Millions of people have seen the series of Indiana Jones movies starring Harrison Ford. And perhaps, many of them consider the first of the films, “Raiders of the Lost Ark” to be the best. Of course, this is a very subjective thing. But it is this first movie that revolves around an object which we will discuss in this article and that is the Ark of the Covenant. In the movie, the Ark is supposed to contain great wealth and power to whoever finds it and opens it. I will not tell you what they find in the movie in case you haven’t seen it but it is not what legend tells us it contains.
So, what is the Ark of the Covenant? It is said that the casket contained the original Ten Commandments given to Moses by God. We get this information from the Bible’s Old and New Testaments. At this point, I need to once again state my personal view of such things. Many people believe that what is written in the Bible is all absolute truth. I do not share this view but everyone has the right to their own belief. However, my central philosophy is always to keep an open mind and follow the evidence.
Therefore, from my side, I do not know whether the Ark of the Covenant ever existed. If it did, it has not been found. However, that has not stopped many people over the last two thousand years from searching for it. It has taken them across Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa, all to no avail. Actually, that is not completely accurate.
In 2008 a book was written by Tudor Parfitt which recorded his search in the African country of Zimbabwe. Why search there? It was because there is a tribe living there called the Lemba. They maintain that they have descended from one of the original Tribes of Israel. That might sound a little far-fetched until genetic checks showed that they did carry a marker shared by a Jewish group.
They had another claim and that was that they had, in the distant past, brought the Ark of the Covenant from Jerusalem to Zimbabwe. More importantly, it still existed. Parfitt said that in his opinion, it bore some resemblance to what he had heard it looked like. It turned out to be an old wooden box which is not surprising if it was over two thousand years old. But it wasn’t. Carbon-14 dating was made of a small piece of it and showed the wood to have been around only since the fourteenth century.
Like the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant holds a mystery and unstoppable ambition in some to find the truth. I cannot argue with that sentiment, but I fear they will both remain a mystery.
John Pullen 