Subtitle by: Abraham Christen Liando
Throughout the ages, the Ark of the Covenant has inspired terror...and obsession.
(Screaming)
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
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.
(Screaming)
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.
(Crash of faIIing rubbIe)
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.
I don't know about the Ark of the Covenant,
but I hope that the tunneI wiII give us more data
and cIues about other pIaces where someone eIse might have hidden treasures.
Whether through revelation, imagination, or even hallucination...
..people have found reason to look for the ark as far away as lreland, Japan...
and Utah in the American West.
Tangled webs of intrigue,
clues left in church windows and the writings of ancient knights
have all had people scouring the globe for the ark.
But could the ark have been hiding in plain sight almost since its earliest days?
There is one place on earth that has openly laid claim to the Ark of the Covenant for centuries,
even millennia.
There are many pIaces
which have some kind of cIaim to a connection with the Ark of the Covenant.
But there's onIy one pIace on the pIanet where there's a Iiving reIigion
based on the Ark of the Covenant.
And that pIace is Ethiopia.
ln Axum, Ethiopia's ancient capital,
mysterious monuments called stelae slash the sky.
This one broken stela was once carved out of a single slab of marble and weighs 500 tonnes.
How it was carved and erected has baffled even modern science.
But believers here suggest it was the Ark of the Covenant that made this
and all other magnificent structures possible.
They say it was stolen and brought here by one of their own -
the result of an epic pairing between King Solomon
and the incomparable Queen of Sheba.
(BeII ringing in distance)
(Singing and drumming)
This is Timkat, the most honoured festival in the Ethiopian Christian calendar.
For the people who celebrate here,
the location of the lost Ark of the Covenant is no riddle -
they own it.
During Timkat, priests carry replicas of the ark through the streets while the people rejoice.
But the real thing, they claim,
lies in a little sanctuary of the Church of St Zion, in the city of Axum.
Journalist Graham Hancock has spent over 20 years searching for the ark,
and he is intrigued by Ethiopia's claim to it.
For this object to occupy such a powerfuI pIace in Ethiopian cuIture,
for it to be so important that every singIe church in Ethiopia
contains a repIica of the Ark of the Covenant, which makes the church sacred...
..the notion that the ark itseIf might be or have been present in Ethiopia
becomes much more compeIIing.
According to the Kebra Negast, or Glory of Kings,
in around 1,000 BC,
the Ethiopian Queen of Sheba travelled to Jerusalem
to meet the mighty and wise King Solomon.
Diplomacy quickly turned to passion,
and the queen became pregnant.
After returning to Ethiopia, she gave birth to a son, Menelik.
He would eventually return to Jerusalem to see his father,
and would convince Solomon to send him
and all of the sons of the high priests back to Ethiopia.
But on the way out of town, under cover of darkness,
Menelik stole the ark from the temple,
leaving a replica in its place in the Holy of Holies.
Many scholars have pointed out problems with this scenario.
There is in fact no historical record of a Queen of Sheba.
And if she did exist, she was probably from Saba, in Arabia, not from Ethiopia.
And why would King Solomon let his half-Ethiopian son
carry off the most precious relic of the ancient world?
Hancock isn't convinced by the Menelik scenario.
But he does think Ethiopia is a likely last resting place for the Ark of the Covenant
for several reasons.
Hancock is among those who believe that the high priests in charge of the ark
somehow managed to save it before the city of Jerusalem was sacked -
along with the Temple of Solomon - in 587 BC.
But he suspects that the priests weren't fleeing an invasion from outsiders,
but an assault from within.
A brutal and blasphemous king named Manasseh
had come to power just decades before the Babylonian invasion.
He abandons the Jewish faith,
and he, in fact, does something which is absoIuteIy abhorrent
in the context of the traditionaI Jewish reIigion,
which is, he instaIIs a pagan idoI in the HoIy of HoIies of the tempIe.
It was most improbabIe and unIikeIy
that those priests who were IoyaI to the traditionaI reIigion of the Ark of the Covenant
wouId have aIIowed the ark to remain in the tempIe
when it had become a sanctuary for a pagan idoI.
They wouId have had to have taken it out.
But where could they go?
lsrael was no longer safe.
Graham thinks they headed south,
fuelled by the knowledge that devout expatriate Jews were living in Egypt.
From ancient papyri, scholars had long known that Jews had settled somewhere on the Nile.
And in 1 997 they discovered the outlines of a Jewish temple that dates from this time...
..on a little island called Elephantine.
This was the onIy Jewish tempIe in the worId outside of JerusaIem in this period.
And the onIy possibIe justification for the buiIding of that tempIe
was as a house of refuge for the Ark of the Covenant.
This temple was completely destroyed sometime around 400 BC.
But no bodies were found at the excavation,
giving Graham hope that the ark had moved on and avoided disaster once again.
And this Jewish community on the isIand of EIephantine, IiteraIIy vanishes from history.
I mean, they are there, and then they're gone.
But there's no evidence of a massacre,
and so what suggests itseIf is that they fIed,
fIed carrying their precious reIic, seeking some kind of promised Iand.
The promised land could no longer be lsrael, with its wicked heretic king,
and Egypt was no longer safe.
So where could they go?
Hancock thinks they headed for Ethiopia -
a place where another group of exiled Jews lived.
And, strikingly, at about the same time as the Temple at Elephantine was destroyed,
the tradition of the Ark of the Covenant
appeared on a different little island on Lake Tana in the highlands of Ethiopia.
It's an obvious journey to go up into the highIands of Ethiopia from there,
foIIowing the BIue NiIe River system, and there you find yourseIf on Lake Tana,
where Io and behoId, we have an isIand with monks
and a specific tradition concerning the Ark of the Covenant.
On this forgotten island lies a forgotten monastery,
home to Christian monks whose tradition tells them they housed the ark for 800 years.
They had once been Jews, but converted in around 350 AD
and sent the ark to Axum, where it's been guarded to this day.
Across the centuries, Graham thinks,
the memory of how the ark came to be in the possession of the Ethiopians was lost...
and the myth of Menelik may have been created to justify its presence.
But regardless, he's convinced the ark is there.
Why is there one country in the worId
that is stiII practising a reIigion based on preciseIy that object?
I mean, if there were five countries which aII had Ark of the Covenant based reIigions,
I wouId have been much Iess impressed by the Ethiopian cIaim.
But the fact is they're unique.
They're also utterly dedicated.
At the Priory of Mary in Axum, one man has even given his life to the ark.
He's the only person pure enough to live in the presence of the ark
and he can never leave it.
The individuaI who's appointed as its guardian,
he becomes a prisoner of the Ark of the Covenant.
And his job is to serve the ark and to offer up prayer before it and to guard it.
And he wiII never Ieave that chapeI untiI he dies.
And the guardians die with startling regularity.
Three of those interviewed by Hancock died within a span ofjust five years.
And they all believed that the ark itself was harming them.
The Iast one that I taIked to was convinced, absoIuteIy convinced,
that the ark was making him sick.
He said, ''WeII, ever since I came into the presence of the ark,
my eyesight has started to go.
It's bIinding me.''
Hancock knows that most scholars remain intrigued but unconvinced by his theory,
which, without an examination of the ark itself, remains wholly circumstantial.
So what was happening in Jerusalem at the time?
We pick up the trail back at the Temple Mount at the time the ark seems to have disappeared,
sometime between its last mention in the Bible, around 620 BC,
and the destruction of the temple, in 587 BC.
lf the high priests did hide it,
where would they be most likely to take it?
According to some people, it might have stayed right here under the Temple Mount.
No-one today can dig at the Temple Mount
because the Muslim authorities who control the area won't permit it.
But this doesn't necessarily mean another dead end.
The legacy of digging under the Temple Mount goes back a long way...
to the elusive, infamous Knights Templar.
Many people believe that they found the ark...
and they think they know exactly where they hid it.
They called themselves the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon.
The Knights Templar were founded around 1 1 20,
in the aftermath of the First Crusade of 1 096,
by a handful of French noblemen.
They claimed to be in the Holy Land
to ensure the safety of European pilgrims headed towards Jerusalem
after it was taken from the Muslims.
But legend has it that the knights had a secret objective
and quickly became occupied with treasure hunting.
They set about digging into the Temple Mount with single-minded zeal,
apparently convinced by a passage in the Talmud
that the Ark of the Covenant was hidden there.
What they found - or didn't find - remains a mystery.
The knights were disbanded, rounded up and tortured.
By the 1 300s, they had pretty much been exterminated, accused of heresy.
But some ark hunters believe
that the clever knights may have managed to hide the golden box before disaster stuck...
and might have left clues as to where.
Journalist Graham Phillips is among them.
The reason I decided to go in search of the ark, to be quite honest,
is because I saw the fiIm Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.
And I thought, ''I wonder if that object reaIIy existed?''
The first stop in Phillips'quest to find the ark was the Shara Mountains in Jordan.
This is where, according to a local Bedouin legend,
a group of English knights long ago discovered an amazing treasure trove,
including one particularly intriguing object.
They cIaimed to have found what they described as bibIicaI treasures - a goIden chest.
What this goIden chest was...is not described.
I couIdn't heIp but wonder if these Knights TempIars
had in fact discovered the Ark of the Covenant itseIf.
We do know that the Knights Templar returned to England as wealthy men.
Could the Ark of the Covenant have been among the treasures they brought home?
But here the trail gets complicated.
Phillips found himself chasing a dizzying series of supposed clues left in churches
as to where the Knights Templar hid their treasure.
The first church is Temple Herdewyke.
ln an old village record, Phillips found an entry for 1 1 92 that concerned sacred artefacts.
Whatever they brought back, it was fairIy impressive...
because they buiIt a chapeI at TempIe Herdewyke...
..to contain what are described in the oId records as ''sacred reIics''.
But today, Temple Herdewyke is a private residence, with no sign of relics.
The second church is All Saints Church in nearby Burton Dassett.
There's no record of this being a Templar church.
But these strange murals were discovered during renovations.
They depict a man holding a severed head.
The Knights Templar reputedly worshipped the severed head of John the Baptist.
Phillips has also discovered a local legend to go along with these murals.
An amateur historian named Jacob Cove-Jones
is said to had deciphered their meaning more than a century ago...
..and then re-encoded the clues in a stained glass window in yet another church,
this little church in Langley.
The coded window is called the Epiphany Window.
It didn't take me Iong to reaIise that there was some rather pecuIiar imagery in the picture.
The window depicts the famous story of the Three Wise Men visiting Jesus
with the gifts of goId, frankincense and myrrh.
What is it about the Three Wise Men that was important?
WeII, in the BibIe, the Three Wise Men had to search for something -
the birthpIace of the baby Jesus.
And they found it by foIIowing a star.
This star is depicted here, but it does seem to be two stars, one on top of another.
Now, two stars are associated with the Ark of the Covenant.
The two angeIs that are depicted on its Iid
are traditionaIIy supposed to be MichaeI and GabrieI.
They are the two taiI stars of what we now caII the Big Dipper, or the PIough,
and they are now caIIed Benetnash and Mizar.
It just so happens that right next to these stars, we have two Ietters, B and M.
And I thought, do I have to foIIow a certain star?
But when and where should he even start?
The Epiphany is traditionally celebrated on January 6.
Tradition has it that the cock crowed at midnight to announce the birth of Jesus.
And this other bird is a phoenix.
And I suddenIy remembered that the name of the beacon on top of the Burton Dassett hiIIs,
right between the two pIaces the TempIars had buiIt,
is caIIed the Phoenix Beacon.
Phillips went to the Phoenix Beacon at midnight on January 6...
..and the tail stars of the dipper led directly to something that looked like this.
I knew I was Iooking for a red brick arch, but I thought it was going to be big.
I didn't know what size this arch was going to be.
But as I drove aIong the road, suddenIy I saw this IittIe arch.
And it matched exactIy, and I was exhiIarated.
If I'm right, what is at this spot is buried here somewhere, the Ark of the Covenant.
Now, if this is right, this wouId probabIy be
the most sacred spot on the earth as far as most reIigions are concerned.
And if the Ark of the Covenant is found here,
then it wouId probabIy be the archaeoIogicaI discovery of aII time.
lt is red, and it's an arch,
but many people have been underwhelmed by this evidence.
lndeed, Phillips'convoluted trail of clues
has baffled the caretakers of the key local churches.
According to records about the All Saints Church in Burton Dassett,
the murals in question almost certainly weren't visible
when amateur historian Jacob Cove-Jones supposedly decoded them in the 1 890s.
I find it amazing how Graham can make this cIaim
that in the 1 9th century, Cove-Jones found waII paintings in the church.
We have factuaI evidence about the parish, about its origin, the date of this buiIding.
We have factuaI evidence interpreted by art historians.
We know that these waII paintings were onIy uncovered in 1 966.
There's also no evidence that Cove-Jones commissioned the Epiphany window
at the Langley church.
And, besides, everything contained within it is standard iconography
found in almost any depiction of the Epiphany - especially the cock and the phoenix.
It's perfectIy straightforward, in my opinion.
I think that one can find answers to aII of the symboIism that is within the window
from straightforward Christian understanding.
Unfortunately for Graham Phillips, the local authorities won't let him dig here.
Another trail appears to have reached a dead end.
But if someone somewhere did hide the ark,
how could something so powerful, so glorious and so volatile remain hidden,
unless it had lost its rather attention-grabbing powers?
ls it possible to explain those powers without resorting to the supernatural?
And if we discover what the ark was, will it yield clues as to its whereabouts today?
Perhaps the most elusive mystery of the Ark of the Covenant
concerns its astounding attributes.
Why did it take the form it did?
What made it tick, spark, fly, incinerate and give people terrible diseases?
For the faithful, the answer to this is easy -
the ark was exactly what the Old Testament said it was -
a glorious gold-encrusted box that was built to hold the Ten Commandments -
and a place where God could make His presence known
in whatever incendiary manner He pleased.
But there are those who believe that modern scholarship -
and the tools of modern science -
can explain the ark as a more earthly object
and perhaps even replicate its powers.
Some people have speculated that what Moses put into the ark was actually radioactive.
People who opened it almost invariably died.
Many who looked upon it were sickened with horrible tumours.
And the high priests who approached the ark had to wear special clothing
in order not to be killed by it.
However, radioactivity was not discovered for another 3,000 years,
so how likely is it that Moses would have known about it
and known where to find radioactive rocks?
Others think the ark's killing powers
may have come from something much simpler- static electricity.
Back in 1 91 5, electrical pioneer and prolific inventor Nikola Tesla
put forward the possibility that the ark might have been a capacitor-
a device for storing huge electrical charges.
Long-time ark researcher, furniture maker, and journalist Richard Andrews
has reconstructed the ark to test this possibility
with the help of a technician in the Oxford physics lab.
We have a sandwich construction.
You have a Iayer of goId, and you then have wood.
We're taIking about something that is eIectricaI.
The ark experiment here is predominantIy static eIectricity.
We are trying to charge it up.
We gonna give it a go?
- I reckon. - OK.
OK, weII, we'II get the beIt going.
Now it's up to speed. And we'II turn on...
Here in damp England, they need the help of a generator to charge the ark.
But they contend that in the deserts of the Holy Land,
large amounts of static could have been generated
simply by the friction of the wool covering
against the gold plating on the outside of the ark.
I can hear a spark. Here we go.
Yeah, it's very interesting.
It...goes into that goId beautifuIIy - Iook.
It reaIIy Iikes the angIe there.
So I think that we can prove with this that it reaIIy can discharge and work as a capacitor.
That's fantastic.
Andrews suggests that the ark as a giant repository for static electricity
could possibly explain the deaths of Moses'nephews,
who tried to offer a sacrifice of fire to the ark...
..and that of poor Uzzah,
who merely stretched out his hand to steady the ark as it was being carried.
And he got a shock that kiIIed him.
Maybe the wooIIen cIoth on the ark had been rubbing backwards and forwards,
buiIding up a charge.
Maybe it was charged with 50,000...60,000 voIts...
..and at the point that Uzzah reached out and touched it,
he wouId have had aII the charge discharged into his outstretched hand.
And Uzzah, apparentIy, according to the BibIe, dropped dead.
60,000 volts is a lot of electricity.
But until someone takes a strict replica of the ark into a desert
and rubs it with wool and animal skins,
the possibility that it was an ancient, giant electrical battery of sorts can't be proved.
lt is possible that it may have given off a slightly nasty shock,
enough to give rise to stories that got better with each retelling
in the hundreds of years before the ark's story was written down.
But, like the nuclear explanation of the ark's powers,
this electrical one also seems to jump the historical gun.
Electricity was discovered just 300 years ago, not 3,000.
And for hardened biblical archaeologists,
any attempt to explain miraculous objects with modern technology is simply ludicrous.
The ark is an ancient capacitor? I don't know why it wouId be.
Does the BibIe say it was? No.
The BibIe says it was an object of unspeakabIe power.
It says nothing about an ancient capacitor or eIectricity.
But for Richard Andrews, the electrifying nature of the Ark of the Covenant
may help to pinpoint its location.
And, as for so many others, all roads lead him back to Jerusalem.
Throughout history, people have clung to the possibility
that the high priests of the temple
had the foresight to hide the ark under the mount
sometime after its last mention in the Old Testament
and before the burning of Jerusalem 30 years later by Babylonian invaders.
But where could they have hidden it?
As Richard Andrews points out,
a glowing, sparking, temperamental ark would be difficult to hide.
So, Iet's suppose for a minute that the ark, before the BabyIonian destruction, was hidden.
Where couId it have gone to?
To move the ark from the originaI HoIy of HoIies and not be seen,
there must have been a tunneI to go from the HoIy of HoIies underground.
So, my theory and my honest opinion is that the ark, if it stiII exists,
wouId be somewhere inside the TempIe Mount.
But the Knights Templar, religious zealots,
bumbling amateurs and legitimate archaeologists
have all excavated under and around the mount, many with obsessive zeal.
All their efforts have led only to the complicated water system under the city.
And with the mount under the control of Muslim authorities - as it has been for 1 3 centuries -
it's unlikely that any further excavations will be allowed,
not least because of the Jewish fundamentalists'plans for the mount.
This is where science and faith part ways... with apocalyptic repercussions.
The ark now has a potentiaI not to hurt anybody who might touch it,
but the concept of the ark has the potentiaI to expIode the whoIe situation,
the whoIe of the MiddIe East.
He's expecting from his peopIe of IsraeI, to buiId his house.
2,000 years he waited. He has no more patience.
Gershon Salomon, founder of the messianic Temple Mount Faithful Group,
eagerly awaits the return of the Ark of the Covenant
and the events it will herald -
the rebuilding of the temple on its original site and the subsequent coming of the Messiah.
The fact that this would require the destruction of the magnificent Muslim Dome of the Rock
doesn't bother him at all.
ln keeping with God's will,
he and his compatriots are preparing to recreate the temple and its contents -
down to the last candle.
We prepare vesseIs.
We prepare architecturaI pIans for the tempIe.
We want to be ready, because we know that God is ready, we know that time is short.
Gershon Salomon even has the cornerstones prepared for the third temple.
But he's missing one thing.
The Ark of the Covenant... waiting for us underneath the TempIe Mount.
According to Salomon, the finding of the ark will herald the arrival of the Messiah.
But what will it mean for the Muslims and their Dome of the Rock?
The Dome of the Rock and the mosque - they shouId be removed from the TempIe Mount.
How it wiII be done?
A government of faith in IsraeI, of vision, which is soon to come,
wiII take the mosque and the Dome of the Rock,
Iocate them in a huge enveIope and maiI them back to Mecca from where they were brought.
lt's hardly a plan for world peace.
lndeed, according to some experts, the destruction of the Dome of the Rock
is the most likely event to cause World War lll.
And all because of an object that scholars still can't agree ever existed.
I beIieve the Ark of the Covenant was a reaI object,
because the Book of Exodus takes great effort to give us the dimensions,
how it was to be constructed.
It was to be made of a particuIar kind of wood, acacia wood, it was to be covered with goId foiI.
So it seems to be describing something very genuine -
not something that was just an abstraction.
It was a reaI object.
There is no physicaI evidence today that the ark ever existed.
There is nothing, absoIuteIy nothing to which you can point and say,
''See? Look, the ark existed.''
After so much obsession,
excavation, investigation and aggravation,
we're left with the darkest of the dark paradoxes of the Ark of the Covenant.
lt may still be deadly...even if it doesn't exist.
Perhaps more than any other riddle of the Old Testament,
this is one that should remain a mystery.