Chapter I

Secrets of the Temple

And there was seen in his temple the ark of his testament: and there were lightnings, and voices, and thunderings, and an earthquake, and great hail. (The Book of Revelation 11:19)

If it existed as it is portrayed in the Bible, the Ark of the Covenant has to be one of the most extraordinary artifacts in history.  It could summon storms, radiate divine fire, level city walls, smash chariots and destroy entire armies.  Moreover, it could summon angels and even manifest the voice and presence of God.

            According to the Bible’s Old Testament, the Ark was made by the ancient Israelites while they were at Mount Sinai - a sacred mountain in the Sinai Desert - following their escape from slavery in Egypt somewhere around three and a half thousand years ago.  It was made on God’s instructions given to Moses, the Israelite prophet and leader.  It is described in detail as an ornate chest, approximately four feet long, two and a half feet wide and two and a half feet high, made of wood overlaid with gold.  A decorated golden rim ran around the top and at the four corners there were rings through which poles could be passed so that it could be carried.  On the lid, facing each other, were two golden figurines of cherubim - a Hebrew word for angels - with their wings outstretched towards one another.  The most sacred part of the Ark was something that modern English translations of the Bible term a ‘mercy seat’.  What exactly this was we are not told, merely that it was set into the lid of the Ark between the wings of the angels.

The Old Testament tells us that the Ark contained the two stone tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments which were cut by God from the living rock at the summit of Mount Sinai.  However, this was not the primary purpose of the Ark – it was used to commune with God.  The term Ark of the Covenant, by which the artifact is commonly known, is not the name by which it referred throughout most of the Bible.  Rather, it is usually described as the Ark of Testimony or Testament.  In other words, it is a vessel through which testimony or religious instruction is given.  According to the Old Testament book of Exodus, when the Israelites are instructed to make the Ark, God tells them:

I will meet with thee and will commune with thee from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubims which are upon the ark of the testimony. (Exodus 25: 22)

Elsewhere in the Bible we are told how the voice of God is heard to come from the mercy seat.  For example, in the book of Numbers we are told that Moses ‘heard the voice of one speaking unto him from off the mercy seat that was upon the ark of testimony’ (Numbers 7:89).  Not only is God heard, he is also seen.  In an account from the book of Leviticus God actually appears:  ‘For I will appear in the cloud upon the mercy seat’ (Leviticus 16:2).   In what form God appeared to the Israelites is not clear, but usually the appearance is described as ‘the glory of the Lord’.  Leviticus 9:6, for instance, describes how ‘the glory of the Lord appeared unto all the people’.

The Ark is not only a means of talking to and apparently seeing God, it is also portrayed as a holy weapon to defeat the Israelites’ enemies.  For example, Numbers 10: 35 tells us, ‘it came to pass, when the ark set forward, that Moses said, Rise up Lord, and let thine enemies be scattered’.  Here, once the Ark is brought to the front of the Israelite army, something happens – we are not told what – that forces the enemy to flee.  In the book of Joshua we are told that the power of the Ark is even able to bring down the mighty walls of the ancient city of Jericho.

And Joshua the son of Nun called the priests, and said unto them, Take up the ark of the covenant, and let seven priests bear seven trumpets of rams’ horns before the ark of the Lord.  And he said unto the people, Pass on, and compass the city, and let him that is armed pass on before the ark of the Lord… So the ark of the Lord compassed the city… and it came to pass, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with a great shout that the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city.  (Joshua 6:6-20)

Somehow, when the Ark is carried around the city walls something happens that makes them collapse.  We are not told specifically what causes such devastation, but another passage in the Old Testament does describe a destructive power actually emanating from the Ark.  According to Leviticus 9:24: ‘there came a fire out… and consumed upon the altar the burnt offerings’.

If the Bible is right then the Ark of the Covenant was a weapon like no other, it held the secrets of human destiny and was a medium to not only hear but to see God.   However, the Bible fails to reveal what ultimately happened to this, the Israelite’s most sacred possession.  No wonder, then, that so many biblical scholars, archaeologists and adventurers alike have spent so much time, effort and expense trying to find it.   Until now, however, its secret hiding place has remained one of history’s most enduring mysteries.

This is my personal quest to solve the secrets of the lost Ark.  Did it really exist?  If it did, did it have the powers the Bible says?  And the greatest enigma of all – what became of it? 

*  *  *

It all began during a visit to Jerusalem when I was researching for an altogether different book about the early Christian Church.   I had arranged to meet with David Deissmann, an archaeologist from Israel’s Hebrew University.  David had been involved in excavations around the famous Wailing Wall and he had offered to take me on a guided tour of the dig which had, amongst other things, uncovered a building which may have been used by some of the very first Christians.  It was during this tour that my interest in the Ark of the Covenant was first aroused.

Standing on the Plaza at the foot of the Wailing Wall, waiting for David, I was flanked on each side by dozens of Jewish worshipers rocking rhythmically and reverently before the ancient, weathered stones.  Bowing repeatedly, they dutifully recited from prayer books that were cupped devoutly in their hands.  Others came and bowed just once or twice before slipping a piece of paper, a written prayer, into cracks in the crumbling facade.  This 1600-foot-long rampart, some sixty feet high, also known as the Western Wall, is a place of pilgrimage for Jews from around the world.  It is all that remains of what had once been Judaism’s holiest shrine – the Temple of Jerusalem, originally built by the ancient Israelites to house the Ark of the Covenant.

According to the Bible the ancient Israelites, also called the Hebrews, were twelve nomadic tribes who conquered and settled in the land of Canaan - what is now Israel, Palestine and part of Jordan – over three thousand years ago. The invasion culminated with the conquest of the city of Jerusalem by the Israelite King David around 995 BC.  According to the Old Testament second book of Chronicles, David’s son and successor Solomon built the first Temple in Jerusalem so that the Ark had a permanent resting place.  Chapter 6, verse 11 relates Solomon’s own words:

The Lord therefore hath performed his word that he hath spoken: for I am risen up in the room of David my father, and am set on the throne of Israel, as the Lord promised, and have built the house for the name of the Lord God of Israel.  And in it have I put the ark, wherein is the covenant of the Lord, that he made with the children of Israel.

Built on what is now called Temple Mount or Mount Zion, a flat-toped hill at the edge of the city, the Jerusalem Temple became the focal point of the Hebrew religion for centuries too come.  When Solomon died around 925 BC, the largest of the Israelite tribes, the tribe of Judah, split from the other tribes and founded its own independent kingdom and made Jerusalem its capital.  Roughly what is now southern Israel, this kingdom was to be known as Judah, later to be called Judea by the Romans, and its people became known as the Jews.  It was the people of Judah who were to develop the early Hebrew religion into what became Judaism and made the Jerusalem Temple into the holiest shrine of the Jewish religion for centuries to come.  For over three hundred years the Jerusalem Temple remained the ‘Mecca’ of the Jewish faith until the city was invaded by the Babylonians, from what is now Iraq.  At that time thousands of Jews were enslaved and carted off to exile in the city of Babylon (near modern Baghdad) and in 597 BC the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar ordered the Temple sacked and destroyed.  However, in 539 BC, when the Persians, from what is now Iran, defeated the Babylonians, the Jews were allowed to return to Jerusalem.  Soon after, the Temple was rebuilt, but by the time the Romans took over the city in 63 BC it was in an advanced state of disrepair.

            Paradoxically, the Roman occupation of Judah actually brought greater prosperity to the area than it had known for centuries.  When the Jewish aristocrat Herod was installed by the Romans as puppet king, he used this new-found wealth to reconstruct the Temple on an even grander scale than the original.  Work began about 19 BC and by the time it was completed the new Temple was one of the largest and most impressive structures in the entire Roman Empire and earned its patron the title, Herod the Great. 

            The Jewish historian Josephus, writing around AD 90, tells of the astonishing magnitude of the project.  The outer walls measured approximately 800 by 3,300 feet: an incredible one-and-a-half mile walk.  They were almost a hundred feet high in places and made from stones, many weighing as much as fifty tons.  At the grand entrance to the south end of the town-sized complex, broad flights of steps led upward to the gateways of the Royal Portico: a great columned hall, opening onto the vast outer courtyard.  According to Josephus, the massive pillars that supported the portico roof were so huge that it took four men standing with arms outstretched to encircle them.  The outer courtyard was large enough to fit thirteen modern football pitches and was surrounded on all sides by colonnades. Beneath these covered walkways, which provided shade from the blistering sun, visitors could meet and teachers and students could debate religious issues.  Glistening in the middle of the courtyard was the inner Temple complex, built on top of a gigantic stone platform almost four feet high.  Its walls measured some 1000 by 500 feet and were about 100 feet in height with defensive turrets at strategic points.  At various intervals steps led up the platform to eight huge doors covered with gold and silver plating.  The main entrance, the Corinthian Gate, was on the eastern side. Over fifty feet high, its double bronze doors were so heavy, Josephus tells us, that twenty men were needed to push them shut.

            Anyone could enter the Royal Portico and the outer courtyard but only Jews were allowed inside the central complex. Notices written in Greek and Latin warned everyone who was not Jewish to keep out.  Any foreigner who ignored the warning was likely to find himself lynched.  Through the Corinthian Gate, worshipers entered an outer court, some 220 feet square, again surrounded by covered walkways.  This was known as the Women’s Court as beyond this court women could not venture.  Only men were allowed to climb a further flight of steps and pass through a final gate and stand in the inner court before the Temple itself - an exact reconstruction of Solomon’s original Temple as described in the ancient scriptures.  Solomon’s Temple had been around 160 feet high and some 1000 feet square, its walls flanked by columns and its roof surrounded by gilded spikes to prevent birds from perching along its edge.  Inside, there was an outer sanctuary, housing braziers for the animal sacrifices required by contemporary religious law and the high altar, bearing the menorah, the golden seven-branched candlestick which symbolized the presence of God.  Finally, beyond this, was the innermost sanctuary called the Holy of Holies: a dark, windowless chamber built to contain the sacred relic that the entire Temple was erected to house - the Ark of the Covenant.

            Unfortunately, Herod’s new Temple survived for less than a century.  According to the biblical New Testament, its destruction was foretold by Jesus during his ministry around AD 30.  During Jesus’ time, shortly after Herod’s Temple had been completed, religious law impelled every Jew to pay a tax towards the Temple’s upkeep once a year and it could only be paid in silver shekels.  For this reason there were money changers stationed in the Royal Portico to exchange travelers’ coins.  In fact, the portico became a hive of industry as there were also lines of stalls selling sacrificial animals, such as birds, sheep and goats. Many of the traders charged extortionate commission and unfairly high prices, taking advantage of the pilgrims, many of whom had spent their savings traveling from far away to worship at the Temple. The traders had to pay for permission to have their stalls in this area and the priesthood was growing rich off the profits.  According to St. Mark’s gospel, finding the entire procedure abhorrent:

Jesus went into the temple and began to cast out them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves. (Mark 11:15)

Jesus was so appalled at the corruption of the Temple that he even foretold its destruction:

Seest thou these great buildings? there shall not be left one stone upon another that shall not be thrown down.  (Mark 13:2)

Jesus’ prediction came true after the Jews revolted against Roman rule in the late seventh decade of the first century AD.  In AD 70 the magnificent Temple was reduced to rubble when the Romans looted it of its treasures and burnt it to the ground.    The Roman Emperor even ordered the entire complex to be demolished stone by stone.  Only the Wailing Wall still remains.  The several courses of stones which now rise above the modern pavement of Old Jerusalem were once part of the western wall of the Royal Portico.

            When David arrived we began the tour of the network of underground tunnels he had helped excavate.  Now open to the public, they are entered off to the south of the Plaza and skirt the western side of the wall, running for almost a quarter of a mile to the exit on the Via Dolorosa at the northern end of Temple Mount.  Discovered in 1967 by engineers laying water pipes, they turned out to be a complex of passageways and artificial caverns built over 800 years ago.

We began by entering an underground vault about forty feet square, which David explained was just one of a series of chambers connected by the stone-clad passageways.  They date from the 1180s when the Arab leader Saladin defeated the European Crusaders who had occupied Jerusalem for years.  For centuries Jerusalem had been a holy city for Moslems as well as Jews, as the prophet Mohamed was said to have ascended to heaven from the site where the Temple of Solomon once stood.  In the seventh century a mosque had been built here, which became one of Islam’s most holy shrines.  As it had been desecrated and vandalized by the Crusaders, Saladin ordered it to be lavishly rebuilt and today it is still the site of the gold-leafed Dome of the Rock mosque.   It was during the rebuilding that Saladin decided to completely restructure the surrounding area, which he did by raising the level of the land to accommodate new buildings to be erected around the mosque.  This was achieved by the construction of the series of vaulted chambers which not only acted as a mean of support but were also used to house essential water cisterns and for storage.

Leaving the vault through a narrow doorway, David led me into a dimly-lit tunnel.  The temperature dropped sharply and the musty smell of mold and ancient, crumbling brickwork hung in the air. The network of tunnels led from vault to vault until we reached a much larger and differently designed chamber.  The others were plain and clearly functional constructions, whereas this was far more decorative, its roof supported by ornamental columns and its walls adorned with dressed stonework of classical design.  Known as the Hall of the Hasmoneans, it is much older than the medieval passageways and dates from the time of Herod the Great.  David explained that this had once been a structure at ground level which had been filled in and buried during Saladin’s reconstruction of the city.  After archaeologists had excavated the building they concluded that it had originally been a public hall just outside the Temple complex where Jewish pilgrims could rest, eat and generally prepare for worship.  This was the building David had wanted to show me because there was evidence that first-century Christians may also have used it as a meeting place as early Christian graffiti had been found inscribed on the walls. 

 David pointed to a pile of large round rocks, stacked in the corner of the chamber.   They were ballisticae, he told me: stones uses as missiles flung from catapults by the Romans when they stormed Jerusalem after the Jewish Revolt in AD 70.  Being found in the rubble during the excavations, they revealed that the building had been attacked.  Perhaps families of ordinary Christians as well as Jews had sought sanctuary here when the legions looted, pillaged and sacked the city after the ill-fated rebellion.  These terrible Roman reprisals not only resulted in the annihilation of the first Christian Church in Jerusalem, David explained, but some scholars believe they were also responsible for the loss of the sacred Ark.

 Despite popular belief, the Romans were generally tolerant of other religions and allowed a conquered nation to continue with their religious practices so long as they paid tribute to the gods of Rome.  Elsewhere, this created few problems as the occupied peoples simply venerated the Roman gods alongside their own.  The Greeks, for example, in the city of Ephesus in what is now Turkey, had a huge cultic center to the fertility goddess Artemis.  The Romans permitted this cult to continue unhindered so long as the Greeks also consecrated the temple to the Roman fertility goddess Diana.  The Greeks agreed, and Diana and Artemis were thereafter considered merely different names for the same deity.  However, all this was completely alien to Jewish thought.  The Jews could begrudgingly live with Roman administration, but Roman gods were heresy.  Their God was the only god and had no equivalent elsewhere.  Despite this, when the Romans annexed Judah in 63 BC they not only tolerated Judaism, they even allowed the Sanhedrin, the priesthood of the Jerusalem Temple, to retain considerable political power.  They also appointed a Jewish king, Herod, to rule on their behalf.  Roman toleration went so far that in 19 BC they even granted Herod permission to rebuild the dilapidated Jerusalem Temple as one of the grandest structures in the entire Roman world.

            Unfortunately, trouble began a few years after Herod’s death.  In AD 6, as Herod’s successor Archelaus proved incompetent, the Emperor Augustus decreed that Judah, now called Judea, should be ruled by a Roman governor.  This meant that a Gentile, a non-Jew, was directly ruling the holy city of Jerusalem.  This, more than anything else, is why there was such anti-Roman feeling amongst the Jews at the time of Jesus’ ministry during the governorship of Pontius Pilate two and a half decades later.  Jewish rebellion finally erupted during the despotic rule of the Emperor Nero in AD 66 and, because of trouble elsewhere in the empire, the rebels held the city of Jerusalem for almost four years.  However, after Vespasian became emperor and Rome had solved its internal troubles, he sent his son Titus to retake the city.  This he did with ruthless efficiency and thousands of innocent men, women and children were butchered in the streets.  Over the next few years, continued repression resulted in the death of an estimated half million Jews and the dispersal of the Jewish people around the world for almost two millennia.  Even the name Judah was erased from contemporary Roman maps, and Jerusalem became part of the Roman province of Palaestina, from where we get the name Palestine.  In AD 70, as part of the reprisals, Herod’s magnificent new Temple was reduced to rubble and its precious treasures were carted off to Rome.  Some scholars, David explained, believe that the Ark of the Covenant was amongst them, whereas others believe that it was safely hidden in a secret chamber deep beneath Temple Mount.

Moving further into the labyrinth of passageways, David and I arrived at yet another chamber: one that seemed to be at the deepest point in the tunnel complex.  Here, a simple table strewn with prayer books was illuminated by candles and a dozen or so people were bowing in silent praying.

‘We are now closest to what many Jews believe to be the most holy place on earth,’ whispered David.   He pointed to what appeared to be a bricked-up archway. Somewhere beyond, he told me, was the spot where the Holy of Holies is thought to have been - the sacred chamber where the Ark of the Covenant was kept.

‘Why hasn’t it been opened up?’  I asked when we moved on.

David explained that in the mid 1990s an influential rabbi organized a dig through the bricked-up archway and into what appeared to be a filled-in passageway behind it.  The rabbi was convinced that somewhere below what had once been the Holy of Holies there had been a secret chamber where the Ark was hidden before the Temple was plundered by the Romans.  Once the Temple was destroyed, the hundreds of tons of rubble covering it made it inaccessible for almost two thousand years.  Whether or not the rabbi was right and the Ark of the Covenant really was hidden here, he was never to know.  Arab protests brought the excavation to a halt.  The rabbi’s dig was heading right beneath the Dome of the Rock, sacred ground to Moslems, and Jerusalem’s Arab population believed that it was a plot to undermine the mosque’s foundations.  When they learned of the digging, the rabbi was attacked and there was rioting in the streets in which eight people died.  The Israeli government decided to order the work to cease and to avoid further trouble sealed the rabbi’s excavation with tons of cement.

 ‘I thought the Romans seized all the Temple treasures,’ I said, wondering why the rabbi should have thought the Ark was still here.  I explained how I remembered seeing a contemporary scene carved on the Arch of Titus in Rome: a monument erected by Vespasian’s son Titus when he succeeded his father as emperor in AD 79.  It showed the menorah and other Temple vessels being carried triumphantly through the streets of Rome during a victory parade after Jerusalem was retaken in AD 70.  According to some historical sources these golden artifacts were melted down, sold off and used to fund the building of the Colosseum.

‘Yes, but the scene does not show the Ark,’ said David.

Although, like the rabbi, David thought it unlikely that the Romans took the Ark of the Covenant, he doubted it was still in Jerusalem when the Temple was sacked.

‘Some historians have speculated that the Ark was hidden by the priesthood shortly before the sacking of the Temple; perhaps in a cave in the Judean Wilderness to the east of Jerusalem,’ he said.  ‘This was where the Dead Sea Scrolls were hidden around the same time.’

Nevertheless, David considered this scenario to be equally unlikely. The Jewish historian Josephus, who lived at this very time, left a detailed description of the Temple rebuilt by Herod but nowhere does it refer to the Ark.  In fact, Josephus states categorically that the Holy of Holies was left empty.  It was David’s belief that the Ark had already been lost to the Jews well before Herod’s time.

‘Another popular theory is that the Ark was lost when the Greek king Antiochus IV plundered the Temple in 169 BC,’ said David.

Alexander the Great had annexed Judah in 333 BC and for two and a half centuries Jerusalem was under Greek control.  Although Alexander was a Macedonian, much of his army was Greek and for centuries the Macedonians had adopted Greek culture and even spoke the Greek language. Alexander’s successors, the Ptolemy dynasty, who ruled Judah from Egypt, were tolerant towards Judaism and allowed it to continue unhindered.  In fact, many Greeks who moved into the area converted to Judaism and the religion spread throughout much of the eastern Mediterranean.  By the second century BC all this changed when the Greek kings of the Seleucid Empire (centered on modern Syria) took control of Judah.  Fearing the spread of Judaism, in 169 BC the Seleucid king Antiochus IV decided to reverse the trend and tried to get the Jews to adopt Greek culture.  Jewish practices were forbidden and scriptures were destroyed.  Worst of all, Antiochus plundered the Jerusalem Temple and erected a giant statue of the Greek god Zeus over the high altar.  This so angered the Jews that in 167 BC Judas Maccabaeus, the son of the Temple’s high priest, led a mass uprising against Seleucid rule.  Although, the revolt forced Antiochus’ successor to reverse the repressive policies and establish a new and tolerant administration in Judah, many of the Temple treasures had been irretrievably lost – including, some believe, the sacred Ark.

As we continued on through the seemingly endless maze of passageways, David told me of other theories concerning the possibility that the Ark had already been lost centuries earlier.  I was becoming so intrigued by the mystery of the lost Ark, that I was forgetting my original purpose for the visit.

  I was surprised to learn that there were even those who claimed that the Ark that Solomon built the Temple to house was a fake to replace the original made at the time of Moses. According to Ethiopian Church tradition, Solomon’s son Menelik secretly switched the Ark for a replica and took the real one to Ethiopia. The people of the Ethiopian town of Axum believe that it is still housed in their local chapel, although it has never been seen by anyone from the outside world.  Unfortunately, as the Axum religious authorities refuse to let anyone inside the inner sanctum of their church, the claim cannot be put to the test.

The most well known theory concerning the whereabouts of the Ark, made famous by the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, places it in the ruins of the ancient city of Tanis in Egypt.  The theory proposes that the Ark was plundered by the Egyptians shortly after Solomon’s death.  According to the Old Testament first book of Kings, the pharaoh Sheshonq I of Egypt attacked Jerusalem, raided the Temple and plundered its treasures (I Kings 14:26).  Sheshonq I established Tanis as the new Egyptian capital and so it is here that Indiana Jones discovers the lost Ark in Spielberg’s movie.

This attack on Jerusalem was an historical event recorded by the Egyptians around 914 BC.  However, whatever happened during the raid, the Old Testament writers themselves claimed the Jews still had the Ark.  In fact, the second book of Chronicles makes reference to the Ark still being in the Jerusalem Temple at Passover during the reign of the Jewish king Josiah, three centuries later, around 622 BC (II Chronicles 35:1-3).  This, however, is the last Old Testament reference to the Ark of the Covenant still being in the Jerusalem Temple and no other contemporary source makes mention of it.

‘It’s possible that the Ark was removed the Temple about twenty-five years after Josiah’s time,’ David concluded.

He explained that in 597 BC the Jerusalem Temple was looted of its treasures when it was pillaged by Babylonians.  Two Old Testament passages, II Kings 25:13-15 and Jeremiah 52:17-22, refer to the Babylonians taking away all the sacred vessels that were in the Temple.  Nevertheless, if the Old Testament is right, then all the stolen items were eventually returned to the Temple around seventy years later, after Babylon fell to the Persian Empire. The Old Testament book of Ezra refers to the Persian king Cyrus (who was sympathetic to the Jews) seizing the Temple vessels plundered by the Babylonians so that they could be returned to Jerusalem.

‘The seized vessels are listed in full in the book of Ezra,’ said David. (Ezra 1:7-11.)  ‘However, there is no reference to the Ark.  If the Ark was in the Temple during Josiah’s reign, around 622 BC, then it must have been removed before the Babylonian invasion.  There is certainly no reliable record of it ever being seen again.’

Finally we reached the end of the passageways and emerged into the daylight, to be met by two Israeli soldiers armed with Uzzi submachine-guns.  We were now in the Arab Quarter of Old Jerusalem and all visitors to the tunnels had to be escorted back to the Jewish area of the city.  Tensions between Arabs and Jews were running high.  Indeed, the present troubles originally began with the rabbi’s excavations of the tunnel beneath the Dome of the Rock to search for the Ark.  However, fighting in Jerusalem was nothing new.  Temple Mount has been the most fought over patch of land in the world.  In ancient times the Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans and Jews all fought and died for control of it.  In medieval times Arabs and Crusaders shed their blood to take, hold, lose and retake the sacred mount.  And today hundreds of Palestinians and Israelis lose their lives each year as both believe that the holy city of Jerusalem is theirs by right.  Before Solomon built his Temple here, Jerusalem was just a typical fortified citadel, one of dozens in what was then the land of Canaan.  I wondered whether the area would ever have become so important if the Temple was never built - a Temple built to house the Ark.  Regardless of whatever power the Ark really had, it seems to have shaped the course of history.

‘I have no idea whether the Ark was lost, stolen, destroyed or hidden,’ said David, when we returned to the Wailing Wall.  ‘All I know is that if it does survive and is ever found, it would be one of the most important archaeological discoveries in history.’

            David’s informative tour had left me fascinated by the Ark of the Covenant.  As I looked around me at the worshipers at the wall, at the armed soldiers stationed all around the Plaza and heard the call to prayer echoing from the Dome of the Rock mosque, I decided there and then that I would temporarily abandon my other project and try to discover more about the lost Ark.  I could never have imagined where the investigation would take me and what it would ultimately lead me to discover.