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Ark of the Covenant News!

Gather by JOHN CHOPORES

All quotes [if not stated otherwise] are from the "JERUSALEM POST".

(From "The New York Times") January 27, 1998

What Ethiopians Believe Is the Ark of the Covenant Rests in Aksum By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

KSUM, Ethiopia -- Like many Ethiopians, the deacon who greets visitors outside St. Mary of Zion Church here has no doubt about the exact location of the Ark of the Covenant, the most sacred object of the Old Testament and the focus of one of the greatest mysteries of all time.

Asked what became of the golden chest that Moses built to hold the Ten Commandments, the deacon, Fiseha Asfaw, just smiled at what he saw as an absurd question. Everyone in this windswept and dusty land knows that the ark is in a square stone temple beside the ancient church, he said. Replicas of the ark are brought out at this time of year for a fervent religious celebration.

The ark has lain here in Ethiopia's most sacred city for nearly 3,000 years, since the time of Solomon, he said, hidden among hundreds of other relics and old manuscripts. It is guarded by a single monk with nothing more dangerous than a wooden cross in his hands.

"No one but the monk can look at it," Fiseha said. "Not even the archbishop. If they look at it, they will soon feel sickness and die. It is God's commandments. The true commandments of God."

For centuries, Ethiopian Christian priests have maintained that they have the sacred ark that the rest of the world believes is lost. ...

There is some confusion about what precisely the monks are hiding behind the faded red-velvet curtain over the doorway of the temple's domed sanctuary. Most people envision the ark as the large gold-covered chest with two cherubim on top described in the Bible and depicted by Hollywood in the Steven Spielberg movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

But in interviews in recent days, priests and monks who say they have seen the relic denied that they have the heavy chest Moses is said to have built, which they refer to as "the chair of the ark."

Instead, they say their ark is a white stone tablet inscribed with the Ten Commandments and kept in a shallow solid-gold case. They say that this tablet was inscribed by God and carried down from Mount Sinai by Moses.

"Yes, it is here, it is the original Ark of the Covenant, the one given to Moses," the chief priest of St. Mary of Zion Church, Nebura-ed Belai, said. "The chair of the ark is not there."

...

Placing [a copy of]the ark in the center of their places of worship is not the only tradition the Ethiopian Christians have retained from ancient Judaism. Christians here also observe the Saturday Sabbath and follow Jewish strictures about clean and unclean foods. Boys are circumcised on the eighth day after birth. ...

Still, many historians and archeologists say that there is almost no evidence to support the legend that the original ark came to Ethiopia. To begin with, the Axumite kingdom did not appear until the first century B.C., at least eight centuries after Solomon.

Many experts on Ethiopia have dismissed the story as a 12th-century fabrication, a piece of propaganda intended to lend legitimacy to a new line of Ethiopian rulers. AKSUM, Ethiopia: Ethiopian rulers.

"There is absolutely no historical truth to this legend, this tradition, of a pre-Christian, Judaic state in Aksum," said Professor Taddesse Tamrat, a history scholar at Addis Ababa University. "This legend is nothing else but a legend. It is not history."

Yet the idea of the ark's presence in Ethiopia has not only persisted; for the vast majority of faithful in the Ethiopian church, it has taken on the weight of historical fact. The entire society is infused with a reverence for the ark, especially during religious festivals like the Timkat celebration.

Graham Hancock, a journalist and a former writer for the Economist magazine, wrote in a 1992 book, "The Sign and the Seal" (William Heinemann Ltd.), that he had found evidence in Ethiopian Jewish folklore, Old Testament scriptures, and some archeological sites suggesting there is a kernel of truth to the legend.

In his book, Hancock argued that Jewish priests took the ark out of Israel during the brutal reign of Manasseh, a Jewish monarch in the seventh century B.C. who worshiped pagan gods, and carried it to a new temple on an island near Aswan in Egypt.

Two hundred years later, Hancock theorizes, a war in Egypt forced Jewish priests to flee again with the ark, traveling up the Nile and its tributaries to Lake Tana in Ethiopia, where local tradition holds it was housed in a tent for 800 years until the first Christian king of Aksum seized it and installed it in his capital.

Biblical scholars say the ark appears to have been lost sometime between 955 B.C., when Solomon built the first temple in Jerusalem to house it, and 587 B.C., when Nebuchadnezzar's army razed the city, but, according to the Bible, did not find the ark. Though the ark is mentioned more than 200 times in the books before Solomon's reign, it appears only a few times in later books, mostly in lamentations about its absence.

Hancock's theory has heightened interest in Ethiopia's claim to harbor the relic and has attracted visitors to Aksum (sometimes spelled Axum). Some tourists have tried to bribe the guardian to see it, monks said. Others have been arrested trying to scale the iron fence around the ark's building.

In separate interviews, a monk who briefly guarded the ark in 1983 and a retired head priest who said he had seen the relic twice described it as a single tablet of white polished stone inscribed with the Ten Commandments in Hebrew. They said the tablet is about 2 1/2 feet long and 1 1/2 inches thick and is housed in a gold box three inches thick, with a hinged lid and no designs.

Their descriptions do not match the biblical descriptions of the lost Ark of the Covenant. In Exodus, Chapter 25, the ark is meticulously described as a wooden box covered with gold, about the size of a tea chest. It measured 3 feet 9 inches long, 2 feet 3 inches wide, and 2 feet 3 inches high. On top was a heavy lid of solid gold on which stood two cherubim with uplifted wings, facing each other. Moreover, there were two stone tablets laid in the ark, not one, the Scriptures say.

"The man who stole the ark hid it in the small box only, not the big one," said the Rev. Gebreab Maru, who was head priest at St. Mary of Zion for nearly 20 years before retiring in 1985. "It is true the larger box never came to Ethiopia."

The monks said the relic seemed to have paranormal powers. They said that at night it sometimes appeared to give off light. They also said it was hard to look at the tablet in daylight because it was so smooth and mirrorlike.

"When I looked at it, it was completely difficult to understand it," the former head priest said. "It makes me very afraid and my eyes filled with tears."

A former guardian of the ark, Wolde Giorgis Wolde Gebrial, said: "It is like a mirror, very smooth, not quite white. Sometimes it looks like water."

At midnight each night, the guardian must begin burning incense and praying incessantly, reading psalms and scriptures. The guardian must keep a vigil over the ark until 3 p.m. the next day, when he is allowed to rest and eat, he said. Sometimes hermits and monks are permitted into the building at night to pray to the relic, he said.

"The Holy Spirit is with it," the monk said. "We can't sleep near the ark. We must be aware and at prayer."

The current guardian, the Rev. Tekle Mariam, declined to be interviewed or photographed for this article.

The Israeli ambassador to Ethiopia, Avi Granot, said that he had visited Aksum and questioned the monks about the relic, but that Israel has made no official request to see the object, much less have it returned. Granot said that Israel regards the monks' claim as a legend with no historical footing.

"I think this is one of those mysterious stories where the beauty will remain forever in the mystery," Granot said. "It's one of those things in which no one is really interested in deciphering the mystery for the fear that the disillusionment will be great."

... Behind them came scores of deacons and lower-ranking priests, dressed in white and wearing turbans, who sang the mournful and nasal hymns of Ethiopian church music. They used their long T-shaped prayer sticks in a slowly accelerating dance before the tabots, a step said to have been handed down from King David.

None doubted that the real ark of the covenant lay in the church at Aksum. None doubted that the spirit of God was hovering in their replica arks in the tent.

"It's not just an old legend," said Simon Teferra, 24, a management consultant. "The ark came from King Solomon. The bishops taught me this and I am following it. Why should I doubt it? We are holy. If you have no religion, you will have many problems. I believe in the Ark of the Covenant. The power comes from God. The arks are holy."

9/18/98 (from "CHICAGO Jewish Star") The Ark: Finally Found? By DOUGLAS DAVIS ...believes he has found the burial site of the Ten Commandments-in a part of the West Bank that Israel has already handed over to the Palestinian Authority. Michael Sanders, ...bases his theory on satellite images, Egyptian papyrus documents from the British Museum in London and other accounts. ...Sanders,...has spent more than 25 years researching biblical history. ...he is planing to excavate the site, where he has detected the contours of an Egyptian temple that he believes may have been build over the burial site of the biblical Ark of the Covenant. ...The Ark of the Covenant...disappeared from Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem after a raid by an Egyptian king in the 10th BC... It was never recovered... Sanders believes the ark was seized by Egyptian King Shishak when Solomon's Temple was plundered in 925 BC...the first in a series of Egyptian raids on Jerusalem. He says papyrus documents in the British Museum have identified an Egyptian temple at the southern end of the West Bank, beneath which the ark may have been buried. "This temple is referred to in the papyrus as a "mysterious house in the land of Zahi," ... In 1830, ...Edward Robinson walked the route that had been taken by the invading Egyptians and found ancient ruins at the village of Dhahiriya. Satellite images have also revealed ruins at the southern end of Dhahiriya, the remains of an ancient Egyptian temple. ..."If the Egyptians had just seized the most sacred religious codes [the Ten Commandments, kept in the Ark] from the people they had invaded, they would have laid them in the foundations of their new temple."

Published: 09-09-94 Byline: Aviva Bar-Am Twenty kilometers east of the Mediterranean Sea the flattop mound of Tel Miqne-Ekron towers over the Coastal Plain. Originally the site of a Canaanite settlement, the hill is better known as one of five fortified Philistine cities mentioned in the Bible. It also contains impressive remains of an Israelite fortress. … Ekron is mentioned in the Bible any number of times as one of five major Philistine cities: Ashdod, Gath, Ashkelon, Gaza and Ekron. It was also the last of these cities to host the Ark of the Covenant, which the Philistines wrested from the Children of Israel in battle and took to Ashdod and later Gath. Following disasters in each of the cities, the Philistines ordered two cows to be hitched to a wooden cart and the holy ark placed on top. Then they watched as the animals pulled it straight up toward Beit Shemesh in Israelite territory (I Samuel 5-6).

Published: 07-29-94

A Texas Bible scholar using NASA satellite photos said yesterday he has discovered Gilgal, the biblical campsite of the holy Ark of the Covenant, just south of Jericho. Vendyl Jones, of Arlington, Texas, …Jones' team of 37 Christian volunteers partially uncovered walls 11 meters wide and about 50 centimeters high running some 300 by 500 meters. These, he claimed, formed the partition surrounding the Mishkan, the biblical tabernacle. Published: Sunday, May 10, 1992 Byline: News agencies A Texas Bible scholar digging in desert caves said Friday he had found ritual incense from the Temple and may be close to finding a bigger treasure, the Ark of the Covenant. Vendyl Jones said he found the incense in the same complex of caves above the Dead Sea where in the 1940s Arab shepherds first discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls. … He used as his treasure map the so-called Copper Scroll, part of the Dead Sea Scrolls. He said the scroll lists 64 places where Temple treasures, including the Ark of the Covenant that tradition says holds the Ten Commandments, were hidden from the advancing Romans in the first century. … But Jones said his belief in the Copper Scrolls was vindicated when he found a small jug of anointing oil from the Temple in a nearby cave in 1988. … Among the lost artifacts Jones said he hopes to recover, in addition to the Ark of the Covenant and the original tabernacle built by Moses and Aaron, are the Ashes of the Red Heifer.

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