The Sign and the Seal

by Graham Hancock

  the lamp-stands, five on the right and five on the left in front of the debir, of pure gold; the floral work, the lamps, the extinguishers of gold; the basins, knives, sprinkling bowls, incense boats, censers, of pure gold; the door sockets for the inner shrine – that is, the Holy of Holies – and for the hekal, of gold.66

  Of course, in this translation, the terms ‘inner shrine’, ‘debir’ and ‘Holy of Holies’ were all used interchangeably to refer to the same sacred place – i.e. the place in which the Ark had been installed by Solomon so many centuries before.67 Once I had satisfied myself that that was indeed the case, a single significant fact suddenly became clear to me: while not looting the Holy of Holies, Nebuchadnezzar had nonetheless removed its door-sockets. From this it was safe to deduce that the doors had been taken off their hinges and that the Babylonian monarch – or the soldiers who had carried out his orders – would thus have been able to look right into the debir.

  I realized immediately that this was an important, indeed a crucial, finding. Gazing into the inner sanctum the Babylonians should immediately have been able to see the two giant cherubim, overlaid with gold, that Solomon had placed as sentinels over the Ark – and they should also have been able to see the Ark itself. Since they had shown no compunction in removing the gold from the furnishings of the hekal it therefore had to be asked why they had not immediately rushed into the debir to strip the far larger quantities of gold from its walls and from the cherubim, and why they had not taken the Ark as booty.

  The Babylonians had demonstrated that they held the Jews – and their religion – in complete contempt.68 There was thus no mileage in assuming that they might have refrained from looting the Holy of Holies out of some sort of altruistic desire to spare the feelings of the vanquished. On the contrary all the evidence suggested that if they had indeed been confronted by rich pickings like the Ark, and the gold overlay on the walls and on the cherubim, then Nebuchadnezzar and his men would unhesitatingly have helped themselves to the lot.

  What made this even more probable was that it had been the normal practice of the Babylonians at this time to seize the principal idols or cult-objects of the peoples they had conquered and to transport them back to Babylon to place in their own temple before the statue of their god Marduk.69 The Ark would have been an ideal candidate for this sort of treatment. Yet it had not even been stripped of its gold, let alone carried off intact. Indeed neither it nor the cherubim had been mentioned at all.

  The logical conclusion [I wrote in my notebook] is that the Ark and the gold-covered cherubim were no longer in the debir in 598 BC when the first Babylonian invasion took place – and, indeed, that the walls, floor and ceiling of the debir had also been stripped of their gold prior to that date. This would seem to lend at least prima facie support to the Ethiopian claim – since I have already established that Shishak and Jehoash did not get their hands on the Ark, or on the other precious contents of the debir, and since they were the only previous invaders to have acquired any sort of treasure from the Temple.

  Of course the Babylonian assault on Jerusalem in 598 BC had not been the last that Nebuchadnezzar would mount – and the conclusion that I had just scribbled in my notebook would be proved completely false if there were any evidence to suggest that he had taken the Ark the second time that he sacked the holy city.

  After the successful operation of 598 BC he had installed a puppet king, Zedekiah, on the throne.70 This ‘puppet’, however, turned out to have ideas of his own and, in 589 BC, he rebelled against his Babylonian overlord.71

  The response was instantaneous. Nebuchadnezzar marched on Jerusalem once again and laid siege to it, finally breaching its walls and overrunning it in late June or early July of the year 587 BC.72 Slightly less than a month later:73

  Nebuzaradan, commander of the guard, an officer of the king of Babylon … burned down the Temple of Yahweh, the royal palace and all the houses in Jerusalem. The … troops who accompanied the commander of the guard … broke up the bronze pillars from the Temple of Yahweh, the wheeled stands and the bronze Sea that were in the Temple of Yahweh, and took the bronze away to Babylon. They took the ash containers, the scoops, the knives, the incense boats, and all the bronze furnishings used in worship. The commander of the guard took the censers and the sprinkling bowls, everything that was made of gold and everything made of silver. As regards the two pillars, the one Sea and the wheeled stands … there was no reckoning the weight in bronze in all these objects.74

  This, then, was the detailed inventory offered in the Bible of all the objects and treasures broken up or carried off to Babylon after Nebuchadnezzar’s second attack on the city. Once again, and significantly, the Ark of the Covenant was not included – and nor was the gold that Solomon had used to line the Holy of Holies and to overlay the great cherubim that had stood within that sacred place. Indeed absolutely nothing else was mentioned at all and it was clear that the bulk of the loot taken in 587 BC had consisted of bronze salvaged from the pillars and the ‘Sea’ – and also from the wheeled basins – that Hiram had made four centuries earlier.

  A fact that argued very strongly in favour of the basic veracity of the list was that it was entirely consistent with the biblical account of what had previously been stolen from the Temple in 598 BC. On that occasion Nebuchadnezzar had left the bronze items in place but had removed the ‘treasures of the house of the Lord, and the treasures of the king’s house’ and had also stripped off all the gold from the furnishings of the hekal. This was why, eleven years later, Nebuzaradan’s haul of gold and silver had consisted only of a few censers and sprinkling bowls:75 he had not been able to find anything more valuable for the simple reason that all the best items had been looted and taken to Babylon in 598 BC.

  Since I had already satisfied myself that those items had not included the Ark, and since the relic had not been amongst the second lot of booty either, I felt increasing confidence in my conclusion that it must have disappeared at some stage prior to the Babylonian invasions. By the same token the other oft-cited explanation for the loss of the relic – namely that it must have been destroyed in the great fire that Nebuzaradan had started76 – also looked increasingly untenable. If the Ark had indeed been taken away before 598 BC – perhaps to Ethiopia – then it would of course have escaped the destruction of the Temple.

  But was it safe, from this chain of reasoning, to deduce that it had gone to Ethiopia? Certainly not. Researching the matter further I found that Judaic traditions offered several alternative explanations for what had happened – any of which, if sufficiently strong, might prove fatal to the Ethiopian case and all of which therefore had to be considered on their merits.

  ‘Deep and tortuous caches …’

  The first point that became clear to me was that the Jews as a people had only become conscious of the loss of the Ark – and conscious that this loss was a great mystery – at the time of the building of the Second Temple.

  I was already aware that in 598 BC Nebuchadnezzar had sent into exile in Babylon a large number of the inhabitants of Jerusalem.77 In 587 BC, after the burning of Solomon’s Temple,

  Nebuzaradan, commander of the guard, deported the remainder of the population left behind in the city, the deserters who had gone over to the king of Babylon, and the rest of the common people … Thus Judah was deported from this land.78

  The trauma of the banishment, the humiliations of the captivity, and the firm resolve that Jerusalem should never be forgotten, were soon to be immortalized in one of the most poignant and evocative pieces of poetry in the whole of the Old Testament:

  By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

  We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof,

  For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

  How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?

&nbs
p; If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.

  If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.79

  This physical exile of an entire people was not to last for very long. Nebuchadnezzar had begun the process in 598 BC and had completed it in 587. Slightly less than half a century later, however, the empire that had expanded so dramatically under his rule was utterly crushed by Cyrus the Great, king of Persia, whose triumphant armies entered Babylon in 539 BC.80

  This Cyrus, who has been described as ‘one of the world’s most astonishing empire-builders’,81 adopted an enlightened approach towards his subject peoples. There were others, like the Jews, who had also been held captive in Babylon. He made it his business to set them all free. Moreover, he permitted them to remove their confiscated idols and cult objects from the temple of Marduk and to carry these home with them.82

  The Jews, of course, were unable to take full advantage of this latter opportunity, because their principal cult object, the Ark of the Covenant, had not been brought to Babylon in the first place. Nevertheless a large number of the lesser treasures that Nebuchadnezzar had seized were still intact, and these the Persians handed over with all due ceremony to the appropriate Judaean officials. The Old Testament contained a detailed report of the transaction:

  King Cyrus took the vessels of the Temple of Yahweh which Nebuchadnezzar had carried away from Jerusalem and dedicated to the temple of his god. Cyrus king of Persia handed them over to Mithredath, the treasurer, who counted them out to Sheshbazzar, the prince of Judah. The inventory was as follows: thirty golden bowls for offerings; one thousand and twenty-nine silver bowls for offerings; thirty golden bowls; four hundred and ten silver bowls; one thousand other vessels. In all, five thousand four hundred vessels of gold and silver. Sheshbazzar took all these with him when the exiles travelled back from Babylon to Jerusalem.83

  That return journey took place in 538 BC.84 Then, in the spring of 537 BC, the Second Temple began to be built above the razed foundations of the First.85 The work was finally completed around 517 BC,86 and although this was a cause for great rejoicing there were also reasons for sorrow. The removal of the Ark of the Covenant from the First Temple – whenever it had occurred – had clearly been kept secret from the public (not a difficult task since no one but the High Priest was supposed to enter the Holy of Holies). Now, however, after the return from Babylon, it was impossible to disguise the fact that the precious relic had gone, and that it therefore could not be installed in the inner sanctum of the Second Temple. This great change was explicitly admitted in the Talmud, which stated: ‘In five things the First Sanctuary differed from the Second: in the Ark, the Ark-cover, the Cherubim, the Fire, and the Urim-and-Thummim.’87 The Urim and Thummim had been mysterious objects (here referred to collectively as a single object) that had possibly been used for divining and that had been kept in the breast-plate of the High Priest in the time of Moses. They were not present in the Second Temple. Neither was the celestial fire that had always been associated with the Ark of the Covenant. And of course the Ark itself was also missing – together with its thick golden cover and the two golden cherubim that had been mounted upon it.88

  The secret, therefore, was out: the most precious relic of the Jewish faith had vanished, apparently into thin air. Moreover the people knew that it had not been brought into captivity with them in Babylon. So where could it possibly have gone?

  Almost at once theories started to circulate and, in the normal way of things, some of these theories quickly took on the character of revealed truths. The majority supposed that Nebuchadnezzar’s looters had failed to find the Ark because, before their arrival, it had been carefully hidden somewhere within Mount Moriah itself, where the Second Temple now stood on the site previously occupied by the First. According to one post-exilic legend, for example, Solomon had foreseen the destruction of his Temple even while he was building it. For this reason he had ‘contrived a place of concealment for the Ark, in deep and tortuous caches’.89

  It was this tradition, I felt sure, that must have inspired the author of the Apocalypse of Baruch to suggest that the relic had been swallowed by the earth below the great ‘foundation stone’ known as the Shetiyyah. I knew, of course that no reliance could be placed on that relatively late and apocryphal work. Nevertheless I was aware that other accounts existed which likewise identified some secret cavern within the Temple Mount as the last resting place of the Ark.

  Reinforcing the notion that that cavern might have been located directly beneath the Holy of Holies, the Talmud expressed the view that ‘the Ark was buried in its own place.’90 And this entombment, it seemed, had been the work of King Josiah, who had ruled in Jerusalem from 640 to 609 BC,91 i.e. until just a decade before the first Babylonian seizure of the city. Near the end of his long reign, the story went, foreseeing ‘the imminent destruction of the Temple’, ‘Josiah hid the Holy Ark and all its appurtenances, in order to guard them against desecration at the hands of the enemy.’92

  This, I found, was quite a pervasive belief. Not all the sources, however, agreed that the place of concealment had been in the immediate vicinity of the Holy of Holies. Another parallel tradition, recorded in the Mishnah, suggested that the relic had been buried ‘under the pavement of the wood-house, that it might not fall into the hands of the enemy.’93 This wood-house had stood within the precincts of Solomon’s Temple, but its precise location had been forgotten by the time that the Jews returned from their exile in Babylon and thus ‘remained secret for all time’.94 Nevertheless the Mishnah reported that a priest had once been working in the courtyard of the Second Temple and there, by accident, he had stumbled upon ‘a block of pavement that was different from the rest’:

  He went and told it to his fellow, but before he could make an end of the matter his life departed. So they knew assuredly that there the Ark lay hidden.95

  An entirely separate account of the concealment of the relic was put forward in the second book of Maccabees (a work excluded from the Hebrew Bible, but included in the canon of the Greek and Latin Christian churches, and in the Apocrypha of the English Bible96). Compiled at some time between 100 BC and AD 70 by a Jew of Pharisaic sympathies (who wrote in Greek),97 the opening verses of 2 Maccabees 2 had this to say about the fate of the Ark:

  The prophet Jeremiah … warned by an oracle [of the impending destruction of the Temple of Solomon], gave instructions for the tabernacle and the Ark to go with him when he set out for the mountain which Moses had climbed to survey God’s heritage. On his arrival Jeremiah found a cave dwelling, into which he brought the tabernacle, the Ark and the altar of incense, afterwards blocking up the entrance.98

  In the opinion of the scholars who produced the authoritative English translation of the Jerusalem Bible – from which the above quotation is taken – Jeremiah’s supposed expedition to hide the Ark was nothing more than an inspirational fable devised by the author of the second book of Maccabees as part of a deliberate attempt to re-awaken the interest of expatriate Jews in the national homeland.99 The editors of the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church likewise regarded the passage as being of no historical value.100 And since it was written some five hundred years after the death of Jeremiah himself it could not even be said to be a particularly ancient tradition101 – although its author had attempted to dress it up as such by claiming that he had based his account on a document found in ‘the archives’.102

  It was a fact, however, that the prophet Jeremiah (unlike the author of Maccabees) had lived at around the time of the destruction of Solomon’s Temple – which meant that he could, just conceivably, have played some role in the concealment of the Ark. Moreover ‘the mountain which Moses had climbed to survey God’s heritage’ – Mount Nebo103 – was a known place that stood barely fifty kilometres to the east of Jerusalem as the crow flies.104 Culturally appropriate because of its associations with the founder of Judaism
, this venerated peak thus also looked like a feasible hiding place in terms of its geographical location.

  The Maccabees story had therefore not been entirely dismissed by later generations of Jews; on the contrary, although never incorporated into the Jewish canon of Scripture, it had been substantially elaborated upon and embellished in the folklore – where, for example, the knotty problem of exactly how Jeremiah (who had been very much at odds with the priestly fraternity in the Temple105) had managed to get the sacred items out of the Holy of Holies and across the Jordan valley to Nebo was solved by providing him with an angel for a helper!106

  After looking back through all the Jewish traditions that I had surveyed concerning the last resting place of the Ark, I entered the following summary in my notebook:

  Outside of the Talmud, the Mishnah, the Apocalypse of Baruch, the second book of Maccabees, and various rather colourful legends, there is nothing of any substance in Jewish tradition concerning the whereabouts of the Ark of the Covenant. Since it now seems certain that it was not looted by Shishak or Jehoash or Nebuchadnezzar, it therefore follows that the only alternatives to the claim that it is in Axum are (a) very sketchy, (b) historically dubious, and (c) lacking in any current vitality (by contrast religious feeling in Ethiopia continues to be massively focussed upon the belief that the relic is indeed there).