The Sign and the Seal

by Graham Hancock

  At any rate, it was clear that the reign of this monarch had, in later years, come to be regarded as a blot, an aberration and an abomination. He had been succeeded by his son Amon in 642 BC and Amon had in turn been succeeded in 640 BC by Josiah, the zealous reformer who was famous (and beloved of the scribes) for having restored the traditional worship of Yahweh.

  Why had Amon’s tenure of the throne been so brief? Because, as the Bible explained, he had done

  that which was evil in the sight of the Lord, as his father Manasseh did. And he walked in all the way that his father walked in, and served the idols that his father served, and worshipped them … And the servants of Amon conspired against him, and slew the king in his own house … and the people of the land made Josiah his son king in his stead.73

  Josiah, however, had been only ‘eight years old when he began to reign’74 and it was not until eight years after that, the Bible reported, that he had shown the first signs of wanting to ‘seek after the God of David’.75 Indeed the young monarch’s passionate reaction against the sins of Manasseh and Amon did not begin until the ‘twelfth year’ of his reign when – at the age of twenty – he launched a campaign ‘to purge Judah and Jerusalem from … the carved images, and the molten images’.76

  And he brought out the grove [Asherah] from the house of the Lord, right out of Jerusalem, unto the brook Kidron, and burned it in the brook Kidron, and stamped it to small powder, and cast the powder thereof on the common burying ground.77

  A passionate reaction indeed! And, moreover, one that could be dated: it had been in 628 BC, the twelfth year of Josiah’s reign, that Manasseh’s loathsome idol had at last been rooted out of the Holy of Holies. The Ark, however, had certainly not been brought back in to replace it. As I already knew, Jeremiah had been responding to public grief at the continued absence of the relic two years later when he had prophesied that a time would eventually come when people would no longer ask ‘where is the Ark of the Covenant of Yahweh’ – a time when they would have ‘no regret for it’ and when they would not consider ‘making another’.

  Four years after that Josiah himself had rather forlornly asked the Levites to restore the Ark to the Temple, adding ‘it shall not be a burden for your shoulders’. That had been in 622 BC, the eighteenth year of his reign, and it was no coincidence that it had been in that very same year, having completed a lengthy nationwide purge, that he had ‘returned to Jerusalem’ and issued orders ‘to repair the house of the Lord his God’.78

  The repairs had been duly carried out by ‘carpenters and builders and masons’.79 The great mystery, however, was that the Levites had been unable to comply with Josiah’s request that they should ‘put the Holy Ark in the house which Solomon the son of David king of Israel did build.’ I was now increasingly sure that the answer to that mystery must lie in Ethiopia – although I was not yet in a position to fathom out exactly how or why.

  Meanwhile I sought academic support for my view that it must have been during the reign of Manasseh that the Ark had gone missing in the first place. I found that support in an authoritative treatise that I had already had occasion to consult several times before – Professor Menahem Haran’s Temples and Temple Service in Ancient Israel. Here, in a brief section in the middle of the book, I read that:

  throughout the various changes that took place in the Kingdom of Judah, the Temple at Jerusalem never ceased to serve exclusively as a Temple of Yahweh … There was only one single period in its history when it was temporarily deprived of its original function and for a short while ceased to serve as a Temple to Yahweh … This occurred during the reign of Manasseh … who set up vessels for Baal … in the outer sanctum and introduced the image of Asherah into the inner sanctum of the Temple … This is the only happening which may explain the disappearance of the Ark and the cherubim … We are entitled to infer that the image of Asherah … was substituted for the Ark and the cherubim. Some fifty years afterwards, when Josiah removed the Asherah from the Temple and burnt it in the Kidron Valley, beating it to dust and desecrating even the dust, the Ark and the cherubim were no longer there.80

  After making a number of telephone calls to the Hebrew University I managed to track down Professor Haran. I told him that I had read his book and that I was excited by his suggestion that the Ark of the Covenant might have been lost during the reign of Manasseh. Could he spare me half an hour or so to discuss the matter further? He replied that he would be only too happy to do so and invited me to visit him at his home in Jerusalem’s Alfasi Street.

  Haran proved to be an elderly but robust man, grey-haired and solidly built – the very image of the type of learned but eminently practical biblical scholar that one meets so often in Israel. I told him a little about my own research and then asked whether he was certain in his own mind that the Ark had indeed been removed from the Temple in Manasseh’s time.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied with conviction, ‘I am as certain of that as I can possibly be. This is why the Ark is not referred to in the long lists of Temple vessels and treasures that were later taken by the Babylonians. And I should add with all modesty that my views on this subject have never been refuted in scholarship.’

  I took this opportunity to put a question that had been bothering me for some time: ‘If the Ark was taken out as a result of Manasseh’s idolatry then how do you account for the fact that the Scriptures make absolutely no mention of the loss?’

  ‘I account for it in this way. To have to write down such a report would have filled the scribes with disgust – with such a horrible feeling – that definitely they would have averted from it. I therefore believe that they deliberately refrained from reporting the loss of the Ark. Even in what they did report of Manasseh’s reign their feelings of utter horror do come through. Yet they could not bring themselves to indulge in a description of the occurrence itself.’

  ‘Do you have any idea at all’, I asked next, ‘what could have happened to the relic after it was removed?’

  Haran shrugged: ‘On that I cannot speculate. It is impossible to prove. I can only say with confidence that the orthodox priests of Yahweh would under no circumstances have permitted the Ark of Yahweh to stay in the same place as the idol of Asherah.’

  ‘So do you think they took it away somewhere? To a place of safety?’

  Another shrug: ‘As I say, I cannot speculate on such matters. However it is evident from our records, from the Holy Writ, that Jerusalem itself – in fact the whole country – was not a safe place for those who were loyal to the worship of Yahweh during Manasseh’s time.’

  ‘Are you referring to the passage in the book of Kings that talks about innocent blood being spilled?’

  ‘Yes. 2 Kings 21:16. And not only that. Jeremiah also speaks obliquely of the same events when he says “your sword hath devoured your prophets like a destroying lion”. I have no doubt that this was a reference to the acts of Manasseh and I infer from it that certain prophets had opposed him and that for this they were massacred. It is an interesting phenomenon, you know, that you do not find any prophets at all during the reign of Manasseh himself – Jeremiah came just afterwards and others, like Isaiah, came just before. The gap was the result of persecutions and of a sustained campaign against the worship of Yahweh.’

  The Professor would not be pushed any further on this subject and resolutely refused to indulge in what he obviously regarded as idle speculation about where the Ark could have gone. When I mentioned my theory that it might have been taken to Ethiopia he looked at me blankly for about half a minute and then concluded: ‘That seems rather far.’

  A temple on the Nile

  After interviewing Menahem Haran I returned to my hotel feeling directionless and confused. Of course it had been exciting to get his confirmation that the Ark had been lost during Manasseh’s reign. The trouble was, however, that I now seemed to have arrived at the brink of a deep intellectual precipice. Ethiopia was indeed ‘rather far’ from Jerusalem, and I could see no good rea
son why the loyal priests of Yahweh who had carried the sacred relic out of the Temple should subsequently have taken it to such a distant place.

  Moreover, the dates didn’t fit. Manasseh had sat on the throne in Jerusalem from 687 to 642 BC, but the Tana Kirkos traditions asserted that the Ark had not arrived in Ethiopia until approximately 470 BC. So I was still two hundred years adrift.

  As I chewed over this problem I realized that what I needed to do was to talk to some Ethiopians. And what better place was there in which to talk to Ethiopians than in the State of Israel? After all, tens of thousands of Falashas – who claimed citizenship under the terms of the Law of Return – had been airlifted here over the past decade. Surely amongst them there must be some elders, knowledgeable in the folk memory of their people, who could help me to bridge the geographical and chronological abyss that yawned before me?

  Further enquiries at the Hebrew University produced the name of Shalva Weil, a social anthropologist who had specialized in far-flung Jewish communities and who was regarded as something of an expert on Falasha culture. I telephoned her at her home and, after introducing myself, asked her if she could recommend any member of the Falasha community in Jerusalem who might be able to speak with authority on the ancient traditions of the Ethiopian Jews.

  ‘Your best bet’, she replied without hesitation, ‘would be Raphael Hadane. He’s a priest, a very senior priest. He’s been here for a few years. He’s an elderly man and extremely knowledgeable. The only problem is he doesn’t speak English so you should try to see him with his son.’

  ‘Whose name is?’

  ‘Yoseph Hadane. He came to Israel as a boy in the early 1970s and he’s now a fully trained rabbi. He does speak fluent English so he’ll be able to translate for you.’

  Arranging the meeting took up most of my last two days in Jerusalem. Finally, however, I did manage to get together with the Hadane family at the Falasha Absorption Centre, which was located in a suburb called Mevasserit Zion to the west of the city. Here I found hundreds of Ethiopians, some newly arrived, others long-term residents, living in a somewhat ramshackle housing estate.

  Raphael Hadane, the Falasha priest, was dressed in a traditional Abyssinian shemma and sported a considerable beard. His son, the rabbi, was clean-shaven and wore a smart business suit. For a long while we sat around drinking tea and exchanging pleasantries while children played at our feet and various assorted relatives came and went. One of these latter, as it happened, had been born and brought up in the village of Anbober, which I had visited in January 1990 on my trip to Gondar.

  ‘Does Anbober really still exist?’ he asked me rather plaintively. ‘It’s five years since I left home.’

  ‘It does still exist,’ I replied, ‘or rather it did in January. The population seemed to be mainly women and children, though.’

  ‘This is because the men emigrate first to prepare a place for their families. Did you talk to anyone there?’

  I told them that I had interviewed the priest, Solomon Alemu, and this brought smiles of recognition from everyone around the table. ‘They all know him well,’ explained Rabbi Hadane. ‘Ours is a small society … and close knit.’

  Eventually I switched on my tape-recorder and began the interview with the rabbi’s venerable father. Much of what he had to say about Falasha culture and religion was already very familiar. When I turned to what was now the central issue for me, however – i.e. exactly how and when Judaism had arrived in Ethiopia – he told me something that made me prick up my ears.

  I had asked a leading question about Menelik and the Queen of Sheba – hoping, after the ritual repetition of the Kebra Nagast story, to pin the old man down on the matter of the date that Menelik’s supposed journey had taken place. Hadane surprised me by dismissing the legend entirely: ‘Some of us say that we are descended from the Israelites who accompanied Menelik, but personally I do not believe that. According to the traditions that I heard in my childhood, our ancestors were Jews who had first lived in Egypt before they came to Ethiopia.’

  ‘But,’ I interjected, ‘the Kebra Nagast says that too. It says that Menelik and his companions travelled through Egypt.’

  ‘That is not what I mean. After leaving Israel, our forefathers did not just travel through Egypt. They settled in that country for a very long time – for hundreds of years. And they built a temple there.’

  I leaned forward over the tape-recorder: ‘A temple? Where did they build this temple?’

  ‘At Aswan.’

  This, I thought, was very interesting. Solomon Alemu, the priest at Anbober, had also mentioned Aswan to me when I had interviewed him in January. At the time I had resolved to make a trip there. And I had in fact travelled quite widely in Egypt since doing that interview. I had not yet gone as far south as Aswan, however, and I was now beginning to wonder whether that might not have been a mistake. If there had indeed been a Jewish temple there, as Hadane had just indicated, then this was potentially a matter of great importance – because the function of the Temple in orthodox Judaism had been to house the Ark of the Covenant. If it was true that a temple had been built at Aswan, and if this had happened after the Ark had been removed from Jerusalem, then the implications were obvious.

  Hadane was unable to be at all specific as to the date of this Aswan temple, however. All he could tell me was that it had endured ‘for a long while’ but that it had eventually been destroyed.

  ‘Why was it destroyed?’

  ‘There was a great war in Egypt. A foreign king who had captured many countries came to Egypt and destroyed all the temples of the Egyptians. But he did not destroy our temple. So when the Egyptians saw that only the Jewish temple was not destroyed they suspected we were on the side of the invader. Because of this they started to fight against us and they destroyed our temple and we were forced to flee.’

  ‘And you went to Ethiopia?’

  ‘Not straight away. Our forefathers passed first into Sudan, through Meroe, where they remained for a short while. But they were driven out by another war. Then they split into two parties: one group went following the Takazze river; the other group following the Nile. And in this way they arrived in Ethiopia, in Quara, close to Lake Tana. There we made our homes. There we became Ethiopians. And because we were far from Israel, though we had stayed in touch with Jerusalem all the time that we were in Egypt and in the Sudan, we now lost that contact and it became to us only a memory.’

  I next asked Hadane whether there was any place in the Lake Tana area that the Falashas regarded as being particularly important or sacred.

  ‘Three places,’ he replied. ‘The first, the most important, is Tana Kirkos, the second is Daga Stephanos, the third is Zegie.’

  I raised my eyebrows: ‘Why is Tana Kirkos the most important?’

  ‘I do not know exactly. But all our people regard it as sacred.’

  My last question was a specific one about the Ark: ‘Ethiopian Christians say that they have the Ark of the Covenant at Axum – the original Ark of the Covenant that was supposed to have been brought from Jerusalem by Menelik, son of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon. You’ve told me that you don’t believe the Menelik story. But do you believe that the Christians have the Ark as they claim?’

  ‘Our people believe, and I myself also believe, that the Ark of the Covenant is in Axum. As a matter of fact, some years ago, I and others of our spiritual leaders went from our home to Axum to try to see the Ark for ourselves. We were very interested in this tradition and we wanted to see the Holy Ark. So we went there, and we got to Axum, and to the church of Saint Mary. But we were told that it was forbidden for us to enter the chapel where the Ark is, because if we were to enter into there we would die. So we said, “OK. We will purify ourselves and then we will go in there and we will see.” So we did that, we purified ourselves, but still the Christian priests would not permit us to enter the chapel. Because of that we had to return to our place without seeing it.’

  ‘I’ve hear
d that it is brought out in public once a year, at the ceremony of Timkat. You would have had a better chance of seeing it if you had gone there at Timkat.’

  Hadane laughed bitterly: ‘I have heard that too. But I do not believe that the Christians would ever bring out the true Ark. They would not do that. They will never show it to anyone. They will use a replica instead. Do you know why? Because they took the Ark from us long, long ago, and they do not want to give it back. They are jealous of it. So therefore they keep it always concealed in its chapel, surrounded by bars, where no one may approach it other than the one who is appointed as its guardian.’

  When I finally left the Falasha Absorption Centre at Mevasserit Zion and returned to downtown Jerusalem my head was literally buzzing with ideas and question. Of all the Ethiopian Jews whom I had talked to during the course of my research, Hadane had proved to be by far the most lucid and the most informative. The story of his attempt to see the Ark in Axum had intrigued me. And the special importance that he had accorded to the island of Tana Kirkos was surely of great significance in the light of what I myself had learnt there during my trip in November 1989. But what had interested me most of all about his answers was the reference that he had made to the existence, at some remote period in history, of a Jewish temple at Aswan. If there was any truth to this then I would certainly have to go to that Upper Egyptian town, which lay some two hundred kilometres to the south of Karnak and Luxor.

  Back in my hotel room I dialled the number of Dr Shalva Weil, the social anthropologist who had put me in touch with Hadane.

  ‘How did the interview go?’ she asked breezily.

  ‘Very well, thank you. Most helpful. I’m grateful to you for the contact.’