David A. Falk – Egyptologist, Bible Scholar, Author
I am happy to announce that I have signed a book contract with Hendrickson Publishers. The book will be on the Egyptian context of the Ark of the Covenant. This will be a context study that will show where the Ark fits in the narrative of the ancient Near East. I will be writing the book for the non-expert. Yet, I will include lots of detail for those who want to see the trees as well as the forest.
I expect the book to be about 300 pages with lots of illustrations and photographs.
About 15 years ago I led a small Bible study group. We would take a book of the Bible and study it one chapter at a time. When I came to the end of the book, I would ask the group, “Which book do we study next?” And of course, nobody wanted to decide what the next book would be.
So, I would say “If nobody can decide what book we are going to study next, I get to pick. And my choice would be the book of Numbers with all those lovely genealogies.” No sooner would I say that, and someone would propose a book (a different book) to study.
The typical Bible reader has an aversion to genealogies. Modern readers often see genealogies as the “boring bits” that one needs to buzz past to get to the interesting stuff. I think that this outlook is unfortunate because genealogies were the literary device of choice that ancient writers used to give us the really juicy info.
In the ancient Hebrew, genealogical lists are called toledot. An important consideration is that toledot are not quite the same as what we call a “genealogy” in the West today. Knowing the technical difference between a toledot and a genealogy can help us navigate the Hebrew Scriptures.
In the West, genealogies normally trace the ancestors of a person going as far back as possible. Hebrew toledot sort of do the opposite. Toledot start with a well-known person and attempt to trace that person’s descendants. The purpose of a toledot is not to establish pedigree as much as it is to show the person’s posterity. So, in effect, the ancient Israelites believed that the actions of a person would have outcomes that would manifest generations down the line.
Ancient writers used these toledot for didactic purposes. Often the toledot sets up the historical context, but the writer could also use it to convey a moral lesson. Most western genealogies lack this didactic component.
One example of a toledot comes from Genesis 5 where we find the posterity of Adam (of the Garden of Eden infamy). We see in Genesis 5 the following structure:
And <Person 1> lived <Number A> years and became father of <Person 2>, And <Person 1> lived <Number B> years after he was father to <Person 2>, and he had other sons and daughters. So all the days of <Person 1> were <Number A+B> years and he died.
The writer repeats this structure from Adam to Jared six times. Then on the seventh generation, Enoch doesn’t die but it taken away instead [Gen 5:24]. This disruption of the normal (intentionally monotonous) pattern using antithesis shows what this toledot is really about. The subject is that mankind is now beset with death without relief.
Adam sinned and fell from grace largely causing the mess on what we call planet Earth. God created Adam in a perfect world that had no death. The toledot in Genesis 5 is to show the reader Adam’s posterity–his actions which caused death to rule unchecked.
The other thing that genealogies can do is establish why something happened. In 2 Samuel 6, Uzzah was struck dead by God after touching the Ark of the Covenant [2 Sam 6:7]. The difficulty here is that touching the Ark was not in and of itself an offense. Priests had handled the Ark several times in its history with impunity. So what gives?
The first thing is that the reader may notice is that the Ark was placed on an ox-cart [2 Sam 6:3], which was forbidden since it was to be carried only by its poles [Exod 25:14]. But this alone probably would not have resulted in condign action.
The other thing we are told is the genealogy of Uzzah in verse 4. He was the son of Abinadab. Abinadab was the son of Jesse and brother of King David [1 Sam 17:13, 1 Chr 2:13], which makes Uzzah the nephew of the king. Moreover, this makes Uzzah from the tribe of Judah. Only Israelites from the tribe of Levi and of those only descendants of Kohath were permitted to carry the Ark [Num 4:15]. Although one offense may have been overlooked, two impious actions were seen as irreverence [2 Sam 6:7].
Toledot can give the modern Bible reader fascinating information if we take the time to try to understand them.
After my blog last week expressing skepticism over the news story announcing the discovery of the Ark of the Covenant, LiveScience.com has walked back its story. The fact is that, lurid tales of killer priests and fabulous treasure aside, a Western professor has seen the ark in the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion.
Edward Ullendorff saw the ark inside the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion. Ullendorff was a professor at University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). He also served as an army officer attached to the British armed forces in 1941. And he was with them, when British forces took Ethiopia from the fascist Italians. With soldiers to his back and no one to stop him, Ullendorff had access to the ark within the church.
When he was still alive, Ullendorff gave an interview to the L. A. Times in 1992 debunking Graham Hancock’s claims. Ullendorff stated that he saw “a wooden box, but it’s empty.” He described it as a “Middle- to late-medieval construction, when these were fabricated ad hoc.” He maintained that the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion possessed a medieval period replica of the ark.
These replicas are a common feature of Ethiopian Coptic churches, and none of them are the real Ark of the Covenant. They serve an important role as an idealized place of veneration and religious focus.
These arks function like the altars in Roman Catholic churches. In Roman Catholic churches, the altar is not really a place were consecrated offerings are incinerated with fire — they are technically offering tables that are called altars.
The tabot (or “ark”) in Ethiopian churches serve a similar purpose. The word tabot comes from the Aramaic tebuta, which descended from the Egyptian tbt, “box, chest.” The purpose of the tabot is to remind the onlooker of the Mosaic law and the tablets of the Ten Commandments.
But this is not a the first time an outsider has seen an Ethiopian ark. In 2002, a Scottish church returned a tabot to Ethiopia. Photographs of these tabot show that they are nothing like the original Ark of the Covenant. They are small wood boxes that a single priest carried over his head. In contrast, the original Ark was 2.5 cubits (45 inches) long by 1.5 cubits (27 inches) wide and high (Exod 25:10) and the priests carried it on poles (Exod 25:13-14).
No doubt exists that these Ethiopian arks remain important religious and historical artifacts. But they are only historically significant to the medieval world of Axum, not the late bronze age world of Israel.
Few bible topics seem to attract as much prurient excess like the Ark of the Covenant. Studies on the Ark have typically followed two unhealthy extremes. These studies either follow the path of extreme skepticism after Julius Welhaussen, Gerhard von Rad, and the biblical minimalists. Or they follow the treasure hunting of Ron Wyatt, Graham Hancock, and a large host of other weird players.
What makes this issue timely was a story on Fox News yesterday re-announcing that “Bible scholars believe the legendary Ark of the Covenant may have landed in Africa…” The ‘scholar’ who announced this was Bob Cornuke who is a self-styled adventurer after the likes of Indiana Jones. He has searched for Noah’s Ark, the biblical Golgotha, the ‘real’ Mount Sinai, and now the Ark of the Covenant.
Treasure hunting is hardly new when it comes to the Ark. In AD 1899, Freemasons and British-Israelites destroyed the archaeological site of Tara in Ireland looking for the Ark. More recently, the upsurge of dispensational premillennialism in the 1970s renewed interest in end times events. That interest in eschatology also kindled an interest the Temple and Tabernacle inviting an influx of speculative theories. Ron Wyatt fed upon this fervor in the late 70s and into the 1990s.
Graham Hancock (1993) used the legend in the Kebra Negast and sterile speculation to suggest Solomon impregnated the Queen of Sheba. The son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba returned to Axum (Ethiopia) to take up his throne. Solomon, loving his son, made a copy of the Ark for the son to take back with him. But the alleged son swapped out the real Ark with the fake. The son returned to Ethiopia and the Ark ended up in a church where it supposedly still resides today.
The problem with the Kebra Nagast is that it is a mashup of unrelated historical characters and places that could even make the plot lines from Doctor Who seem plausible. Part of that mashup confuses kingdom of Axum with the unrelated kingdom of Saba. Axum is a region in northern Ethiopia that did not become a kingdom until ca. AD 100. Saba was a southern Arabian kingdom that began ca. 1200 BCE and lasted until ca. AD 275. Axum and Saba are in no way related historically or geographically. It is historically impossible for the Queen of Sheba to be monarch of Ethiopia.
Many others writing on the Ark have regurgitated selections of Hancock’s hypothesis. Bob Cornuke and David Halbrook repeated this hypothesis in 2002, Stuart Munro-Hay in 2003, and Randall Price in 2005. These books typically involve an ‘expedition’ to Ethiopia to meet the Guardian, an enigmatic figure connected to the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion. The Guardian verbally affirms that the church holds the true Ark of the Covenant. Heaven forbid that any of these scholars make an extended expedition to a library. Needless to say, Hancock’s hypothesis is perhaps the most plagiarized hypothesis when it comes to the Ark.
Moreover, these treasure hunters take their readers on vicarious voyages of faith, confusing truth with possibilities. Voyages of faith are a necessary aspect in how we come to believe. But such voyages without a firm foundation in fact neither educates nor illuminates. Thus, such literature has degraded into the pulp fiction of biblical publishing.
Cornuke apparently holds a Ph.D. in Bible and Theology from Louisiana Baptist University. However, questions have been raised about the quality of that dissertation, “Noah’s Ark, the Ark of the Covenant and Mount Sinai in History and Tradition.” Some have suggested that his dissertation was a mishmash of Ron Wyatt’s and Graham Hancock’s theories. Credentials aside, Cornuke’s hypothesis and the related news article have serious problems.
First, the idea that bible scholars believe the Ark landed in Africa is ridiculously weak. The article makes it seem that there is consensus among bible scholars that the Ark is in Ethiopia. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact is that most bible scholars don’t believe that the Ark existed at all, let alone resides in Africa.
The other fact is that the actual number of scholars that specialize in the Ark is remarkably small. These scholars normally complete of a Ph.D. dissertation on the Ark or its related archaeology or literature. Among scholars that have done this there are less than a half-dozen subject matter experts worldwide; I happen to be one of them. Of real experts on the Ark, none to my knowledge believe the Ark is (or ever was) in Ethiopia.
Also, the hypothesis supplies a narrative but no evidence. Cornuke believes the Israelites transported the Ark up the Nile during the reign of King Manasseh. He believes that Israelites stole the Ark when they established a colony at Elephantine. He thinks this took place when Manasseh introduced pagan worship into Israel. Where is the evidence for any of this?
Furthermore, the biblical text contradicts the hypothesis. 2 Chr 35:3 quotes King Josiah ordering the priests to bring the Ark into the Solomonic Temple. The priests removed the Ark and placed it in temporary housing when the Temple fell into disrepair. Josiah ordered the restoration of the Temple (2 Chr 35:20) and the Ark returned to its place.
Finally, the Prophet Jeremiah records in Jer 3:16:
“It shall be in those days when you are multiplied and increased in the land,” declares the Lord, “they will no longer say, ‘The ark of the covenant of the Lord.’ And it will not come to mind, nor will they remember it, nor will they miss it, nor will it be made again.”
Jeremiah was active from the 13th year of Josiah until after the destruction of the Solomonic Temple. His writing stating “nor will it be made again” implies that the Ark no longer existed. In other words, Nebuchadnezzar II destroyed the Ark and no one would rebuild it. And like the people who mourned over the destruction of the Temple, some mourned over the destruction of the Ark.
After the priests brought the Ark into the Temple, the Lord’s glory departed from between the wings of the cherubim, and the glory of the Lord filled the Holy of Holies (1 Kings 8:11). After that, the Ark was no longer important. The thing that made the Ark special was not its physical existence or its value in gold. The truly valuable thing about the Ark was the presence of God dwelling in the sacred space between the cherubim.
The Ark does have a rich ancient history. And as an artifact, it is an object worthy of study. But to get something meaningful from such studies, we need go beyond both beyond extreme skepticism and beyond Indiana Jones.
