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

Reuven shook his head distractedly and got heavily to his feet. We walked to the Jaffa Gate where Reuven’s driver was waiting to drive him back to Te l Aviv. At the last minute, he suggested I go with him.

I love Jerusalem like no other place on earth. But sometimes it makes you feel claustrophobic. Te l Aviv is the best antidote to too much Jerusalem. Having nothing better to do and feeling like a break I climbed into his comfortable dark blue Mercedes 500SE.

His encounter in the Christian Quarter seemed to have taken a lot out of Reuven. The headache he frequently had as a result of his slight wound in the Yo m Kippur War was troubling him. He rubbed the side of his head, took a handful of pills, and in a few minutes was fast asleep. I sank into the luxurious leather seats and enjoyed the ride down through the forests of Judea.

I reflected that the Ark had passed this way more than once thousands of years ago during earlier Jewish conflicts with local populations. As I was wondering what its impact on the current conflict was likely to be I dozed off as well and only woke up when the engine was switched off in front of the elegant apartment block where Reuven lived near Dizengoff Street. Clara was out for the evening, it was the maid’s evening off and we had their place to ourselves.

Reuven showered and changed into a pair of jeans and a white T shirt.

‘What happened to your orthodox clothes?’ I asked.

‘With the security situation everywhere in the world being as it is, I do not feel like sticking out like a sore thumb. With a shnoz like mine,’ he said, tapping his nose, ‘anyone can tell I’m a Jew, but I do not need to advertise it any more than God intended. Clara has persuaded me to dress in a more discreet manner, at least for the time being.’

‘And your quest, Reuven?’ I asked softly.

‘This is what I wanted to talk about. I want you to help. I’ve been reading all I can and a number of people have been assisting me. Some progress is being made. However I can now see that the whole thing might be a little more complicated than I first imagined. I am losing my sense of what the Ark really was. I don’t really know what it is I am looking for.

‘On the one hand it appears to be some kind of a weapon. On the other it often formed part of a kind of procession along with tambourines and trumpets. And in addition it was both the footstool and throne of the Almighty. All very good, but what was it? There’s a big question mark over what it actually was.’

My friend looked worried and driven. It was obvious that the whole issue of the Ark was beginning to frustrate him. The more he studied it, the less he understood what it was all about. It would therefore be very difficult to find it. But with massive investment of money, he kept saying, and with a proper businessman’s organization it should be possible. He rambled on, talking of special investments to finance the long-term search for the Ark and then plunging back into its intricate and ambiguous history.

He rubbed his head in his characteristic gesture and I supposed that his ‘Yom Kippur headache’ had returned.

With a strange look on his face he left the room, moving like a sleepwalker, leaving me alone for about half an hour. In the distance I could hear him on the phone to someone, speaking volubly in Hebrew.

When he came back he was carrying a tray full of bread, olives, salted and pickled herring, dill pickles, soft goat’s cheese - jibneh in Arabic - the humus I had bought from Abu Shukri’s which I had put in the fridge, and a bottle of white Golan wine. He opened it, served us both, muttering under his breath that he should not be drinking wine with a bloody, uncircumcised goy, and downed his glass. He ate silently for a few moments and seemed to regain his composure.

It was a warm, unbearably humid Te l Aviv night and I was dressed for Jerusalem, not for Te l Aviv. I had taken a shower but I felt sticky and could feel the sweat trickle down my back.

‘Come outside, there’s a bit of a breeze,’ Reuven said, leading me onto a covered terrace from where I could see the lights of the esplanade and beyond that the inky darkness of the sea.

‘I have been speaking to Rabbi Getz at Ateret Cohanim,’ he continued. ‘He doesn’t actually claim to have seen the Ark or to have found its hiding place, but he believes in his heart it might be down there under the Temple Mount in some secret place although he knows as well as we do that the area has been excavated constantly at least since Roman times. I am beginning to doubt it’s there at all. If it had been, why did the knights Templar, who had full access, and unlimited manpower and who spent years looking, not find it?

‘For the moment, anyway, the Government has forbidden any more digging. The last time Getz and his friends burrowed into the foundations, Muslims up on top heard the noise coming up through a cistern and rushed down to see what was happening. Yo u know about the unrest that followed. The entrance has now been sealed up by ten yards of reinforced concrete. I’ve decided I do not want to be involved in any digging around in Jerusalem. Especially after what I heard about Hamas.’

‘That I understand,’ I said, nodding in agreement. ‘In any case, people looking for the Ark in Jerusalem are tripping over each other. In addition, there’s not the slightest proof at all that it is there.’

‘Quite so,’ said Reuven gloomily. ‘Getz said that they had weeks down there before they were discovered. They found traces of many earlier excavations but little else. I think that I am at a dead end.

‘A couple of days ago I was reading the Talmud and came across the passage in Masekhet Shekalim about the Temple priest who noticed that a flagstone on the floor of the Temple wood store was shaped differently from the others. The assumption was that this marked the hiding place of the Ark. He went to tell a colleague about it and was struck dead on the spot. That passage spoke to my heart!’ He laughed. ‘I’m not really afraid of being struck dead, but I’m just beginning to wonder if we should not be looking elsewhere. We were talking the other day about the possibility that the Ark had been taken to Egypt. Maybe that’s where we should be looking? Maybe that’s where you should be looking?’

He looked at me questioningly. I had been dreaming of getting more actively involved in the search for some time. His obsession was becoming my obsession. Now that we had both more or less concluded that the Ark was not in Jerusalem, I was keen to look elsewhere. The thought of setting out on a mission to Egypt was very tempting. But as I stared out at the distant seashore I wondered if I really should embark on what some people would see as a wild goose chase. Did I - a British gentile - really want to go sleuthing round the Eastern Desert in Egypt in search of a Jewish Holy Grail?

‘I’m not sure, Reuven,’ I said. ‘Go to Egypt in search of the Ark? I’ll have to decide first what I want to be, a scholar or an adventurer.’

‘You could, of course, be both,’ he said. ‘Anyway, from what you said and from what I have been hearing, there are many traditions which seem to lead to Egypt. But as you’re thinking it over, perhaps you could bear these in mind.’

He went back into the apartment and returned with a small velvet-covered box, which he placed, gently on the table.

‘Open it,’ he said

There were three very plump diamonds inside.

‘These are for the first stages of the work if you need them,’ he said. ‘Our war chest! And this is just for starters.’

I slid the little box back across the table. I did not want Reuven’s money. Over the following years it was good to know it was there for emergencies but I stubbornly refused to take anything for myself.

‘I am afraid you are not a practical man,’ he replied sighing. ‘And I wonder if you will ever really get anywhere without changing your attitude towards money. Anyway if this does not tempt you, maybe this will.’

He took out a piece of paper, which had been tucked under one of the old leather-bound Hebrew books on the table and passed it to me with a very formal, slightly ironic gesture.

It was just a few lines, written in Hebrew, from a poem by the twelfth-century Spanish Jewish poet Yehuda ha-Levi:

And I shall walk in the paths of the Ark of the Covenant,

Until I taste the dust of its hiding place,

Which is sweeter than honey.

Reuven knew how to touch my Celtic heart. There was an inspiring beauty in these few lines. And what, indeed, could be sweeter than finding something which for millennia had never ceased to excite the imagination of men?

The City Of The Dead

‘Wallah, this is the hiding place effendi! This is where the Ark was put.’

I had no idea what on earth my somewhat dippy and excitable friend Daud Labib was talking about. For the preceding few minutes I had been reflecting on the fact that over the previous year my interest in the Ark had started to take over my life. Indeed it was principally because of the Ark that I now found myself in the spring of 1994 in Cairo, Egypt, having finally succumbed to Reuven’s entreaties to try to find out more about the world’s most sought after artefact. Whatever reservations had constrained me before had been put aside.

There were two main reasons for coming to Egypt. In the first place I wanted to investigate ancient traditions which maintained that the Ark had been brought here long before the destruction of the First Temple. Secondly, I had wanted to try to understand the background of the exodus of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt. Over the previous week I had stood in the shade of the pyramids the Hebrews had helped construct, walked in the fields where they would have collected straw and mud to make their bricks. Whatever the Ark was, and I was still deeply unclear about this, it had started life, at least conceptually, here in the land of the Pharaohs. I had wanted to feel and see and smell the reasons that led to the creation of the Ark.

So far enlightenment had evaded me.

The following day I was going back to England for a stint of library work but when I returned to Egypt I planned to examine various Ark-like artefacts from Ancient Egypt in Cairo’s museums.

My undersized friend was walking in front of me. Gazing down at him I started wondering inconsequentially how it was that his particularly small head could possibly have produced such a disproportionate mass of dandruff: it had settled on the shoulders of his black, synthetic shirt like an ermine stole.

This morning Daud had dragged me out of the archive where I spent most of my time to take me on a tour of his favourite places in Cairo. He was a Copt - a member of the Egyptian Coptic Christian minority - who lived in a suburb of Cairo but who was originally from the southern Egyptian town of Qift which had played an important role in the history of the Copts.

The word ‘Copt’, deriving from the Greek word for Egypt (Egyptos), simply means ‘Egyptian’, a point that Copts are not slow to bring to your attention. Their liturgical language, Coptic, is the descendant of the ancient Egyptian language. But no-one speaks Coptic any more - Arabic is the spoken language of the Coptic minority as it is for the rest of the predominantly Muslim populations. The Copts see themselves as the true heirs of the great civilization of ancient Egypt.

Daud was pointing proudly at a nondescript building set back from the dusty road down which we were walking. His dark eyes radiated enthusiasm. ‘The Ark was put here’ he repeated, making a stabbing gesture with his right hand.

Daud was unlike anyone I had ever met in Egypt. A brilliant and scholarly man who was working on a doctorate on ancient Coptic manuscripts, he carried his irritating eccentricity and individuality before him like silken banners.

‘This is where the Ark was put!’ Daud bellowed, pointing to a plaque on the wall which proclaimed that this was the Ben Ezra synagogue.

I knew of nothing which connected the Ark with the Ben Ezra synagogue. This synagogue is world-famous because of the discovery in one of its storerooms of the world’s most important collections of medieval documents. I was planning to see what this archive - the Cairo Genizah - had to say about the Ark, if anything. But that would not be here or now, as the documents had been removed to western university libraries in the nineteenth century. But there was absolutely nothing as far as I knew to suggest that the Ark had ever been hidden here.

‘What are you going on about, you excitable little Copt? How do you mean the Ark? Nobody’s ever said the Ark had anything to do with this place.’

In fact I was more than a little mystified. I’d certainly not mentioned my interest in the Ark to Daud. We were close friends and in the past had shared confidences but once, in an unguarded and inebriated moment, he had boasted about carrying out jobs for the Egyptian Mubahath al-Dawla (the General Directorate of State Security Investigations), and since then I had been a little careful about what I told him. In Egypt, the Ark with all its political and religious ramifications, was not a subject to bandy around with the likes of Daud. How could he possibly know about my involvement? I felt an unpleasant clamminess at the base of my spine. I looked at him questioningly.

‘You know, ya achi, Musa’s basket when he was hidden in the reeds: “the Ark of bulrushes”.’

He began to recite by heart in a monotonous chant, which he accompanied with a rhythmic movement of his hand as if he were swinging a censer:

‘And Pharaoh charged all his people, saying, every son that is born ye shall cast into the river, and every daughter ye shall save alive. And there went a man of the house of Levi, and took to wife a daughter of Levi. And the woman conceived, and bare a son: and when she saw that he was a goodly child, she hid him three months. And when she could no longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the reeds by the river’s brink.’

In the Hebrew of the original Biblical account, the word used for the humble basket in which the baby Moses was hidden by his mother was teva. But the English translation was ‘ark’. I breathed a sigh of relief. Daud knew nothing about my true reason for being in Egypt. Of course I knew about the ancient tradition that Moses of the house of Levi was hidden on this very site among the rushes in a floating basket, a miniature coracle. The rushes were the feathery papyrus reeds that still line the banks of the Nile and that have been used for making paper for around 5000 years.

His recitation over, my friend made the sign of the cross, bowing and mumbling to himself. Turning his bony, mottled face towards me, he smiled and fingered the large gold cross he wore over his shirt. Daud had crossed himself in a stagey, ironical way, like some corrupt Italian prelate. And like some corrupt Italian prelate I knew it did not mean much. He had begun to lose his faith while he was studying at an American theological college. He had lost it completely by the time he had finished another undergraduate degree and an MA in an English university. He was fond of quoting Gabriel Garcia Marquez: ‘Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses.’ Daud was no longer religious but he was proud of his remarkable knowledge of the Bible, great swathes of which he knew by heart and could quote in Coptic, Arabic, or English. And for reasons I did not at first understand, he always wore sacerdotal black shirts with a large gold cross swinging from a metal chain around his neck.

Notwithstanding his overall eccentricity, in one respect he conformed to Egyptian norms: he was opposed to all the doings of the Israeli state (he refused to use the term ‘Israel’ and persisted in calling it ‘the Zionist Entity’) and extended this animosity to the Jews of recent times with the exception of Einstein and the Marx brothers. He had reservations about me, too, as I was a frequent visitor to Israel, but had substantially overcome them as I had done some work on an illustrious ancestor of his called Labib who had played the leading role in the (failed) revival of Coptic as a spoken language. It was my interest in the Coptic language revival that had led me to contact his family, and thus meet up with him.

Daud was anxious to show me this ancient but much restored Cairo synagogue as part of the tour of the city he had planned for me. This was not, however, out of love for the ancient Jewish heritage in Egypt, but because it was the site of an ancient Coptic church. The church, he told me, had been bought by the Jews for the paltry sum of 20,000 dinars over a thousand years before, in AD 882.

‘Only 20,000 dinars - they had it for nothing, effendi. Yo u can’t imagine the price of land in Cairo,’ he said. Once they had purchased the church, the Jews turned it into a synagogue. ‘Damned cheek, ya achi,’ he said indignantly. ‘They tricked us out of our birthright, same as they are doing with the Palestinians.’

His anger caused his face to break out in small pink blotches. For Daud it was as if the purchase of the church had taken place the day before - yet another reminder of the vividness of historical memory in the Middle East.

‘Come on, you ineffably daft Copt,’ I said. ‘The Jews would not have much use for a bloody church, now would they? Anyway I read somewhere that the Copts couldn’t afford to pay their taxes and were forced to sell the church. Yo u could say the Jews helped them out.’

‘Wallah, another Jewish lie!’ he snorted, shaking his head violently and causing another layer of his shedding derma to explode over his shirt. ‘The Copts were rich in those days. They could afford their taxes. They were the intellectual and commercial elite of Egypt - always were, still are. No, the rubbish Jews cheated us.’

The day was oppressively hot. We were standing in the shade of the synagogue. ‘That was the hiding place,’ he repeated, stabbing his finger at a point to one side of the building. ‘That’s where the bulrushes used to be. That’s where the prophet Musa was hidden and that’s why we built a church there - one of the finest churches in the whole of the Middle East.’

He put his arm round my shoulder and opined piously: ‘Wallah, Musa was a great man! He had horns, it is true, like quite a few Jews, so they say. But he was a very great man. A great prophet.’ He smiled crookedly. ‘He managed to rid Egypt of all its rubbish Jews when they escaped from slavery under the Pharaohs.’

His face became sombre again. ‘Problem is, they came back. And desecrated our damned church.’

Again he fingered his cross, a troubled look on his face.

After a brief look around the synagogue, we walked through medinat al-mawta, the City of the Dead, Cairo’s ancient cemetery, which has given shelter to the living as well as the dead for over a thousand years. Thieves, outlaws, pilgrims, professional reciters of the Quran and guardians of graves have often made their homes here in the tombs and, over the last many decades, their numbers have been swollen by hundreds of thousands of homeless people. The cemetery used to be in the desert, far outside the city, but the city has grown around it and this vast area is now right in the centre of the great noisy metropolis that is Cairo.

The City of the Dead was an island of relative calm. In its alleys there were bands of black goats and dirty, ragged children. Today the whole area was covered by veils of smoke and mist which formed and dissolved around the shapes of the tombs, leaving one to guess what was real and what was imagined. The few spring flowers were dulled with a coating of fine white dust.

Daud obviously knew the cemetery well. Walking at breakneck speed, despite his pronounced limp, he led me on a tour that took in most of the important shrines and mausoleums. He gave me a hurried explanation of the main sites and then pushed on restlessly to the next one. Finally he came to something that really interested him. Just next to a stone-built marvel of high medieval Islamic architecture, crowned with a dome, the tomb of some long-dead poet or saint, a group of men were constructing an ugly concrete breezeblock wall around what appeared to be a small vegetable patch.

After our long walk in the heat of the day, the normally indefatigable Daud now complained of tiredness and wanted to stop for a while to smoke a cigarette. We walked over and sat close to them on slabs of masonry from another age fringed with red and yellow lichen. A cold tainted draught seemed to be coming out of the tomb itself.

From the proprietary way he had walked around the tomb, Daud gave the impression that he knew the place.

From the colour of their skin I guessed that the builders were from the south of Egypt or perhaps from further south still, from the Sudan. They were black, emaciated men with faces devoid of any semblance of hope. They appeared so crushed by the burden of their lives that they did not greet us or even acknowledge us.

A woman walked out of a squat aperture set into the side of the tomb. She greeted Daud with a knowing smile. On her shapely hip she was resting an aluminium tray on which I could make out some small gold-rimmed glasses and a number of home-rolled cigarettes. She placed the tray on the ground and poured out thick black tea, the colour of ink, which is typical of Upper Egypt, from a charred pot sitting on the ashes of a cooking fire, and served the men: each one received a glass of tea and a cigarette. The men squatted on the ground, arms resting on their thin knees, in the lengthening shadow of the wall they were building, and lit up. The fragrant smell of hashish mingled with the smoke of the fire.

‘This is a drug den,’ sneered Daud, showing his blackened teeth. ‘They are building the widow a wall, and she pays them with tea, drugs and I don’t know what else. Egypt is a strange place. Our wonderful law bans the growing of tobacco - nobody knows why - so we have to import millions of tons of it every year; but every delinquent grows hashish in his back garden. This widow, this Maryam, grows it and sells it.’

One of the men picked up a drum and started playing an intricate, pulsating African rhythm. Daud had forgotten his tiredness and started performing a kind of lopsided disco dance. Ricky Gervais has serious competition. It was the strangest dance I had ever seen: he would leap in the air, eyes rolling, cross himself fervently and then bow deeply in the direction of the setting sun. No one paid much attention.

After a while Maryam went back into her tomb and came out wearing a colourful sequined shawl over her long shabby cotton dress. She walked over and stood squarely in front of me. Smiling, she too started to dance, her movements sinuous and sexy. Daud eyed her anxiously.

To the widow’s evident annoyance, the drummer stopped playing, put his drum on the ground beside him, and shot me a truculent look, a glimmer of interest in his eyes. I guessed he was wondering if there was any chance that I would pay him something to continue.

The widow faltered in her dance and tossed her head. The dust rose up around her fine ankles like a small cloud as she descended on the drummer. A victorious look on her face, she lifted the drum above her head and started playing it herself. Dancing and playing. Triumph in her eyes.

I was sitting in the shadow of the tomb watching this pantomime. I had wanted to imagine the days before the appearance of the Ark in the world, to understand what may have led to its construction. Bizarrely what was happening here had given me more enlightenment than all my walks around the pyramids and building sites of ancient Egypt. The scene before my eyes reminded me of something I had almost forgotten, something I had read without paying much attention years before when I was a student. I was reminded of the victory dance of Miriam, the prophetess and sister of Moses and Aaron.