What Happened To The Ark Of The Covenant?

Nadene Goldfoot                                           

Carrying the Ark of the Covenant on the Exodus
The Ark of the Covenant, also known as the Ark of the Testimony, is a gold-covered wooden chest with lid cover described in the Book of Exodus as containing the two stone tablets of the Ten Commandments.

  The Ark of the Covenant was the chest where the 2 Tablets of the Law were kept.  In Exod. 25:10-22, we read the description of what it looked like.
                                                                       

Acacia tree, the real bible tree of Israel 
Hebrew name: Shita
Scientific name: Acacia
Family: MimosaThree species grow in the Land of Israel in the desert and one rare species in the Mediterranean region.  In large areas of the desert lands of the Negev and Sinai, acacia trees are the only trees.

 It was made of acacia wood and was inlaid with gold and also covered with it.  Gold has certain properties.  A molding of gold surrounded it and there were 4 gold-overlaid wooden staves that were placed through 4 rings on its side, then had a cover of gold over it.  Two golden cherubim with wide wings screened the cover of the ark.  This is where the Shekhinah (Divine presence) stayed.  The ark contained the Tablets of the Law which was the covenant between G-d and His people.
                                                                         

Fresco, 1816

The tribe of Levi was the one to handle the ark.  Moses and his brother Aaron were of this tribe.  Aaron was chosen to be the high priest and his male descendants would also be cohens.  Today we find that most Cohens serving in the synagogue have the J1 "cohen" gene.  Aaron had placed a jar of manna before the ark for safe-keeping to show the future Jews that was fed to those on the Exodus.  We've lost that evidence, too.

It was considered being so sacred to them that even the high priest, the Cohen, was only allowed to see it once a year under a cloud of incense...as explained in Lev. 16.16:1-6.  From the time of Moses to building King Solomon's 1st Temple, the ark was taken out from the Holy of Holies in case of national need to lead the people on their journey and help them in battle.  "Another account says that Solomon foresaw the eventual destruction of the Temple, and set aside a cave near the Dead Sea, in which Josiah eventually hid the Ark (Maimonides, Laws of the Temple, 4:1).

                                                                           

Let there be music while on the Exodus with the Ark

In I Samuel 4:5, it tells about the Philistines stealing the ark, and bringing it from Eben-ezer to Ashdod,  and its presence was causing them so much trouble that they decided that they needed to return it.  The whole city had become panicked and it was returned with the gold objects they had also stolen.  They also included other guilt offerings.  "According to the Tanakh, Uzzah or Uzza, meaning strength, was an Israelite whose death is associated with touching the Ark of the Covenant. Uzzah was the son of Abinadab, in whose house the men of Kirjath-jearim placed the Ark when it was brought back from the land of the Philistines."
                                                                       
During the time of the 1st Temple between 961-920 BCE, the ark was kept in the Temple area called the Holy of Holies and was never removed. The Temple was in Jerusalem. 

Our 10 northern Tribes were carried was by the Assyrians in 722-721 BCE 
                                                                     

King Solomon's Temple 

The tribe of Judah was attacked by the Babylonians in 597 BCE and again in 586 BCE causing the Jews to be taken by Nebuchadnezzar to Babylon.  They were able to return 40 years later in 538 BCE  The Babylonians carried away many of their vessels but the ark was not mentioned.  Our Talmudic tradition is that it had been hidden "in its place" by King Josiah who ruled from 637-608 BCE so we can presume that it was hidden before the Babylonians had attacked.   However, they had destroyed the TEMPLE!  The Jews returned and were instructed by Cyrus the Great  of Persia to rebuild their TEMPLE, and they did.  Was the ark there?
                                                                     

In 70 CE, the Romans, who had been occupying Jerusalem for about 150 years, destroyed the 2nd Temple and burned down Jerusalem while they were at it, taking many Jews as slaves.  Others scattered in all directions that lived through the ordeal.  They had been starved to death during the siege.  It was an inhumane ordeal for the living.  The Romans stole all the gold fixtures in the Temple, making their Jewish slaves carry them all the way to Rome as seen in the scene of the Arch of Titus in Rome.  Did they remove the Ark of the Covenant?  Is it hidden among all the other gold items somewhere in the catacombs of Rome?
                                                                           

Levites carrying ark during the divided sea allowing the crossing

The ark served as the only manifestation of G-d on earth, referring to the Shekhina on the cover, for we do not believe that man can be G-d, except that we are all G-d's children.  We have that spark.  This doesn't mean that any of us can say a particular man is G-d.  We do not even make pictures of G-d.  This is offensive, and against the teaching from Moses.  The Romans did believe in man being able to be god and they had many half gods.  They believe in a whole world of Olympus where the gods lived.  This belief came to them through the Greeks who believed in it first.

"A more plausible claim is that of archaeologist Leen Ritmeyer, who has conducted research on the Temple Mount and inside the Dome of the Rock. He claims to have found the spot on the Mount where the Holy of Holies was located during the First Temple period. In the precise center of that spot is a section of bedrock cut out in dimensions that may match those of the Ark as reported in Exodus. This section of the mount, incidentally, is the one from which the creation of the world began, according to midrash (T. Kedoshim, 10). Based on his findings, Ritmeyer has postulated that the Ark may be buried deep inside the Temple Mount. However, it is unlikely that any excavation will ever be allowed on the Mount by the Muslim or Israeli authorities."
                                                                       

Tudor Parfitt, in his book, THE LOST ARK OF THE COVENANT, had thought he had found the ark in Africa.  I think it was the dumbest idea, since this one is described as a drum.  Whatever did he think of the description in the Torah?  He's a professor.  We agree on one point, that it could have been stolen at the time of the Babylonian  invasion.  However, Parfitt was called by the Wall Street Journal as a "British Indiana Jones."  His life work has been spent tracking down the lost tribes of Israel, looking for them in Africa and Asia.  He's been a professor of Jewish studies in London at their School of Oriental and African Studies, and is a fellow of the Oxford Centre of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, but Parfitt, a DRUM?  That's not even close to the Torah's description, he he declares it's "similar."  He says he found it with the Lemba Tribe in Africa in which some men  have been found to have some of the Cohen genes after DNA testing.
                                                                   

"Lemba people. The Lemba, wa-Remba, or Mwenye are a Bantu ethnic group native to Zimbabwe and South Africa, with smaller, little-known branches in Mozambique and Malawi. According to Tudor Parfitt, Professor of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, in 2002 they numbered an estimated 50,000.

 In 2002 he published his Lost Tribes of Israel: the History of a Myth.  Dr Shalva Weil, from Hebrew University in Jerusalem studied the Pashtos of Afghanistan, Pakistan and parts of India and she didn't come up with any myth.  She found many customs many of these people had continued that were Jewish customs such as lighting candles on Friday night.  In fact, they've recently held a conference about the Pashtos in Jerusalem and their being of the 10 Northern tribes, the descendants of Jacob.  

One thing he did is something I highly approve of.  "Seeking more data, in 1996 and later years Parfitt organised Y-DNA studies of Lemba males. These found a high proportion of paternal Semitic ancestry, DNA that is common to both Arabs and Jews from the Middle East. The work confirmed that the male line had descended from a few ancestors from southern Arabia. In recognition of this work, he was made corresponding fellow of the Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-Mer."  This could have been the J1 Y haplogroup, which is the Cohen gene found in Jews, though many Arabs carry a variation of it that holds just a slight difference.  Both Jew and Arab can be told they have the J1c3d haplogroup.  It could be that Jewish traders met up with the Lemba tribe and children were born.  The traders could have been carrying these genes, that is if proven they were Jewish genes.  They could also be Arab since Arab countries border the continent of Africa on the north side.  .  

Moses could not let anybody carry the ark.  A reaction was induced by it if touched by the wrong people.  Being G-d's presence was said to be in the cover protecting the laws, this was backed up by this reaction.  
                                                                     

Gold (Au), chemical element, a dense lustrous yellow precious metal of Group 11 (Ib), Period 6, of the periodic table. Gold has several qualities that have made it exceptionally valuable throughout history.  I believe Moses had found something through G-d that even Nostradamus may not have known about by the Middle Ages.  "Gold is one of the densest of all metals. It is a good conductor of heat and electricity."  It does not corrode.  I'm thinking about batteries that can carrode.  Somehow, could some form of electricity have been charged up when being carried as part of the ark?    

"Because of its high electrical conductivity (71 percent that of copper) and inertness, the largest industrial use of gold is in the electric and electronics industry for plating contacts, terminals, printed circuits, and semiconductor systems. Thin films of gold that reflect up to 98 percent of incident infrared radiation have been employed on satellites to control temperature and on space-suit visors to afford protection. Used in a similar way on the windows of large office buildings, gold reduces the air-conditioning requirement and adds to the beauty."

"Alluvial deposits of gold found in or along streams were the principal sources of the metal for ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Other deposits were found in Lydia (now in Turkey) and the lands of the Aegean and in Persia (Iran), India, China, and other lands. "   

Resource:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tudor_Parfitt
https://www.britannica.com/science/gold-chemical-element
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-ark-of-the-convenant
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-ark-of-the-convenant#where
Tanakh, The Stone Edition.  index, ark...
https://www.britannica.com/plant/acacia
http://www.kkl-jnf.org/tourism-and-recreation/touring-holy-land/trees/acacia.aspx
https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/parfitt-tudor-vernon-1944