The Lost Ark of the Covenant: The Remarkable Quest for the Legendary Ark

For the next couple of weeks I buried myself in the Judaica Reading Room at the Hebrew University and National Library in Jerusalem. The shelves were full of dusty, disintegrating tomes, many of which had been gathered after the Second World War from destroyed Jewish libraries and seminaries throughout Europe. The old library and synagogue stamps from Pressburg, Lodz, and Odessa spoke of hundreds of years of destroyed intellectual endeavour. Many of the Library readers were black-coated orthodox Jews poring over rare rabbinic treatises. Pale-skinned young men with close-cropped hair and thick glasses, they swayed backwards and forwards as they read.

After my weeks in the Library, I passed several days seeing no one and barely leaving the house. This new interest of mine was becoming an obsession and I spent hours poring over my notes trying to make some sense of the Ark. The telephone rang, I did not answer.

As they had not seen me for a while my Arab friends from the suq assumed I was ill and brought me hubiz - flat Arab bread - glistening black olives and hard-boiled eggs. I drank their qahehweh, thick muddy Arab coffee, and pondered the mystery of the Ark.

Over the previous years I had visited Jewish communities throughout the world. I recalled an evening I had spent with the Chief Rabbi of Djerba, an island off the coast of Tunisia. It was around the time of Passover. The rabbi invited me to dinner in a small whitewashed house in the heart of the ancient Jewish quarter called Hara Seghirah. Over dinner the conversation turned to the destruction of the Temple.

He described in graphic detail the sack of Jerusalem, the ruination of the Holy of Holies, the tramp of jackboots over the marble paving stones of the dwelling of the Most High. And as he described this national disaster, he wept. The tears flowed down his haggard cheeks and on to his straggly white beard.

Rabin, I thought, was right about one thing. If the Ark had been destroyed either by the Babylonians or by the Romans, Jews would indeed still be lamenting it.

And the idea that Jews would have done anything and everything to save precious pieces of their heritage was also confirmed by what I learned in Djerba. The venerable rabbi told me that a group of priests had fled to the North African coast after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, founding the Djerba community and bringing with them a door and a stone rescued from the Holy of Holies. The stone can be seen to this day. There was no tradition of the Ark going to Djerba, but priests had taken what they could salvage of their spiritual heritage.

‘Follow the priests,’ Rabin had said.

It was February 1993 and Jerusalem was beginning to enjoy an early spring. I sat one morning in my small courtyard, under the lemon tree, surrounded by pots of cyclamen and smallleafed basil and tried to summarize in my mind what was historically known about the Ark up until its disappearance from King Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem.

Once the Israelites under Moses’ command had escaped slavery under Pharaoh and crossed the Red Sea, they made their way into the Sinai Desert. On the first new moon after their escape they camped in front of Mount Sinai. God commanded Moses to climb the mountain to receive the Law.

Having received the Law in the form of the Te n Commandments engraved upon stone tablets ‘by the finger of God’, he descended the mountain to discover that the Israelites were worshipping a statue of a golden calf. In fury, Moses smashed the tablets, and was commanded by God to create a new identical set himself.

The Te n Commandments formed an essential part of the ongoing agreement or covenant between God and the Israelites. Moses was given instructions by God to build the Ark of this covenant, in which the stone tablets incorporating the covenant would be placed.

There are two quite different biblical descriptions of the construction of the Ark.

The first description has the Ark constructed by Bezalel, the artist, upon the orders of Moses. The box was covered all over with the purest gold. Its lid (the kapporet) known in English as the ‘mercy seat’, was surrounded with a rim of gold. On its lid were golden cherubim whose outstretched wings formed an arch above the lid. There were two gold rings on each side through which carrying poles could be inserted.

The second version of the construction of the Ark is simpler. According to the book of Deuteronomy, it was Moses himself who made the Ark, and the Ark was a totally different kind of object. It was just a regular wooden box. There is no mention of nails, or of joints, or of glue. So perhaps it was simply a kind of recipient hollowed out of the trunk of a tree with a knife or chisel.

The Ark, in both forms, was made of acacia wood - shittim wood in Hebrew. In many arid zones in Africa, the acacia is the archetypal tree. In the Sinai desert - the land bridge between Africa and Asia - the acacia species rules supreme. It would have been just about the only building material available in the wilderness.

The wood of the acacia is exceptionally hard, very heavy, very dense, and will last for a long time. In desert conditions, it would not perish. In Egypt there are acacia panels which have survived for well over 3000 years.

Under the right conditions the Ark could virtually last forever.

The Ark was 2.5 cubits long, 1.5 cubits wide and 1.5 cubits high which translates as about two foot wide, two foot tall and just under three foot long.

It was about the size of a large suitcase.

It was easily transportable, easy to hide.

But what was it for? The Ark’s first purpose was to serve as a receptacle for the stone tablets. The second was to serve as the throne of God, who was visualized as sitting just above the outstretched wings of the cherubim. The lower part of the Ark was seen as the footstool of God.

In whichever form the Ark was made it was placed in a tent shrine called the Tabernacle. Soon after, Aaron, Moses’ brother, brought sacrifices for the Lord. He prepared his sacrifices according to the letter of the law, but the sacrifices were consumed by a fire, but not by a fire that had been prepared by him.

The fire just happened.

And later his sons Avihu and Nadav made improper offerings not done according to the letter of the law. They brought the wrong sort of fire before the Ark, and its fire killed them.

The fire went out of the Ark.

The Ark had something of the quality of a flame thrower. It could and did kill.

‘Two fiery jets issued from between the cherubim above the Ark’, goes the account in the Jewish legendary literature called the Midrash ‘burning up snakes, scorpions and thorns in its path and destroying Israel’s enemies’.

The Rabbinic sages called this the fire of God.

Like a secret missile covered with camouflage sheets on its military transporter, the Ark was always covered over with blue cloth and animal skins. Even the priests were not allowed to look at it.

In the Bible there is a prayer of great antiquity which seems like a prayer you’d say over a weapon.

When the Ark travelled, Moses said: ‘Arise! Scatter your enemies, and let those who hate you flee from in front of you.’ And when the Ark rested, he would say ‘Return…’

In every Hebrew Torah scroll these two menacing verses are enclosed by two letters - the letter nun - the Hebrew N - written upside down on either side. What does it mean? The Rabbis explained that this unique code signified that the verses were not in their proper place.

They said that the verses celebrating the military nature of the Ark constituted a separate book of the Bible.

The Ark was carried on its poles in front of the advancing army by the priests. During the conquest of Canaan it was the Ark which caused the waters of the River Jordan to open up, allowing the Israelites to cross over safely. It was the Ark, carried as part of a military band behind the seven priestly trumpeters as they famously marched around the walls of Jericho, which caused the impregnable double-walled fortifications of the city to collapse.

As the Israelites streamed into Canaan, the Ark was placed first in Gilgal and then in Shiloh, twelve miles north of Jerusalem. Here it stayed for 300-400 years, occasionally being taken out at times of war. Once it fell into the hands of the enemy and was placed in the temple of the Philistine god Dagon in Ashdod. The Ark soon put paid to Dagon whose statue was discovered in bits on the floor.

The Philistine population was not spared either. The people were afflicted with bleeding haemorrhoids and the land was cursed with an infestation of mice.

The Ark then spent 20 years in Kiryat Yearim a hill village close to Jerusalem until King David decided to take it to his new capital. He built a special cart, put the Ark in it, and started off, accompanied by a great crowd of people singing and rejoicing. Then the cart hit a rut in the road. For a moment it looked as if the Ark would fall to the ground. There was no priest standing by to steady it, so a man named Uzzah reached out his hand.

The Ark blasted him to death.

The rejoicing stopped and the Ark was deposited in the nearby house of one Obed-Edom the Gittite. Three months later King David came back to fetch it. This time he did things better. Before setting off for Jerusalem the king made special sacrifices and then supposedly danced naked before the Ark. He was also carrying an ephod - a mysterious and undecipherable object never satisfactorily explained - which had also been created in the Sinai at the same time as the Ark.

After a period of peace King David observed to the Prophet Nathan that while he David was living in a fine house of cedar, the poor old Ark was still languishing in the tabernacle tent. Should something not be done about it? The Ark was not keen to move and let it be known that it would stay where it was for the time being, thank you very much. It would not be until the time of King Solomon, the future king, that the Ark would move into a proper house - the magnificent new Temple of Jerusalem - which would be built to house it.

***

By now, I believed, as Rabin did, that the Ark once existed. The historical account surrounding it was too complex and nuanced for the whole thing to have simply been made up. What it actually was was another thing altogether. The more I pondered its function, the less I understood it. In the wilderness of Sinai, Moses was attempting to transform his ex-slaves into a viable military force. Would these men have been emboldened as they advanced upon enemy lines by following a simple box or coffin carried on poles by the priests? Even if the box or coffin was construed as the dwelling place of the invisible God. It apparently had destructive powers too, but how these powers worked, if they can be credited, was anybody’s guess.

Whatever its true function or meaning, it once existed. That being the case, it could theoretically be hidden somewhere. There were numerous clues in the ancient texts. Some of them suggested that the Ark was in Jerusalem, others that it had been taken far away from Jerusalem. Whoever hid it would certainly have been a priest. But how would it be possible for anyone to follow the passage of priests two and a half thousand years later?

The next morning I woke up to find strong sunlight pouring into my bedroom, revealing untidy piles of books and papers, unwashed clothes, empty bottles of wine and whisky and copper trays covered with the debris of meals brought up from the suq. I had overslept.

On the other side of the small courtyard there was a metal door leading out on to the street. There was an electric bell mounted to one side of it. As I gazed blearily at the mess the bell sounded, jolting me out of my morning reverie. I went out with a towel wrapped round my middle and saw my friend Shula. She had been giving some American guests of Teddy Kollek a tour of the Old City and had come to see me.

‘What’s all this business of the Ark of the Covenant?’ she chided me. ‘I thought you were the sanest person in Jerusalem. Why don’t you leave crazy stuff to the crazies? Teddy’s not happy about it. We’ve got plenty of crazies in Jerusalem and we don’t need any more. Get on with your translations of Hebrew poetry. Write your book on the Jews and Islam. Go back to London to see your girlfriend. But do me a personal favour. A personal favour. Leave the Ark alone!’ She gave me a great hug and said that she would have to go back to join her group.

She was heading to the kotel - the Western Wall. I washed and dressed quickly and went with her some of the way through the Jewish Quarter and then we parted. I continued down through Dung Gate and struck out across the open land towards the seven golden onion-shaped cupolas of the Russian Orthodox Church of Mary Magdalene at Gethsemane, on the lower reaches of the Mount of Olives.

I knocked on the heavy wooden gate and waited in the shadow of the great wall, which protected the convent. After a while, the bolts were drawn and Luba, a short, stern-faced Palestinian convent servant I had known for many years let me in.

We walked through the fragrant shade of the garden, heavy with the intoxicating scent of sun-warmed pine trees to a little building among the copse that the nuns used to receive people from the outside world.

As Luba offered me some mint tea, she welcomed me: ‘Marhabah! Ahlan! Ahlan wasahlan hawajah. Welcome back sir! What can we do for you? Who would you like to see, hawajah?’ she asked, using the honorific hawajah in a charming, teasing way.

I explained that I had ordered an icon from the nuns who made them and it should be ready for collection. She went off to fetch it.

There was a pile of papers and church magazines in Russian and English on the table next to where I was sitting. I picked up an old copy of the Jerusalem Post. There I found a short article on Ron Wyatt.

According to the Post, he first came to Israel in 1978. His plan, which struck me as being utterly absurd, was to go scuba diving in the Red Sea to look for Egyptian chariot parts, as a way of proving that Pharaoh’s army really had been swallowed up and that the Biblical account of the exodus from Egypt was true.

He soon claimed to have discovered the original site of the Red Sea Crossing, the original sites of the biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the genuine original site of the crucifixion of Christ which has never been satisfactorily located.

He first claimed to have discovered the Ark of the Covenant in about 1982 during secret excavations just outside the walls of the Old City. According to him, the Ark was hidden here before the arrival of the Babylonians in an underground chamber above which he located the original site of the crucifixion. No less.

He had a sizeable following in the United States, which included a number of powerful if gullible tele-evangelists, and indeed there was a research institute in Tennessee dedicated to his findings.

As I finished the article, a handsome, longhaired Russian orthodox priest from New York, a friend of Shula’s, whom I had met once or twice, wandered into the vestibule. We chatted for a while about people we knew in common in Jerusalem. As he was turning to go, I asked him, ‘Have you seen this article about Ron Wyatt?’

‘You mean the guy who discovered the lost Ark?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘Yes,’ he laughed. ‘I’ve heard a lot about him. He found what he said was an “earthquake crack” just below the site of what he claimed was the crucifixion, which extended down to the hiding place of the Ark. According to him, the actual blood of Jesus flowed down through this crack onto the Mercy Seat - the lid of the Ark. What Wyatt took this to mean was that the traditions of Old Testament animal sacrifice reached their most sublime point with the sacrifice of Jesus, whom he sees as the new High Priest. When the blood of Jesus dripped onto the Mercy Seat, the great and final act in the cult of sacrifice was consummated. It’s a pretty gripping thought.’

‘Wonderful, but why didn’t he reveal any evidence?’

‘He claimed that the Israeli Antiquities department had made secrecy a condition of his permit. So the access tunnel to the chamber was sealed with reinforced concrete. He refuses to say where it is situated and the Ark will remain where it is. The Israelis, he claims, want to keep it that way. Wyatt believes that more than a dozen people have died because they have since tried to locate the Ark! He has held back the documents, video and photographs he alleges to have in his possession but one day, he says, he will show them. He says traces of Christ’s blood are clearly visible. Shula told me that the CIA guy in Jerusalem, who is famously dim, says the Israelis don’t want the connection between the Ark and the crucifixion revealed as it would lead to the mass conversion of Jews to Christianity.’

‘Oh dear. What I don’t understand is how, without a shred of evidence, a story like this can possibly have the status of anything more than an old wives’ tale?’

‘Quite. But it sure keeps chins wagging in Jerusalem. Oh, I forgot the best bit. Wyatt claims to have had a DNA analysis done of Christ’s blood, which proves he was born of a virgin! If He had no father I guess that means He had no Y-chromosome!’

The priest grinned irreverently, waved at me, and left, just as my old friend, Luba, returned with the icon. I gave her the amount that had been agreed, plus a few shekels for the work of the church.

‘People have been talking about you, Ha w a j a ,’ she scolded. ‘Hara m . Poor fellow! They say you are working with the Jews. Is this true? Do the Jews not have friends enough already? I’ve heard them say you are looking for the Ark of the Covenant. Is this really so? How is the Ark going to help the Palestinians? Will it save us from the Jews? Or will the Jews use it against us? It was a dangerous thing I read about it in the Bible - and people are scared of it. Both here and in my village I see many more people than you think. Some of them are violent men. Take my advice. Be careful!’

She took both my hands in hers and squeezed hard.

Before I walked back to the Old City I sat under the ancient cedars and gazed down at the Temple Mount, listening to the distant noises of the city and the nearby rustlings and crepitations of this most sacred garden of Gethsemane. Clearly Wyatt was one of the enthusiasts Rabin had warned me about. Jerusalem was full of cranks looking for the Ark in soil which had been raked over for thousands of years by Assyrians, Romans, Crusaders and assorted modern investigators of varying degrees of seriousness. I was beginning to feel that Jerusalem was the least likely of places in which the Ark would turn up. I felt anyway that I could put Wyatt and co. out of my mind. Luba’s warning was more worrying.

A few weeks later I was walking in the Old City of Jerusalem carrying a supply of the world’s best humus from Abu Shukri’s famous establishment near the Via Dolorosa. To my surprise I saw Reuven rushing down the street towards me, his coat flapping wildly about him. Every vestige of his vaguely orthodox look had disappeared. He was dressed in a conventional navy blazer and a Hermes tie. This was not his orthodox uniform. His luxuriant beard had been transformed into a small, stiff affair, and he had shaved his moustache.

He looked scared. His suntanned face was red with exertion and he was breathing with difficulty.

‘Quick,’ he said, looking over his shoulder. ‘Let’s have a coffee, I have something urgent to tell you.’

I led him to a small Arab café I sometimes used in the Muslim Quarter. It was lost in a maze of little alleys and had a first-floor room reached by a metal spiral staircase, which was hardly ever used except by young courting couples.

If Reuven was in sudden need of a secure bolthole, this was the place.

I ordered two cardamom-flavoured coffees and jerked my thumb in an upward movement towards the upper room.

Reuven went ahead, breathing with some difficulty and I followed. There was no one else there. It was a good place to talk. We sat on low, perfumed sofas upholstered in elaborate woven Damascus cloth. The coffee, served in small glass cups, arrived almost immediately.

‘Shukran,’ I thanked the waiter, and asked him not to allow anyone up there while we were there. ‘What on earth is the matter?’ I asked Reuven. ‘You look awful.’

‘So do you,’ he said. ‘Have you stopped eating or what?’

I explained that I had spent some time in solitary, scholarly confinement.

He smiled thinly and said, ‘You have been industrious, but I’ve been a fool.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You remember Anis, that dealer who sold me the Yemenite document about Muhammad?’

‘Yes, I remember very well.’

‘When you told me it was a forgery I stopped the cheque. I gave him back the manuscript, of course, but he was not pleased. The problem is that I had already told him all about my mission. I was absolutely convinced that the document was genuine and really would change the religious and political situation in the Middle East. Of course I told him to keep quiet about it. At the time, Anis was quite sympathetic, or at least he seemed to be. As you know, he is a Muslim, but a rather unobservant one. We often used to have a whisky together in the American Colony Hotel bar. Since we had this financial disagreement he has turned against me, and I believe he has spread the word that I am trying to subvert Islam. With everything that’s going on in Israel at the moment, I need that like a hole in the head.’

He looked away for a moment.

‘He’s also apparently told some fundamentalist Muslim friends of his that I am looking for the Ark and that I am connected with Ateret Cohanim. The problem is that he has let people believe that I somehow want to use the power of the Ark against the Palestinians and Muslims in general. I told him how the Bible describes the Ark and the awesome power it was supposed to have. Some of these people are very superstitious and believe Jews have superhuman powers anyway. The message has got round that I am plotting against Islam.’

He lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘Word has it in the street that Hamas has been showing an interest in me. Yo u know the Hamas flag features the Dome of the Rock? They’ve been saying I want to dig up the foundations of the mosque to find the Ark!’ He giggled helplessly. ‘You see, it could hardly be worse!’

Hamas is the Arabic acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement (Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyya). It had been founded some years before by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin at the beginning of the First Intifada - the Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule which lasted from 1987 to 1993. The charter of Hamas calls for the destruction of the State of Israel and its replacement with a Palestinian Islamic state in the whole of historical Palestine. Hamas was not very keen on Jews in general and Reuven had every reason to be afraid.

Reuven told me that he and Clara had moved to a rented flat in Te l Aviv for security reasons, and today he had just come back to his Jerusalem place to get some books. Clara had telephoned and pleaded with him to go straight back. However, inveterate collector that he was, he had taken the opportunity to nose round some antique dealers in the Christian Quarter. When he left one store, with a couple of manuscripts and books under his arm, a couple of Arab-looking men had snatched the books from him and pushed him around a bit.

‘It was the books they were after. They wanted to see what I am up to. I think I was very lucky.’

‘I doubt they’re Hamas,’ I said. ‘If they had been, and if Hamas has anything on you, you wouldn’t be sitting here enjoying a cup of excellent coffee! But strangely enough I just heard from a Palestinian friend that rumours are going round about me too. I guess people saw you coming to my place in the Old City. Or did you mention my name to Anis?’