Tudor Parfitt - The Lost Ark of the Covenant - The Remarkable Quest for the Legendary Ark

The Israelites had to destroy Jericho if they wanted to conquer their Promised Land and the Ark was somehow, in some strange, mysterious way that has never been satisfactorily explained or understood, instrumental in making its walls come crashing down before the besieging Israelite horde. The first important religious site the Israelites created in Canaan was at Shiloh not far from Jerusalem. The tabernacle and the Ark stayed here for hundreds of years. During the battles against the Philistines - the great enemies of the Israelites - the Ark was used in battle.

It was seriously dangerous.

Finally at the time of King Solomon, the son of King David, it was placed in the magnificent new temple created to house it. From this moment on we hear precious little about the Ark and the assumption is that at some point over the next few hundred years, and probably before 587 BC, this fabulous artefact disappeared.

As Reuven was speaking, my mind was transported back five years to my perilous night on Dumghe and the vague associations I had imagined between the ngoma and the Ark. But Reuven was unstoppable.

The more he spoke about the Ark the more excited he became. ‘The Ark radiated mystical energy from the centre of the world,’ he said. ‘For Jewish mystics the Land of Israel - Eretz Yisrael - was in the middle of the world. Jerusalem was at the centre of Eretz Yisrael . The Temple was at the centre of Jerusalem. The Holy of Holies - the devir was at the centre of the Temple and the Ark of Moses was at the centre of the holy of holies. Directly beneath the Ark,’ he continued, ‘was the even Shetiyyah - the foundation stone - a stone drenched in mystic power. A kind of cosmic battery for the universe!’

Reuven’s face had taken on a strange radiance and his voice grew louder. ‘This,’ he boomed, ‘was the place where Adam was buried. This is where the patriarch Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac. This is where Muhammad ascended to heaven. This is where the very creation of the world took place. The foundation stone was the critical element which separated the upper world from the pit of chaos below, and the Ark incorporates that elemental centrality.’

Breathlessly he described the construction of the Ark by the Israelite craftsman Bezalel shortly after Moses had led the Hebrews out of Egypt. He spoke of the exquisite golden cherubim which were placed on its golden lid - the Mercy Seat - which was nothing less than the actual throne of the Almighty. To be honest all these mystical, supernatural references left me cold.

‘Oh come on, Reuven,’ I groaned. ‘Anyway, according to the book of Deuteronomy it was Moses who made the Ark, not Bezalel, and it was just an ordinary wooden box. If you remember, God commanded Moses to make two stone tablets and an acacia Ark. He made the simple wooden Ark and took the stone tablets to the top of the mountain. The law was duly inscribed upon them and Moses brought down the tablets and put them into the Ark he had made. No gold, no cherubim, nothing.

‘Modern scholars think that the more elaborate description of the Ark with all its gold stuff was probably a scribe’s attempt to make the Ark match the glories of the Temple and was written hundreds of years after the period when it was made, which would have been about 1300 BC. The scribes who wrote the detailed descriptions of the Ark had never seen it. They simply described what they imagined it to be. Their imagination was infinitely more influenced by Egyptian and Assyrian models than by the Ark itself.’

‘Don’t try to diminish it,’ growled Reuven, seizing my arm. ‘The Ark was the holiest thing in the world, ensconced in the holiest place in the world. It was where the Shekhinah - the divine presence of God lived. The combination of the holiest place in the world and the holiest object in the world radiated its own force and the world is still trembling! My Kabbalistic teachers taught me that the Ark existed and still exists in a kind of hyperspace. It defied all physical laws. When it was put in the Holy of Holies it was attached to its carrying poles. We know that the space available was too small for the length of the poles yet the Ark still fitted in. The Ark was constructed on a heavenly original.’

‘So it was kind of fake like your document. Not even an original,’ I said grinning, hoping to deflate him a little or provoke him into a more rational discourse.

For a few minutes, he appeared to be lost in thought and then he plunged back into the magical and mystical aspects of the Ark which seemed very far from his central interest, his mission. He told me that his Kabbalistic teachers drew an analogy between the Ark, with the two tablets inside, and the brain and its two hemispheres. In the same way as the brain was central to the working of the body, so the Ark was central to the working of the people of Israel.

‘Reuven,’ I said patiently, ‘this is all undoubtedly of great interest, but how can the Temple treasure and the lost Ark possibly help you in your mission to placate the Muslim world?’

‘Because I have found this!’ he said triumphantly. ‘I have found an amazing passage actually in the Quran and this is no forgery. ’ He took a copy of the Quran from his briefcase and read aloud in his faultless Arabic.

‘Their prophet said to them, “The sign of his kingship is that the Ark of the Covenant will be restored to you, bringing assurances from your Lord, and relics left by the people of Moses and the people of Aaron. The angels will carry it. This should be a convincing sign for you, if you are really believers.”

‘Muhammad considered the restoration of the Ark to the Jews to be a sign of the kingship of Saul, the first king of Israel. I have no doubt that contemporary Muslims would see the restored Ark as a convincing sign of kingship and political legitimacy today. This should be a convincing sign for you, if you are really believers. The Ark seen in the context of this verse from the Quran would be better than any manuscript. In any event who can say if the kind of manuscript I have been seeking really exists? But the Ark once existed and if I can find it, it would guarantee peace in our time between Muslims and Jews.’

I had never noticed this verse from the Quran. He went on to tell me what Muslim theologians and scholars had to say about the Ark. The Muslim version of events was based loosely on the well-known story in the Apocryphal Second Book of Maccabees, a late Jewish text, which relates that the Biblical prophet Jeremiah carried the Ark out of the Jewish Temple just before the Babylonians seized Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple in 587 BC. Jeremiah took it across the River Jordan into what is today the Kingdom of Jordan, hid it in a cave on Mount Nebo, the mountain from which Moses had gazed upon the Promised Land before the Israelite conquest of Canaan, and then sealed up the entrance to the cave. Some of the Prophet’s followers tried to find the path that Jeremiah had taken in order to find the Ark. He rebuked them and said that the Ark would remain hidden until God gathered his people together at the end of time.

Here the Arab historians take up the story and this was new to me. According to them the Ark was subsequently discovered on Mount Nebo by the Jurhum tribe. They took it to Mecca and there it stayed. According to some Muslims the Ark is still to be found beneath the Ka’aba - the construction at the heart of Mecca which is the holiest place in the world for Muslims. Reuven told me of other Muslim theories concerning the fate of the Ark. Abbas, a cousin of Muhammad, maintained that the Ark was hidden in the Sea of Galilee, Kinneret , in Hebrew - and would be found just before the end of time by the Mahdi , an Islamic Messianic figure.