One of the greatest mysteries of the Hebrew Bible involves the Ark of the Covenant:
the vessel of the stone tablets on which God inscribed the ten commandments,
imbued with incredible destructive powers.
The bible makes frequent and detailed reference to the extraordinary power of the ark,
but the object inexplicably vanishes from historical record sometime in the 6th or 7th century BCE.
Many questions remain, but insights from new scholarship, and a few ancient traditions,
expose the remarkable story of this mysterious ancient object.
The word “ark,” as it originally appeared in Hebrew, means a kind of container, or a simple boat,
and the “covenant” refers to the agreement Moses made with God
to have the Hebrews become his chosen people.
The ark of the covenant was built to house the ten commandments
as they were inscribed on two stone tablets.
The earliest reference to the ark occurs in Exodus 25, verse 10,
when God commands Moses to build him a “sanctuary” so that he can “dwell amongst” the Hebrews.
The ark was constructed, by divine specifications, at 1.2 meters long, and 76 cm tall and 76 cm wide.
It was made of acacia wood, a tree associated with the tree of life in mystical traditions,
and covered in gold, inside and out.
The lid was a solid gold slab, called the mercy seat,
with two cherubim angels on top with wings outstretched towards each other.
This feature was meant to emulate the two cherubim that were standing on opposite sides of God
when Moses encountered him on Mount Sinai.
God told Moses that he’d speak to him from between these cherubim,
and the bible often describes God appearing here as a vaporous cloud.
When God gave Moses the ten commandments,
he ordered him to place the stone tablets they were written on inside the ark.
God also commanded him to place inside of it a pot of manna and the staff of Moses’s brother, Aaron,
and to consecrate the sacred vessel with the oil of holy ointment.
The ark was to serve as a mobile sanctuary for the commandments of God,
and for the spirit of God himself, during the Hebrews’ 40-year exile in search of the promised land of Israel.
The ark was to be carried by the priests of the Levite tribe - the tribe of Moses -
on gold-coated, acacia wood poles slid through gold rings on its sides,
and was to be handled according to specific instructions from God.
When not travelling, the ark was placed in a portable fenced-in tent called the Tabernacle.
The ark was almost never opened in all its history,
and it was kept under a veil of badger skins and a blue cloth,
shielding onlookers from its supernatural radiance.
The ark glowed brilliantly at all times, and was frequently accompanied by clouds,
thought to be the vaporous presence of God.
During their period of exile, the Hebrew tribes used the ark to incredible effect
both as a weapon against hostile forces, and as a tool for manipulating the environment.
It was brought into battle in their wars against the Amorites, the Midianites, and the Philistines.
In Joshua 3, the river Jordan dried up under the feet of the priests carrying the ark across.
Later, the Hebrews marched the ark around the city of Jericho once a day for 7 days,
allegedly causing the stone walls to come crashing down when the priests sounded their horns (Joshua 6: 16-20).
The ark was also consulted as a divining tool before several important battles.
At the same time however, the ark was extremely dangerous,
and inflicted suffering and death upon those who approached it without great care.
Nadav and Avihu, the sons of the priest, Aaron,
brought a foreign flame in a metal incense burner to offer a sacrifice in the Tabernacle
and were engulfed by a burst of flame emanating “from the Lord” and killed.
King Uzziah was struck with leprosy when he too brought a foreign flame in a metal burner before the ark.
When Uzzah tried to steady the ark while it was being transported by ox-cart, he was immediately struck dead.
Jewish exegetical traditions tell of several instances in which the ark would levitate over its carriers,
or pick them up and throw them to the ground.
After a crushing military defeat at Ebenezer described in the book of Samuel,
the Hebrews lost the ark to the Philistines, who kept it for 7 months within their borders.
In all three cities it visited, its arrival coincided with great afflictions on the people.
There was an outbreak of mice and sores, or tumours, at Ashdod,
and an idol of the god Dagon was mysteriously laid prostrate before the ark,
with its head and hands broken off.
The people of Gath and Ekron were also afflicted by sores or tumours,
and many in Ekron were killed. (1 Samuel 5: 1-12. 1 Samuel 6).
The Philistines returned the ark to Israel in a spirit of apology,
and it was passed between several cities before landing in Jerusalem.
As it was passing through Beth-shemesh,
some of the men there made the mistake of approaching the ark in a profane manner,
and according to some translations, touching or looking inside of it,
and 70 of them were immediately killed by God.
The Ark passed through the care of a number of priests after the Hebrews settled the “promised land,”
and before the unification of the Kingdom of Israel under King David around 1000 BCE.
David decided to build a temple as a “place of rest for the ark of the covenant,”
and received a plan for its construction from God,
but it was Solomon, David’s son and [third] king of the Israelites, who built it.
The temple of Solomon was built on a sacred rock
thought to be the place from which the creation of the earth began.
The ark sat directly on this rock, called the Shetiyyah, or foundation stone,
enclosed in its own sacred space called the “holy of holies,” where it was safely guarded from the laity.
Only the high priest was allowed to enter the Holy of Holies, and only once a year under strict conditions.
A few essential rituals, including burning incense and wearing heavy robes,
saved the high priest from death in the ark’s presence.
The Israelites maintained the ark in the Temple of Solomon
at least until Uzziah was struck with leprosy in 740 BCE, and most likely until 701 BCE,
when the prophet Isiah wrote of the miraculous slaughter of the Syrian army besieging Jerusalem,
an event that seems to have involved the ark.
After this, the ark simply vanishes from record, with no mention in scripture of how or why.
It’s only brought up again to comment on its absence.
The first indication that the ark had been removed from Solomon’s temple occurs in the book of Jeremiah,
written in 626 BCE, when the prophet foresees a time when the Israelites will no longer miss the ark of God.
Passages from Kings and Deuteronomy provide further clues that it was gone under the reign of Josiah,
which spanned from 641 - 609 BCE.
A passage in 2 Chronicles, written in 622 BCE, makes it clear that the ark was absent from the temple
when King Josiah commands the Levites to return it there.
So the ark was almost certainly gone by the end of the 7th century BCE.
Nevertheless, mainstream academic opinion is that the ark remained in Solomon’s temple
until the Babylonian King, Nebuchadnezzar, invaded Jerusalem and destroyed it in 587 BCE.
However, the biblical description of the pillaging of the temple makes no mention of the ark,
even though it provides a very detailed list of what was taken as booty,
and clearly specifies that Nebuchadnezzar’s men had removed the doors to the Holy of Holies.
The lack of any clear indication of what happened to the ark has led to endless speculation on its whereabouts.
Some Jewish traditions suggest that Josiah, or some other late temple-era king,
hid the ark under the wooden storehouse on the Temple Mount,
or in a cave that Solomon set aside near the Dead sea.
Archaeologist Leen Ritmeyer has found a cutout piece of rock
measuring the dimensions of the ark on the Shetiyyah,
now contained within the Muslim Dome of the Rock,
and suggests that the ark was hidden under this cutout before the Babylonian invasion.
Unfortunately, previous attempts to excavate under the rock have yielded little of interest,
and no further excavations are likely to be permitted by religious authorities.
Author Graham Philips believes that the ark was found by the Knights Templar in the 13th century,
and taken away to central England when they fled the persecution of King Philip of France.
One of the more plausible explanations for the ark’s disappearance holds that it was taken to Ethiopia
and deposited in the city of Axum, where the Ethiopian Orthodox Church claims it rests today.
The Church appoints a monk to keep watch over the ark in the Chapel of the Tablet,
at the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion.
These monks tend to die within a few years of their appointment,
and frequently develop cataracts on their eyes which they attribute to the power of the ark.
However, no one but the guardian is allowed to enter the chapel,
and the ark is never removed, making the claim difficult to verify.
There are a number of historical reasons to believe that the ark resides at Axum, however.
First, there is a dwindling, but ancient population of Jews in parts of Ethiopia,
who claim to have come from Israel thousands of years ago.
The Falashas, or “Beta-Israel,” as they’re called, practice an archaic form of Judaism
not observed in Israel since the time of the ark’s instalment in Jerusalem.
The pagan Qemant north of Lake Tana in Northern Ethiopia,
practice many of the ancient Jewish dietary restrictions,
and worship in sacred groves, as some of the early Hebrews did in the time before the Temple.
It’s possible that there was already a strong Jewish presence in Ethiopia
by the time of the Ark’s disappearance.
A 13th century Ethiopian epic known as the Kebra Nagast tells of the ark’s abduction by Menelik,
the mythical son of Solomon and the mysterious Queen of Sheba.
Menelik stole the ark while visiting his father and brought it to Ethiopia via the Nile and Takazze rivers,
into what the document claims was the native land of Sheba.
However, Axum did not exist in the time of Solomon,
and there is very little evidence that anyone named Menelik ever existed,
or that Solomon ever had a child with the Queen of Sheba during their rendezvous in scripture.
Various traditions amongst the Falashas offer more plausible accounts for the ark’s arrival.
Some hold that the Jews leaving Israel at the time of Menelik's mythical voyage passed through Aswan,
in Egypt, first, and others claim that they built a temple and remained there for several hundred years.
German archeologists have confirmed that there was a Jewish temple on Elephantine Island, near Aswan,
on the Nile, and that this temple was built to the same dimensions as Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem.
This Elephantine connection has led British author, Graham Hancock,
to posit a new theory on the ark’s arrival in Axum in his book, The Sign and the Seal.
Hancock, along with biblical scholar Menehem Haran believe that the Levite tribe
removed the ark from Solomon’s temple during the tumultuous reign of Manasseh,
who installed a pagan idol in the Holy of Holies
and led a bloody war against the prophets and scribes of Yahweh, the god of David.
This would place the ark’s disappearance from the temple between 687 and 642 BCE,
in the same time that it’s believed the Elephantine temple was constructed.
Hancock claims that a group of Levite settlers left the now idolatrous state of Israel
and settled on Elephantine Island, building a replica of Solomon’s Temple to house the ark.
When the temple was destroyed by the Egyptians in 410 BCE,
the Levites brought the ark along the Nile and Blue Nile Rivers to the Island of Tana Kirkos,
on Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile.
Hancock claims that the ark remained for 800 years at Tana Kirkos,
as per Falasha tradition, before being brought to Axum in the middle of the 4th century AD,
under the reign of the Christian Axumite King Ezana.
Ethiopian traditions say that it was briefly removed to escape pillaging in the 10th and 16th centuries,
but has otherwise remained at the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion that Ezana first constructed for the ark.
The ark moved to the present chapel only in 1965.
Mainstream scholarship is at a loss to account for the remarkable powers
attributed to the ark in biblical sources.
One prominent explanation is that instead of the tablets containing the ten commandments,
the ark contained radioactive fragments of a meteor found by Moses on the top of mount Sinai.
The Hebrews were known to collect holy stones and gems
and to use them for ritualistic and divining purposes.
Others postulate that the ark was some kind of an electrical device
that killed its victims with violent expulsions of charge.
The entire inner surface of the Holy of Holies was coated in gold,
an excellent radiation shield and electrical conductor.
Wood is also a great insulator.
These materials could be used to great effect with the right source of power.
Hancock speculates that Moses found meteor fragments, or some other key ingredient,
on the top of Mount Sinai during his 40 year exile, before freeing the Hebrews from Egypt.
He then led the Hebrews back to this site, ascended the mountain alone,
and built this material into the ark using ancient,
now-lost knowledge he would have gained in his time as a prince in Egypt.
There are several depictions of ark-like objects carried in ritual processions on long poles at Egyptian holy sites,
and its likely that Moses would have been instructed in ancient Egyptian knowledge and occult magic
as a potential successor to the throne.
Others, of course, suggest that the supernatural abilities of the ark were all made up,
and that in reality, it was no more than an ordinary vessel for some important holy relics.
The ark of the covenant may be the greatest mystery of the Judeo-Christian heritage.
Scholars cannot agree on what it contained, how it functioned, when it disappeared, or where it is today.
That the ark’s no longer a concern to Jewish groups today is remarkable in its own right,
given its central place in the religious life of their ancient predecessors.
The one object to contain God’s spirit, and the instrument through which
multiple supernatural acts occurred that saved the nation of Israel, simply vanished from history.
We may never know what the ark was, or where it went,
but the many references to it in scripture suggest that someone in ancient times
knew how to build something that we can no longer build today.
(Sources listed in the video description.)