National Geographic: Riddles of the Bible - Second Season

Throughout the ages, the Ark of the Covenant has inspired terror...and obsession.

This gold-encrusted chest once held the Ten Commandments

and it gave Moses a direct line to God.

The lsraelites had it when they conquered the Holy Land,

and they built it a temple.

Then, in perhaps the greatest biblical riddle of all,

the Ark of the Covenant simply vanished from scripture.

For hundreds of years it has enthralled knights, archaeologists, madmen...

and filmmakers.

Can modern scholarship tell us where it is now?

And can it explain the ark's legendary powers?

Jerusalem is a city sacred to many.

At its heart lies a hill called Mount Moriah,

now the site of the magnificent Dome of the Rock.

lt was from here that Muhammad ascended to heaven, so Muslims revere this place.

Before that, Jesus healed the blind and the sick here

so Christians also call it holy ground.

But a thousand years before that, Solomon built the original temple on this mount

to house the mysterious object called the Ark of the Covenant,

then the centrepiece of the Jewish religion.

How the ark got there - and how it vanished - are riddles that have plagued many.

WeII, what on earth happened to this thing?

Why does the most important object in the bibIicaI scheme of things just disappear?

Did it exist?

Was it a figment of the BibIe editor's imagination...

..or not?

For some reason, peopIe keep Iooking for the ark. They never find it.

I think they're gonna keep Iooking for a very Iong time, cos I don't think it's out there.

The story of the ark began more than 3,000 years ago.

As one man led some two million people into the Sinai Desert,

they began to grow restless and short-tempered.

He could have used some divine intervention...

..and he was about to get it on a spectacular scale.

The man was Moses, leading his people out of enslavement in Egypt,

according to the Old Testament.

Three months of wandering after the parting of the Red Sea

brought the lsraelites to Mount Sinai.

And God was about to bestow a gift upon humanity unlike anything it had seen before.

The hundreds of laws contained in the Old Testament

all seem to have been handed down from somewhere...

except the ten astonishing laws that Moses brought down from the mountain.

The Ten Commandments are unique.

They are not onIy originaI, but they are unique.

For exampIe, if you Iook at Hammurabi's Iaw code,

he's got aII kinds of Iaws in there, incIuding an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,

which shows up in the BibIe about a thousand years Iater.

If you are Iooking for a historicaI precedent to the Ten Commandments, you wiII not find it.

Moses also came down with a divine blueprint for something to carry them in -

the Ark of the Covenant.

God's blueprint for the ark was exceedingly specific.

lt was to be a portable wooden chest,

a little over a metre long by half a metre wide and half a metre high...

made of an extremely resilient wood called acacia...

and plated inside and out with pure gold.

At the corners of the ark there would be four gold rings

into which gold-plated poles could be inserted for carrying.

lts lid - God's footstool - would be pure gold

with golden winged angels called cherubim at each end facing each other.

The ark served as Moses'direct hotline to God -

although how exactly the Bible doesn't make clear.

But it seems a brilliant cloud would appear just above the golden lid,

between the cherubim,

when God had something to pass on to his people.

God commanded that only priests of the tribe of Levi could carry the ark.

lt probably weighed over 1 00kg,

but according to legend, it could levitate itself and those carrying it.

No-one, not even the Levite priests, could look upon it,

so they covered it with blue cloth and animal skins at all times.

From the beginning, the ark revealed a dangerous side.

Within days, two of Moses'nephews had tried to make an offering before the ark,

and were promptly incinerated.

Legend has it that the cherubim sparked incessantly,

charring nearby people and objects.

And with the ark leading them in 40 years of wanderings and battles,

the lsraelites conquered the promised land.

It was an object of unspeakabIe power, and unspeakabIe importance.

According to the stories in the Hebrew BibIe,

the ark was carried at the front of the army in virtuaIIy every battIe.

Every battIe that took pIace during the IsraeIite conquest of the Iand of Canaan.

It was constantIy being wheeIed out in battIes to infIict defeats upon the enemy.

The ark wouId be right there in the front Iine.

And there are extraordinary accounts of it Ievitating off the ground

and fIying through the air towards the enemy, emitting some kind of moaning sound.

It's reaIIy quite spooky when you read it aII.

One poor man named Uzzah simply put out a hand to steady the ark

when it looked like it was going to fall, and he was instantly struck dead.

Afterwards, Moses ordered it housed in a tent,

not to protect it from the people, but to protect the people from the ark.

Fanfare

The ark's first and most famous military triumph was the felling of the walls of Jericho.

The Levite priests in charge of transporting the ark

carried it around the walled city once a day for six days.

On the seventh day, they circled seven times and ordered the trumpets to blow -

and the walls famously crumbled.

300 years later, the ark abandoned the lsraelites...with devastating effect.

When the high priests ignored their sacrificial obligations to the ark,

it failed to protect them in a great battle against the Philistines.

30,000 lsraelites died, and the Philistines took the ark.

But seven months later, the Philistines sent it back.

Plagues of tumours and rats had broken out among them.

Eventually, under King David, the lsraelites managed to defeat the Philistines

and then take a last stronghold of opposition - the city of Jerusalem,

which would become the capital.

God spoke to David and told him that a temple must be built to house the ark.

But it fell to his son, Solomon, to do the building.

The site was to be Mount Moriah, the highest point in the city

and the place where legend had it that Abraham almost sacrificed lsaac.

Solomon's vision for the temple was unlike anything the world had ever seen before.

Only the finest cedar and stone were used, and at its highest point, it soared 20 storeys.

Solomon went so deeply into debt to pay for it

the he had to give 20 frontier villages to a neighbouring kingdom.

Solomon placed the ark at the centre of the temple.

Thereafter, only the high priest could approach the Holy of Holies

and even he would have to enter the windowless room burning incense

to protect himself from the brilliance of the presence of the lord.

And there the ark stayed.

lt was mentioned again in the Old Testament,

although not as a weapon or a communication device.

But eventually, references to it ceased altogether-

an almost unimaginable lapse.

We're now left with what many scholars have called the greatest riddle of the Old Testament.

How could the centrepiece of the Jewish religion -

the only object imbued with the presence of God -

simply disappear?

Any search for the lost Ark of the Covenant

must begin with the temple that Solomon built to house it

and to make Jerusalem the centre of the world.

But today there is not a single artefact or stone

that remains to show where the temple stood on Jerusalem's Temple Mount.

The famous Wailing Wall, perhaps the most precious of Jewish sacred sites today,

is actually what remains of a second temple built centuries after the ark disappeared.

Some of the people who worship here

await the time when the current occupant of the Temple Mount -

the lslamic Dome of the Rock -

will be destroyed and a third Jewish temple erected in its place.

ln the original temple, the Ark of the Covenant stood in the most central and mysterious place -

the Holy of Holies.

According to the Old Testament, it took its place there about 955 BC.

But by around 620 BC,

references to the most important artefact in the Jewish religion had simply ceased.

It just disappears from history.

That is, it disappears from the Hebrew BibIe.

It's never mentioned again.

One thing is certain.

Only a crisis of catastrophic proportions - internal or external -

could have driven the ark from the Holy of Holies.

One crisis that fits the bill

was an attack by an Egyptian pharaoh named Shishak

just a few decades after the temple was built.

I'm gonna bIow up the ark!

lt was the Shishak scenario

that inspired lndiana Jones'adventures in Egypt in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Egyptian sources confirm that a pharaoh named Shishak attacked lsrael around 1,000 BC

and took many treasures back with him to Tanis,

which is where lndiana Jones discovered the ark with the Nazis hot on his heels.

However, in reality,

it seems clear that Shishak never actually captured the city of Jerusalem.

lnstead, he was content to have the people there send him a pile of treasure in tribute.

And it's highly unlikely that they would have sent him the ark.

WouId the bribe to Shishak have incIuded the ark?

No.

SimpIe answer is no.

There is no way that they wouId have given up voIuntariIy the hoIiest object they've got.

Furthermore, the Old Testament makes reference

to the ark still being in the temple at Passover during the reign of Josiah,

300 years later, around 620 BC.

But three decades after that, in 587 BC,

came another crisis,

one that many scholars think explains the disappearance of the ark.

The city and its temple were overrun and looted by Babylonians,

led by the famous King Nebuchadnezzar.

This seems an obvious time for the ark to have been destroyed and the riddle solved.

But was it?

The BabyIonians were very good bureaucrats and record keepers.

And actuaIIy, they kept detaiIed note of everything that they took from the tempIe.

The one object that is conspicuousIy Iacking is the Ark of the Covenant -

the premier object of the tempIe.

This suggests to me very strongIy

that the reason why the BabyIonians didn't Iist it amongst their Ioot

was because it wasn't there.

So where was the ark?

The critical hope for virtually all who believe the ark still exists

is that someone was sharp enough to smuggle it out of the temple

before the danger came to a head.

The ground under Jerusalem, especially under the Temple Mount,

is riddled with networks of caverns and tunnels.

Some people have suggested that the priests hid the ark under the mount.

And there is a passage in the Talmud saying that the ark was hidden ''in its place'' -

wherever that might be.

This is where most ark hunters, including the famous Knights Templar,

have concentrated their efforts - but apparently to no avail.

Another favourite site is Mount Nebo in Jordan,

and one passage in the Old Testament has Jeremiah hiding it there.

Still others think the ark is in one of the caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found.

One scroll in particular, the Copper Scroll, speaks of the many treasures hidden there.

An ark hunter named Vendyl Jones raised two million US dollars to dig there

and claimed to have found the holy anointing oil and holy incense from the temple - but no ark.

Oren Gutfeld of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

has been doing legitimate archaeology in these tunnels for five seasons,

hoping to make sense of the Copper Scroll.