct evidence that members of the Jewish community had been involved in military expeditions far to the south as early as the sixth century BC.(42) Furthermore, I discovered well documented instances of previous migrations migrations that had not necessarily involved Jews but that had seen large numbers of people from the Aswan area travelling and settling in 'the Southern Countries'. For example, Herodotus, the 'father of History', reported that four days' journey beyond Elephantine the river Nile ceased to be navigable:

You will then disembark and travel along the bank for forty days, for there are sharp rocks in the Nile and many reefs through which you will be unable to sail. Having marched through this country in forty days, you will embark again in another boat and sail for twelve days, and then you will come to a great city, the name of which is Meroe. This city is said to be the mother of all Ethiopia... From this city, making a voyage of the same length of sailing as you did from Elephantine to the mother city of the Ethiopians, you will come to the land of the Deserters . . . These were two hundred and forty thousand Egyptians, fighter Egyptians, who revolted from the Egyptians and joined the Ethiopians . . . . in the time of King Psammetichus. When these people had settled among the Ethiopians, the Ethiopians became more civilised, through learning the manner of the Egyptians. For four months of travel space, then, sailing and road, beyond its course in Egypt, the Nile is a known country. If you add all together, you will find that it takes four months of journeying from Elephantine to these Deserters of whom I spoke.(43)

I said earlier that the mass exodus of 'the Deserters' from Elephantine had not necessarily involved Jews, and I could find no proof that it had. Herodotus had stated very clearly, however, that this exodus had occurred in the time of the Pharaoh Psammetichus (595-589 BC).(44) I was therefore excited to learn from an impeccable source that 'Jews had been sent out as auxiliaries to fight in the army of Psammetichus against the King of the Ethiopians.'(45) On the basis of this well documented historical fact it did not seem unreasonable to conclude that there might indeed have been some Jews amongst the Deserters. Another aspect of the Herodotus report which I found intriguing was that it made specific mention of Meroe through which, according to Raphael Hadane, the forefathers of the Falashas had passed on their way to Abyssinia. Moreover, Herodotus had gone to considerable lengths to explain that his 'Deserters' had lived a full fifty-six days' sail beyond Meroe. If this journey had been made on the Atbara river, which flows into the Nile just to the north of Meroe (and into which, in turn, the Takazze also flows) then it would have brought the traveller as far as the borders of modern Ethiopia, and perhaps across those borders.(46) Herodotus had written his report in the fifth century BC. It followed that if a group of Jews bearing the Ark of the Covenant had chosen to flee southwards from Elephantine in that same century then they would have passed through 'known country' almost all the way to Lake Tana. Moreover, simple logic suggested that the Abyssinian highlands could have been an attractive destination for them cool and well watered, these green mountains would surely have looked like a Garden of Eden by comparison with the deserts of the Sudan.

BEYOND THE RIVERS OF CUSH

Could the fugitives from Elephantine have had foreknowledge of this 'garden beyond the wilderness'? Was it possible that in making their journey to the south they might not only have been travelling through 'known country' but also going towards a land in which they already had kin and co-religionists? As my research progressed I did find evidence to suggest that this was indeed possible and that Jews could well have ventured into Abyssinia at dates even earlier than the fifth century BC. Part of this evidence was biblical. Though I knew that the use of the word 'Ethiopia' in the Scriptures could not automatically be assumed to refer to the country now going by that name, I also knew that there were circumstances in which it might have done. As noted above, 'Ethiopia' is a Greek word meaning 'burnt faces'. In the earliest Greek editions of the Bible, the Hebrew term 'Cush' was translated as 'Ethiopia' and was used to refer, as one leading authority put it, to 'the entire Nile Valley south of Egypt, including Nubia and Abyssinia'.(47) What this meant was that biblical references to 'Ethiopia' might or might not refer to Abyssinia proper. Likewise, in English translations that had reverted to the use of the word 'Cush', Abyssinia might or might not have been implied. In this context it seemed to me at least worthy of note that Moses himself had married an 'Ethiopian woman'(48) according to an undeniably ancient verse in the book of Numbers. Added to this was the curious testimony of the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus supported by several Jewish legends which asserted that between his fortieth and eightieth years the prophet had lived for some time in 'Ethiopia'.(49) Other passages in the Scriptures also referred to 'Ethiopia'/ 'Cush'. Many were plainly irrelevant to my interests. Some, however, were intriguing and raised the possibility that the scribes responsible for them had not had Nubia or any part of the Sudan in mind but rather the mountainous land in the Horn of Africa that we call 'Ethiopia' today. One such, with which I was already familiar, occurred in the second chapter of the book of Genesis and referred to the rivers that flowed out of the Garden of Eden: 'And the name of the second river is Gihon; the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia.'(50) A glance at a map showed me that there was a very real sense in which the Blue Nile, sweeping out from Lake Tana in a wide loop, did indeed compass 'the whole land of Ethiopia'. Moreover, as I had been aware for some time,(51) the twin springs regarded as the source of that great river are known to this day as Giyon by the Ethiopians themselves.(52) Another interesting passage occurred in Psalm 68, described by Jon D. Levenson, Associate Professor of the Hebrew Bible in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, as 'one of the oldest pieces of Israelite poetry'.(53) This psalm included a cryptic reference to the Ark of the Covenant(54) and also made the following strange prediction: 'Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.'(55) I could not help but wonder why Ethiopia had been given prominence in this way as a likely candidate for conversion to the religion of Israel. Unfortunately, there was nothing in the psalm itself which helped to answer this question. However, in a passage written somewhat later by the prophet Amos (whose ministry lasted from 783 to 743 BC),(56) there were indications that something so momentous had happened in Ethiopia/Cush that the inhabitants of that distant land were now to be regarded as being on a par with the 'Chosen People' of Israel. Three different translations of the same verse (Amos 9:7) help to illustrate what I mean:

Are ye not as Are not you Are not you children of the and the Cushites Israelites Ethiopians unto all the same to like Cushites me, o children me, sons of to me? says of Israel? Israel? it the Lord. (New saith the is Yahweh who English Lord. (King James speaks. (Jerusalem Bible) Authorized Bible) Version)

While I realized that it would be possible to interpret this verse in another way i.e. to understand from it that the children of Israel were no longer to be accorded any special privileges by Yahweh it seemed to me that the more obvious reading also had to be considered. By the eighth century BC, when Amos was prophesying, was it not conceivable that there could already have been a flow of Hebrew migrants southwards through Egypt and into the highlands of Abyssinia? There was no proof for this admittedly wild speculation. It was an undeniable fact, however, that out of all the vast swath of territory that Amos could have been referring to when he spoke of Ethiopia/Cush, only one specific area was known to have adopted the Judaic faith in antiquity (and, moreover, to have adhered to that faith right up until the twentieth century AD). That area, of course, lay in the vicinity of Lake Tana, the Falasha homeland since time immemorial. The next biblical passage that caught my attention was in the book of Zephaniah, and had been written at some time between 640 and 622 BC(57) i.e. during the reign of King Josiah. Again I found it helpful to view side by side three separate translations of the same verse (Zephaniah 3:10), which supposedly quoted the words of the Lord:

From beyond From beyond the From beyond the the rivers of banks of the rivers of Cush my Ethiopia my rivers of suppliants of suppliants, Ethiopia my the Dispersion even the suppliants will shall bring me daughter of my bring me tribute. (New dispersed, offerings. English Bible) shall bring (Jerusalem mine offering. Bible) (King James Authorized Version)

Since there was absolutely no doubt that this verse had been written before 622 BC and thus well before the exile and captivity of the Israelites in Babylon it was pertinent to ask the following questions:

1 When Zephaniah had referred to a 'dispersion' what event exactly had he been talking about? 2 Which part of biblical 'Cush' had he had in mind when he had envisaged the suppliants of the Lord bringing offerings 'from beyond the rivers of Ethiopia'?

In answer to the first question, I had to conclude that the prophet had been talking about some kind of voluntary popular migration, because there had been no enforced 'dispersion' of the Hebrews from the Holy Land prior to Zephaniah's time. As regards the second question, the reader will recall that the biblical term 'Cush' connoted 'the entire Nile Valley, south of Egypt, including Nubia and Abyssinia'. The verse quoted above, however, contained internal evidence which helped to narrow down the precise geographical area that Zephaniah had been speaking of. That evidence lay in the phrase variously translated as 'beyond the rivers of Ethiopia'. Since more than one river was involved, the Nile Valley as far south as Meroe could be ruled out. East of Meroe, however, flowed the Atbara, and beyond that the Takazze, while to the south (roughly parallel to the Atbara) the Blue Nile rushed down from Abyssinia. These, surely, were the rivers of Ethiopia, and beyond all of them lay Lake Tana. The possibility that the prophet had had the traditional area of Falasha settlement in mind when he had written this intriguing verse could not, therefore, be entirely dismissed. My feeling that there might be something to this speculation strengthened when I ran a computer check and discovered that the phrase 'beyond the rivers of Ethiopia/Cush' had only been used on one other occasion in the entire Bible. The King James Authorized Version translated the relevant passage (from Chapter 18 of the book of Isaiah) as follows:

Woe to the land shadowing with wings, which is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia: That sendeth ambassadors by the sea, even in vessels of bulrushes upon the waters, saying, Go, ye swift messengers, to a nation scattered and peeled, to a people terrible from their beginning hitherto; a nation meted out and trodden down, whose land the rivers have spoiled!(58)

The other translations of the same passage, which I reproduce below side by side, added further shades of meaning to an already rich and haunting message:

Country of whirring wings There is a land of beyond the rivers of Cush, sailing ships, a land who send ambassadors by beyond the rivers of sea, in papyrus skiffs Cush which sends its over the waters. Go, swift envoys by the Nile, messengers to a people journeying on the waters tall and bronzed, to a in vessels of reed. Go, nation always feared, a swift messengers, go to a people mighty and people tall and smooth- masterful, in the country skinned, to a people criss-crossed with dreaded near and far, a rivers. (Jerusalem Bible) nation strong and proud, whose land is scoured by rivers. (New English Bible)

Falling as it did in Chapter 18 of the book of Isaiah, it was certain that this passage had been written by Isaiah himself. (59) This meant, of course, that it could be accurately dated to his lifetime which, as I already knew,(60) had been a long one, spanning the reigns of Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah (respectively 740-736 BC, 736-716 BC and 716-687 BC).(61) In fact, the prophet had almost certainly survived into the reign of Manasseh, the monarch whose idolatry, I was now quite certain, had led to the removal of the Ark of the Covenant from the Holy of Holies of the Jerusalem Temple. I was therefore interested to learn of a strong and ancient Jewish tradition which held that Isaiah had died a martyr at the hands of Manasseh himself(62) What I found even more interesting was the way in which the prophet had spoken of the mysterious land that lay 'beyond the rivers of Cush'. The King James Authorized Version of the Bible suggested that he had cursed this land but the more recent translations conveyed no such impression. All three renderings, however, did agree on its geographical character: not only was it located 'beyond' rivers, but also it was itself 'spoiled', or 'scoured', or 'criss-crossed' by rivers. In my view, this information made it virtually certain that Isaiah had been referring to Abyssinia and to the area of traditional Falasha settlement there. The high country around Lake Tana is indeed 'criss-crossed' by rivers (which also spoil and scour it by carrying away huge quantities of its precious topsoil). There were other clues as well:

1 The inhabitants of the land were said to be tall and 'peeled', or 'smooth-skinned', or in the authoritative Jerusalem Bible translation 'bronzed'. This, I thought, was a description that could easily be applied to modern Ethiopians, whose glowing, chestnut-brown complexions are quite distinct from the 'black', negroid skin tones found in other African countries. 2 The land was curiously described as 'shadowing with wings' (or more directly as a 'country of whirring wings'). This, I felt, might very well be a reference to the giant locust swarms that, every decade or so, lay waste Ethiopia, overshadowing the fields of the peasants and filling the air with a dry whirring sound that sends shivers down the spine. 3 Finally Isaiah had made specific mention of the fact that the messengers of the land travelled in 'vessels of bulrushes' or in 'papyrus skiffs', or in 'vessels of reed'. To this day, as I was very well aware, those who dwell around the vast inland sea of Lake Tana make extensive use of papyrus-reed boats known as tankwas.(63)

All in all, therefore, I felt that the biblical data did lend a considerable degree of credibility to the view that some kind of relationship might have been established between Israel and the Abyssinian highlands at a very early date. Moses's Ethiopian wife, Isaiah's 'people tall and bronzed', and Zephaniah's 'dispersed' suppliants who would return to Jerusalem 'from beyond the rivers of Cush' all made it very difficult to resist the suspicion that Hebrews had been travelling to Ethiopia, and probably settling there, long before the fifth century BC. If, as I suspected, the Jewish priests of Elephantine had brought the Ark of the Covenant to the island of Tana Kirkos in that same century then it followed that they would have been coming to a land in which their co-religionists had already established a secure foothold.