The Ark Of The Covenant: The True Story of the Greatest Relic of Antiquity Book

There are so many imaginative rewrites of religious history and archaeology these days--most of them full of factual inaccuracies and hop-skip-and-jumps of logic--that it's a delight to read one which is sound and scholarly. The authors of The Ark of the Covenant are academics specialising in the history of Africa, particularly Ethiopia. The Ark is nothing to do with Noah's Ark. It was the most sacred object in ancient Judaism: the casket in which the Tablets of the Law which God gave to Moses--the Ten Commandments--were kept. The Ark led the Israelites to battle but it was always carefully shielded from view; anyone who saw it or even came too near would be killed by its awesome power. Initially it was kept in a tent or Tabernacle but when Solomon built his famous temple it was housed in the Holy of Holies, the innermost sanctuary. The historical books of the Old Testament are full of references to the Ark--but after that it is barely mentioned again, as if it has vanished completely. Was it destroyed when Jerusalem was sacked in 587B.C.? Was it stolen, hidden or spirited away to safety? Grierson and Munro-Hay discuss in detail an ancient Ethiopian epic called The Glory of Kings which claims that the Ark was taken from Jerusalem to Ethiopia by the son of Solomon and his most famous lover, the Queen of Sheba. They visit a shrine in Ethiopia which even today claims to house it, and examine the peculiarly Jewish nature of Ethiopian Christianity. But unlike Graham Hancock, whose book The Sign and the Seal they describe as a "sensational account", they make no wild claims. This is an historical study by scholars, and a very sensible and readable work. --David V BarrettRead More