The Ark of the Covenant
The God of Israel said to Moses:
«You will make an ark of acacia wood and cover it with pure gold. And inside you will place the Testimony that I will give you »
commands the Lord Jahweh. Moses obeyed and built a chest of 125 centimeters in length by 75 in height and width and covered it with pure gold, covering it with a golden lid, called a propitiatory. Above him he placed two small figurines, depicting cherubs, on the sides of the box he inserted four rings so that it could be transported more easily, without touching it, by inserting two poles. Inside the ark Moses the prophet placed some of the manna collected during the crossing of the desert, Moses imposed on his people, for the custody of the sacred object, a whole series of provisions as precise as they are incomprehensible.
In 587 BC the Babylonian armies defeated the Jews and plundered them of everything, including the ark. Before that date, once they reached the Promised Land, the Levites placed the ark in the sancta sanctorum, a secret underground cell of twenty cubits by twenty in the Temple of Jerusalem.
It was said that the ark, at particular times, would light up and be able to unleash the divine power, annihilating thousands of people. How this happened is unclear. But what is certain is that the ancient biblical chronicles say that with the ark at their head the Jews managed to annihilate the dozens of hostile tribes encountered during the exodus in the Sinai desert. Gergesei, of the Jebusites and the Evei and of another ten peoples who lived in the Canaan belt in the 13th century BC What these divine thunderbolts were is not clear.
In some passages the Bible implies the presence of an unidentified exterminating angel, while in various verses of the Exodus and in the Second Book of Samuel it is clearly stated that whoever touched the ark died beaten by God. As happened to the sons of Aaron, although they were the expert guardians of the relic, and to a certain Oza who, wanting to prevent the ark from overturning during a transport, he grabbed it with his hands and died instantly. But the greatest victory of the ark remains the destruction of the city of Jericho. Regarding this episode, the Book of Joshua is very clear. By order of God for six days the armies of Israel, led by seven priests carrying seven ram horn trumpets and the ark of the covenant, they circled the Cyclopean ramparts.
And on the seventh day, the trumpets sounded, the walls collapsed
says the Bible.
But if we wanted to exclude divine intervention, and if the chronicle reported real events, what other explanations could be given?
The French writer Robert Charroux says that:
the ark was nothing more than an impressive weapon capable of developing electrical energy. We must not forget that Moses, when he was still being instructed as a future pharaoh, had received from the Egyptian priests profound alchemical-esoteric notions of chemistry, physics and meteorology such as to justify some of the prodigies attributed to him. The ark of the covenant could be a kind of electric chest capable of producing strong discharges of the order of 5-700 volts ...
and
The ark was made of acacia wood - writes the researcher - and coated with gold inside and outside. With this same principle, electric capacitors are built, separated by an insulator which in that case was wood. The ark was placed in a dry area, where the natural magnetic field normally reaches 600 volts per vertical meter, and was charged. His own garland perhaps served to charge the capacitor. To move it, the Levites passed two golden poles through the rings, so much so that from the garland to the ground the conduction took place by taking natural ground, discharging without danger. Isolated, the ark sometimes haloed itself with rays of fire, with flashes, and, if touched, gave terrible shocks. Basically it behaved exactly like a Leyden device ...
According to Charroux, therefore, the ark was nothing more than an electric weapon built on the basis of ancient knowledge lost and kept only by the Egyptian Initiates. Also thanks to this knowledge, which for the Swiss popularizer Erich Von Daeniken were instead of extraterrestrial origin, Moses would have built a propitiatory that worked like a transistor radio. Only in this way would it explain, for the writer, the fact that Moses could speak as a friend with the Lord God.
These hypotheses could explain the interest of other populations in the holy ark.
The temple of Jerusalem, where the sacred relic was kept, was plundered many times: in 925 BC by the Egyptians of Pharaoh Soshenq I, in 797 by Joas king of Israel, in 621 by the Chaldean and Babylonian armies.
According to the Israeli rabbi Goren:
It would be enough to dig in correspondence with its ancient location.
declares Goren
Unfortunately, however, now in that area there is the esplanade of the Islamic mosques of Jerusalem and the religious authorities prefer to avoid any archaeological excavation to avoid friction with the Muslims ...
According to another version, the ark of the covenant is found in Axum, Ethiopia. It would have been brought to us by a certain Menelik, who according to tradition was born from the marriage of King Solomon with Makeda, the queen of Sheba. The son of the young and handsome Ethiopian, in agreement with a handful of rebellious Jews, allegedly stole the ark, transporting it secretly to Axum. And thanks to the powers of the same, the falascià of Menelik, that is the Ethiopian Jews, would have effortlessly lifted the hundreds of tons of the gigantic obelisks erected in Axum.
This story has fascinated the dozens of researchers who have set out on the trail of the ark, from the Jewish archaeologist Vendil Indiana Jones, who inspired the TV personality of the same name, to the English scholar Graham Hancock, a Templar history expert who is convinced that the sacred hood is kept in a chapel in Lake Tana in Ethiopia. Unfortunately, each of Ethiopia's approximately twenty thousand Coptic churches has a copy of the ark. Finding the authentic one is therefore an almost impossible undertaking.
But perhaps the professors Vincenzo Francaviglia, director of the CNR for technologies applied to cultural heritage, Giuseppe Infranca of the University of Reggio Calabria and the architect Paolo Alberto Rossi of the Milan Polytechnic succeeded in the impossible:
In 1990 we were in Axum for an official invitation from the Ethiopian government
Professor Francaviglia told the press
and, after a series of ceremonies, a meeting was organized with the Abuna, the highest religious authority. He received us with solemn vestments and led us to visit the old Christian church of St. Mary of Sion in Axum, a church built in the seventeenth century by Emperor Fasiladas ... Behind the high altar, protected by a red velvet canopy with embroidery, there was the ark. The abuna did not want to show it to us at all. But a young cleric opened the tent and we could see a chest of dark wood, one meter long and sixty centimeters high, with a double sloping roof. There were no more gold sheets and the surface itself appeared deteriorated. As soon as the abuna noticed that they were observing the ark, she harshly scolded the cleric, ordering him to immediately lower the curtain ...
According to the Coptic religion, in fact, nobody is allowed to see the ark.
Curiously, all these narrations seem to forget what the Bible writes in the Second Book of Maccabees, when it is told in detail how the prophet Jeremiah, having climbed Mount Nebo, decided to hide the ark "in a cave" then walled up, probably to steal the Precious relic from the fury of the armies of the Babylonian sovereign Nebuchadnezzar, who besieged Jerusalem in 587 BC. Still in the biblical text, in the Apocalypse, it is written that the ark will reappear in the days of the last judgment. At that time "the temple of God in heaven will reopen and the ark of the covenant will appear among the clouds".
Using data from the Bible and some historical information, hypotheses can be made about the possible current location of the ark:
- In 925 BC in Bubasti in Egypt the soldiers of Pharaoh Soshenq I sacked the temple of Jerusalem. The ark may have been stolen and taken to the ancient capital of the Kingdom, not far from Tanis (Samaria, Palestine). Having escaped the Egyptian pillage, the chest could have fallen into the hands of King Joash of Israel in 797 BC, during a civil struggle between the peoples of Palestine. Babylon, Mesopotamia. In 587 BC, King Nebuchadnezzar's Chaldean and Babylonian armies overthrew the kingdom of Judea and destroyed Jerusalem, pillaging the temple.
- Axum, Ethiopia: the Coptic religious authorities affirm that the ark would be found in the Church of St. Mary of Sion or in one of the more than twenty thousand churches of Ethiopia.
- The negus Haile Selassie boasted of having the Ark of Moses among his treasures. If so, the best place to hide it was a decent Swiss bank.
- But it could also be that the ark, following the Crusades in the year 1000, was found by the Templars (an ancient tradition speaks of a mysterious sacred object received by the latter from the Islamic sect of the Hashashin Guardians of Hassan Ibn Sabbah ) and brought to Rome. In this case it would be in some secret room of the legendary basements of the Holy See. Of this idea is the chief rabbi Zvi Vinman of Jerusalem, who, speaking of his visit to the Vatican undergrounds, said: «I found many objects that the Christians had stolen from the Jews. But they didn't want to show me a room.
- Nuremberg, Germany. The führer's troops may have discovered the ark during one of their top secret archaeological missions. If successful, the precious tabernacle could have ended up in the church of St. Catherine in Nuremberg, where in the late 1930s Hitler kept his treasures.
- Moscow, CIS With the fall of Berlin, the Soviet liberation troops, getting their hands on the secret weapons of the Reich, may have discovered the ark. Not understanding its usefulness well, they may have packed it and set it aside in some basement of the Kremlin which, as is known, is very rich in dungeons, many of which are currently impracticable or forgotten.
