The Ark of the Covenant

The Hebrew Bible describes the Ark, in Hebrew aron ha-berit, as a chest of acacia wood overlaid with gold, about two and a half cubits long, carried on poles and covered by a golden lid, the kapporet (often translated “mercy seat”), with two cherubim facing each other above it (Exodus 25). It held the stone tablets of the covenant given to Moses at Sinai. The New Testament Letter to the Hebrews adds a jar of manna and Aaron’s rod, while the First Book of Kings states that there was nothing in it but the tablets. God promised to meet Moses “from between the two cherubim”, so the Ark was understood as the throne or footstool of the divine presence.

In the biblical narrative the Ark leads the Israelites through the wilderness, halts the waters of the Jordan and is carried around the walls of Jericho. It is captured by the Philistines, who send it back after plagues strike their cities (1 Samuel 4–6), and King David later brings it to Jerusalem with dancing and music (2 Samuel 6). Solomon installs it in the innermost room of his Temple, the Holy of Holies (1 Kings 8).

Then the Ark quietly disappears from the story. When the Babylonians destroyed the Temple in 587 or 586 BCE, the account in 2 Kings lists the bronze and gold objects they carried away but does not mention the Ark. Later writers noticed this silence. The Second Book of Maccabees says that the prophet Jeremiah hid it in a cave on Mount Nebo, to remain concealed until God gathers his people again.

No physical trace of the Ark has ever been found, and it is not mentioned in any surviving source outside biblical and later religious literature. Many scholars think the detailed description in Exodus reached its present form in priestly writings of the later monarchy or the exile, though it may preserve older memories of a portable shrine. Such shrines are well attested in the ancient Near East: Egyptian sacred chests and barques carried on poles, such as the Anubis shrine from Tutankhamun’s tomb, offer close parallels, as do winged guardian figures flanking royal and divine thrones.

The Second Temple, rebuilt after the exile, had an empty Holy of Holies. The historian Josephus, writing in the first century CE, states that nothing at all stood in it, and the Mishnah says that a bare stone, the even shetiyah, marked the place where the Ark had once rested. Whether the Ark was destroyed by the Babylonians, taken earlier (the Bible records that the Egyptian pharaoh Shishak plundered the Temple treasury around 925 BCE) or hidden is unknown.

The best-known claim to the Ark today is that of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, which holds that it rests in a chapel beside the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Aksum, watched over by a single guardian monk. No outsider is permitted to see it, so the claim cannot be examined. Historians note that the story behind it is told in the Kebra Nagast (“Glory of the Kings”), a work compiled in the fourteenth century from older traditions.

For Jews, the memory of the Ark lives on in the synagogue: the cabinet that houses the Torah scrolls is called the aron ha-kodesh, the “holy ark”, and it is usually placed on the wall facing Jerusalem. Rabbinic sages debated the Ark’s fate, some holding that it was hidden beneath the Temple Mount and others that it was carried off to Babylon. The Qur’an also refers to the tabut, a chest bearing tranquillity (sakina) from God and relics left by the families of Moses and Aaron, carried by angels as a sign of Saul’s kingship (Surah 2:248).

In Ethiopia the Ark is not only a distant relic but a living presence. Every Ethiopian Orthodox church contains a tabot, a consecrated tablet representing the Ark and the tablets of the law, without which the church cannot be used for the liturgy. At the festival of Timkat, the Ethiopian Epiphany, the tabotat are carried in procession, wrapped in rich cloth, through crowds of worshippers.

Modern audiences mostly meet the Ark through adventure stories. Steven Spielberg’s film Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) made it an object of terrifying power sought by Nazi agents, and authors have proposed hiding places from Ireland to southern Africa; the historian Tudor Parfitt, for instance, connected it with a sacred drum of the Lemba people. None of these theories has produced verifiable evidence, but the Ark’s disappearance continues to draw searchers.