 You're listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit nakedbiblepodcast.com and click on the support link in the upper right-hand corner. If you're new to the podcast and Dr. Heiser's approach to the Bible, click on newstarthere at nakedbiblepodcast.com. Welcome to the Naked Bible Podcast, episode 158, The Fate of the Ark of the Covenant. I'm the layman, Trey Strickland, and he's a scholar, Dr. Michael Heiser. Hey Mike, how are you? Pretty good. Dizzy as usual, but pretty productive week heading toward the end of the Distance Ed thing, so that's wonderful to even contemplate, of course, and got a trip coming up here too. People can see what the main event is on Florida by going to the website, drmsh.com, of course, and the main time is going to be at Calvary Chapel Surfside. That's in Indian Harbor, Florida. It's going to end 5-ish, 5.30 or so, then I'm going to go out to get some dinner and hopefully not talk. We'll be talking the whole day, but we've appended another meeting on top of that. The same evening, I'm going to go a few minutes away to another Calvary Chapel Church. This one is called South Coast Calvary Chapel. It's on Croton Road, C-R-O-T-O-N. I think we're going to try to start that at 7, but I'm only going to go there for like an hour, hour and a half, but we're going to ... Both of these places have read a lot of unseen realm content, and this second one, they're doing some sort of Bible study, and they've hit Genesis 6, so I'm going to go and present Genesis 6 that evening. It's the same evening, just a little bit later, but that has not made it on the website. We actually just finalized that like two days ago, and it's also not in the newsletter, so I will stick it on the website today, but other than that, this is the first that's been announced, so an appendage, not a second meeting. Awesome. The more hyzer we can get, the better, so that's great. Well, I think that's what they're thinking, because they're only a few minutes apart, so I'm betting that people that go to the one thing are probably going to stay and travel over to the other, so I don't know anything about their capacity, their space. I just said, okay, I'll show up after I take a couple hours to not talk, so. Well, if there's a case to be made for transhumanism or cloning or whatever, if we could just duplicate you, that'd be worth it right there, I guess. Yeah, I'd settle for the beam me up kind of thing. That would be great. Well, did you at least watch Raiders of the Lost Ark for this episode? No, I've probably watched it eight or nine times. I don't think I'm in double digits on this one, I've only ever watched two movies in double digits, but we're close. I think we've covered that in the past episode. Remind us which of those, it's Princess Bride, right? Princess Bride is one, and Empire Strikes Back. Empire Strikes Back, there you go. Yeah. Those are the two good ones to watch. Well, I did see Guardians of the Galaxy this last week. Oh, I haven't seen it yet, so don't tell me, don't spoil it, don't tell me. I love the first one, but. Yep. I won't say anything. Excited for the second one. I think you'll be entertained, though. I'll just say that. Well, Mike, I'm excited about this episode. Ever since you mentioned it several months ago, I put it down and said, we got it. We're definitely going to have to do this, so. Yeah, this is kind of a favorite subject. Yeah, this is a favorite subject. I remember teaching in Bible College, you know, whenever I had history of Israel or something, we'd set aside a day to do Ark of the Covenant stuff. So what I'm going to try to do today is hit, you know, try to stay serious. I mean, we're going to have to hit some of the silly stuff, but I'm going to try to stick with the serious views of, you know, what the fate of the Ark of the Covenant was and or the most sort of well-known, you know, kind of the ones that deserve attention. Now, I put it that way because there's over a dozen theories on what happened to the Ark of the Covenant, and some are just more deserving of attention than others. So if you want, you know, I guess to to get even a broader stroke here, broader perspective, if you subscribe to the newsletter, I have uploaded a few articles that I'll mention today while we go through this material. One of them is by John Day and it's entitled, Whatever Happened to the Ark of the Covenant, and it's from it's from the Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series, which is a book. It's an edited volume, and this is one of the chapters in it. So you can get a PDF of the chapter if you subscribe to the newsletter. You go up to the the protected folder, the private folder, and it'll be in there. And when I hit some other things that I've uploaded, I'll let you know. But that one gives a decent, you know, overview of even more items than we'll touch on here. And of course, I'm going to be throwing a lot of other stuff that isn't in that article, but that's a good resource. So we might as well jump in in no particular order. We're just going to go through the different theories and I'll explain kind of what the thinking is and then talk about, you know, problems that the theory has and why it's either not accepted or why some people are still in the bandwagon or, you know, whatnot. So the first one is what we'll call, I guess for lack of a better name, the Samaritan view. And that is, again, just what it sounds like, the Samaritans. Again, the these, you know, for lack of a better term, Halfbreed Jews in the north in Samaria, from which the Samaritan community derives from. The Samaritans believe that the Ark of the Covenant never reached Jerusalem or the temple at all. So it wasn't even in the Temple of Solomon. You might scratch your head and say, well, what in the world is that all about? Well, they obviously want to have the Ark of the Covenant and the Temple on Mount Gerizim, which is the holy mountain to the Samaritans and not Mount Zion, Jerusalem. So they have articulated this view, again, trying to be charitable here. And I know no scholar actually takes this seriously for reasons that I think will become obvious as we talk about it. The idea here is that after the Conquest under Moses and Joshua and toward the end of the period of the Book of Judges, we have Eli the priest. OK, he's a character in the book of Samuel. Just the theory is that Eli created a rival cult center, a rival holy place, you know, other than what would other than Jerusalem, OK, what would be Jerusalem in the time of David and this rival cult center, this rival holy place. Eli had a fake Ark and a fake tabernacle and fake vessels the whole bit. He he concocted all this had had replicas made and so they could use them at his alternate cult center. And supposedly a high priest named Uzzi, Uzzi, I hid the real Ark and the tabernacle furniture and all its vessels in a cave on Mount Garazim. And as the Samaritans believe that the Ark will remain hidden there until true worship is restored on Mount Garazim, because, hey, that's where it should be, because, hey, we're Samaritans. So you can kind of see right away. I mean, there's actually no, you know, literary, archaeological, textual evidence for any of this. However, Josephus actually alludes to the idea. I mean, there were Samaritans, obviously, in first century. And of course, earlier, Josephus reports in one place that during the time of Pontius Pilate and, you know, we'll just call it the mid 30s AD, a Samaritan in the the community there promised to lead a procession of people to Mount Garazim and show them the stuff, you know, show them the Ark and the other vessels were, quote, Moses had deposited them, unquote. Now, that that's odd wording. Since, according to the Torah, Moses never got to the Promised Land. So how could he get to Mount Garazim and put the Ark and all this other stuff there if the Torah has him never entering the Promised Land? So that right away, that's a problem. Now, you could say Josephus is just wrong. He's kind of a kind of dopey, but that that's a pretty major point. So that's a little dubious. You could say that the alleged Samaritan priests that, you know, Josephus is writing about said that for propaganda purposes, you know, like trying to convince people who were ignorant that Moses really did come into the Promised Land and, you know, hid the Ark there on Mount Garazim because Moses was really a Samaritan, too. Again, it's just it's contrived all the way across the board that there are no other than Josephus's mention of this random Samaritan talking about, hey, I can show you guys the Ark. There is nothing that refers to any element of this view directly. And so no scholar takes it seriously. A lot of the Samaritan material, including their Pentateuch, is medieval. Now, there are fragments at Qumran that reflect a Samaritan Pentateuch reading. So it's probably, you know, much older. But as far as their their religious documents, their their historical accountings of anything, it's all like 11th, 12th, 13th century. So this one really lacks coherence and lacks data. I mean, what else can you say? The second view is a little more serious. And that is the idea that the Ark was removed from the temple by Shishak, who was is referred to as Pharaoh of Egypt in the Bible. When he presumably, and there's a reason I'm saying it this way, that I'll get to in a moment, when he presumably invaded Jerusalem, according to 1 Kings 14, 25 through 27. I'm going to read you that passage. 1 Kings 14, 25 in the fifth year of King Rehoboam. Shishak, King of Egypt, came up against Jerusalem. He took away the treasures of the House of the Lord and the treasures of the King's House. He took away everything. He also took away all the shields of gold that Solomon had made and King Rehoboam made in their place shields of bronze and committed them to the hands of the officers of the guard who kept the door of the King's House. Now, you say, well, why do you say presumably, Mike? Right there is the account. You know, Pharaoh of Shishak goes to Jerusalem, loots the place and so on and so forth. Well, just hang on. There's a reason why I say it. Now, this is the view. If you did rewatch, rewatch Raiders of the Lost Ark, this is the view the movie takes. There's a particular conversation with Indiana Jones, you know, at the University of Chicago there. And they refer to Shishak, you know, taking the Ark and then taking it to Tannis. Tannis was the capital city of the Egyptian Pharaoh that most scholars believe is the counterpart to Shishak. That Pharaoh's name is Shoshank. Now, it sounds sort of the same. There's a problem, though, that we'll get to again with this possible correlation, but just stay with me now. We've got Shishak coming down there, whoever that was. Invading Jerusalem takes the Ark, takes it to Tannis, and of course, according to the movie, then it gets buried in a sandstorm because God is really ticked off and it's just waiting there for Indiana Jones, you know, to discover it. Now, this Shishak theory was proposed by serious scholars in the 19th century. Two of the bigger names here are Mo Winkle, who's very famous for his work on form criticism in the Psalms, and Julian Morgenstern, who's a bit of an odd duck in certain of his conclusions, but he's actually one of my favorites. He has a very long piece on Psalm 82, and he's into Israelite religion stuff, and he's not afraid to go into the sort of arcane side of these things. So I kind of like Morgenstern, so he liked this theory. He adopted this theory in the early 20th century. Now, Mo Winkle adds, though, that he thought the Ark was replaced by a replica after it was taken by Shishak, and so Mo Winkle actually adds this idea that after Shishak takes the real Ark and it winds up in Tannas, the Israelites make a fake one, and that's what they use in the temple until 586 BC when David Kinezor destroys everything. Now, this view, though, despite, you know, this late 19th century, early 20th century support by some, you know, substantial scholars, today this view is mostly rejected by scholars for a number of reasons. One is that the first king's reference that I actually read doesn't specifically mention the Ark. Now, if we go back to it, you know, he took away the treasures of the house of the Lord, the treasures of the king's house, he took away everything, and people would say, well, everything, we would include the Ark. Well, yeah, you could say that, unless the everything clause there refers to the king's house, because that's what it follows, and it doesn't refer to the temple. So there's ambiguity in the text, and the Ark, of course, is not specifically mentioned. Second reason why a lot of scholars don't, you know, get too excited about this one is that I shouldn't say a lot of scholars, some scholars don't get excited is because Shishak's own account of this episode, of this Trek into Judah, doesn't mention the Ark at all. And here's where we get to the reasons for my hesitation. Not only does Shishak's own account, which has survived in Egyptian material, not mention the Ark, it doesn't mention Jerusalem, okay, the capital in the list of his conquests. So in, if the pharaoh Shishak is indeed the Egyptian guy, Shoshank, if you go to Shoshank's preserved itinerary, you know, it's a carving, it has, you know, it has survived all this time. If you assume that Shishak is Shoshank, and then you go read Shoshank's record of what he does in Judah, Jerusalem isn't even in the list. So that's a huge disconnect. If again, these two guys are the same. Now, I'm gonna muddy the waters here, and not, this doesn't help the theory. This basically would demolish the theory. And it already has problems because if you assume a Shishak, Shoshank correlation, Shoshank's record of his conquests, don't say anything about Jerusalem or the Ark, that's a huge problem for this view. But there are some scholars who don't believe that Shishak and Shoshank should be identified with each other. Now, practically everyone does. And this is, if it's not the number one lynchpin that links the Egyptian chronologies with the biblical chronology, it's pretty close to the top. But it has serious problems. And you almost never hear about the serious problems that it has. Now, I used to be in the biblical chronology. I decided I wanted to keep my sanity. And an Israeli religion was a little more interesting, but I used to be really into biblical chronology and all the problems that there are in the systems. And it's one of the reasons why I got a warm fuzzy watching, you know, patterns of evidence because patterns of evidence about the Exodus is using the work of David Rohl. And Rohl was very good at pointing out problems and other possibilities for the Exodus. He goes a little too far in other areas, which is unfortunate because that makes people turn away, you know, from what I think they ought to be looking at here. But this is another one of these areas. Now, I'm gonna recommend an article. Again, if you subscribe to the newsletter and, you know, please do, you should because you get extra stuff like this. There's an article that's gonna be in the folder by John Bimson. It's called Shoshank and Shishak, a case of mistaken identity, question mark. It's from the Journal of the Ancient Chronology Forum. Now, that journal is no longer produced, but you can find a lot of their volumes online, but I'm gonna save you the effort and just put this in the folder. It's a really good article and I'm just sort of flabbergasted why people so blindly accept a Shoshank correlation. And to be honest with you, the answer is that people need it. People need it to construct a biblical chronology, but it has significant problems. And the mention of Jerusalem and not mention of Jerusalem is just one of them. There are other serious problems when you correlate Shoshank's account with the biblical account and try to line them up. And it's not that, oh, there's a few problems here, we're just gonna take the biblical one and be done with it. A lot of people do that. The problems are actually more serious than that. They are quite contradictory. They're not just contradictory in one or two places. It's like two different things. So that's an issue and I bring it up here because if there is a disconnect here, then this view of the Ark, the one that the movie takes, is just done for. Frankly, I think even if you take the correlation, it's done for because Shoshank does not list the Ark or Jerusalem, that's a huge problem. Now, let's just talk about it a little bit more. Let's just sort of assume that Shoshank goes down there and he's fiddling around the temple. Some scholars think that the treasures mentioned in First Kings 14 would not have been left in the Holy of Holies. So again, this is an argument from silence and this is a familiar pattern. Basically everything we say here is gonna be an argument from silence the whole episode because nobody really knows what happened to the Ark. So some would say, well, look, the Ark wasn't captured. Yes, we believe that Shoshank shows up down there. He goes into the Holy of Holies and he doesn't find the Ark because surely the priests would have removed the Ark and hidden it somewhere when they knew that the city was threatened. Okay, well, sure, that's an argument from silence and that lets you keep the Ark in Jerusalem for later for Nebuchadnezzar, but that's just what it is. It's an argument from silence. Others would object and say, well, if the Ark was really taken, you would expect some note in the Hebrew Bible to that fact. After all, when the Ark gets taken by the Philistines, nobody's afraid to mention that. It's for Samuel four and five. So if the Ark was taken again, why would we conclude that the biblical writers wouldn't want to write about that? They wrote about it the first time and I think that's a good point. You would just expect certain things and you don't get them. Now, another sort of wild card into this that matters is Isaiah 37, 16. Now listen to this verse. Isaiah 37, 16. This is about Hezekiah. Hezekiah, familiar character, living during the time of Isaiah, which is the eighth century BC. That's the 700s BC. Here's the verse. I'll start in verse 15. And Hezekiah prayed to the Lord. Oh Lord of hosts, God of Israel, enthroned above the cherubim. You are the God. You are the God. You alone of all the kingdoms of the earth. You have made heaven and earth. And he goes into his prayer. It's about Sennacherim. But you notice what Hezekiah says. He addresses the God of Israel as enthroned above the cherubim. Now, is this a reference to the ark? It's true that the ark and God, of course, does get described this way in other passages. So if this is the case, if this is the case, then in the 700s, which is considerably after the time of Shishak, I don't know if I mentioned the date there, Shishak would be around 920 BC. So basically 150 to 200 years later, Hezekiah is praying to the Lord enthroned above the cherubim. That would suggest to many that Hezekiah knows that the ark is still there. And of course, he assumes that the Lord is there. So that would also undermine the idea that Shishak took the ark. And so, you just hit walls, almost no matter which side of this you try to argue, because we're dealing with a paucity of data. There's really no way, again, to know exactly what to do now. Some, of course, I've already mentioned, would say, well, yeah, Hezekiah is praying there to the ark, but that's a fake ark. That's a replica. The priests build a new one after Shishak took it out. Well, again, there's no evidence for that. That's an argument from silence, but that's what you're going to hear if you try to do some research on this debate. No, that was a fake. And Hezekiah, just as the priests aren't telling him, Hezekiah doesn't really know. Okay, again, argument from silence. Let me throw another monkey wrench into it. In case someone wants to try and say, okay, the Isaiah 37, 16 reference addressed to the Lord enthroned above the cherubim, isn't referring to the ark, it's referring to the giant cherubim in the temple, not the ark. Okay, you might hear somebody say that, well, there's a problem with that because nearly identical phrasing to this enthroned above the cherubim is found in Exodus 25, 22, which of course is Mosaic. It's a description of the mercy seat, again, the lid of the ark. Another similar phrase is used in 1 Samuel 4-4, and we know the ark is there. That's when the Philistines capture it. 1 Samuel 4-4, so the people sent to Shiloh and brought from there the ark of the covenant of the Lord of hosts who was enthroned on the cherubim. The exact phrase is used in 1 Chronicles 13-6. Okay, let me read that one to you. 1 Chronicles 13-6. And David and all Jerusalem went up to Ba'alah, that is to Kiryathe Arim, which belongs to Judah, to bring up from there the ark of God, which is called by the name of the Lord who sits enthroned above the cherubim. So there you have the same reference in David's day, David's time. So I would say it's really unlikely that this phrase could be isolated to the two giant cherubim just to argue that the ark was no longer in the Holy of Holies. That seems to be really special pleading. But then again, that's the nature of this whole subject. Arguments from silence, special pleading, guesswork, that's what you've got. How about another monkey wrench? Okay, curiously though, with all the talk of the glory and the glory thrown in Ezekiel, and we just went through Ezekiel, the whole book, there is no unambiguous mention of the ark in Ezekiel, but the glory is presumed to still be in the temple, you know, in the Holy of Holies prior to 586 BC, you know, when it's destroyed. Ezekiel 8-4, we hold the glory of the God of Israel was there, okay, in the temple. If we start back in beginning of chapter eight, that's where Ezekiel is taken to the temple. The glory of the God of Israel is there. Like the vision I saw in the valley, okay. You also have Ezekiel 9-3, in similar language here, Ezekiel 9-3. Now the glory of the God of Israel had gone up from the cherub on which it rested to the threshold of the house. Now that implies that the cherubim, again, on the lid of the ark, are still there. Okay, in the temple, in Ezekiel's day, this is prior to when it's destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, when the temple's destroyed, okay. So that language does really suggest that the ark is still there. Is the glory of the God of Israel had gone up from the cherub. Now you say, well, Ezekiel's just having a vision. He can't like peek inside. Well, sure, that's true. So then is Ezekiel wrong? Is he lying? Is God hoodwinking him? Again, this is the kind of stuff that you have to say, just to get the ark out of there before 586 BC. I think that gives you a flavor for what we're dealing with here. Now a related consideration to all of this is the date of the writing of First Kings. Okay, we're still under the Shishag view because the Shishag view, again, is 920 BC trying to argue that the ark is not there when Nebuchadnezzar shows up. That's the whole point of the Shishag view. You have First Kings 8-8. We're trying to deal with phrases about the ark or the cherubim or the seed on the cherubim or the Lord in throne. Like do they indicate the ark or not? All of this is gonna come back as we go through the different views because all of this language matters for whether you think these phrases point to the ark or don't point to the ark or whether they point to a replica of the ark. And it's a muddled mess. First Kings 8-8 says this. This is the ceremony when Solomon is dedicating the temple when they bring everything into the temple and it says this. And the polls, we should just go there because we'll pick up a little bit of the context here. Then verse six. Then the priests brought the ark or the covenant of the Lord to its place in the inter sanctuary of the house in the most holy place underneath the wings of the cherubim or right away that undermines the Samaritan view but they don't really care. For the cherubim spread out their wings under the place of the ark. So that the cherubim overshadowed the ark in its poles and the poles were so long that the ends of the poles were seen from the holy place before the inter sanctuary but they could not be seen from the outside and they are there to this day. Now this is a description of Solomon's time but first and second Kings was written well after Solomon's time. Nearly all scholars have first and second Kings written after the 586 BC exile. For why that is, I'm gonna quote David Howard here in his book, An Introduction to the Old Testament historical books, which is a book I certainly recommend. Howard says this, the phrase to this day or until now again depending on your translation occurs 14 times in first and second Kings. Each of these speaks of some event causing a state of affairs that continued until the time of the writing under this day. Most of these could easily have been written by the final author of first and second Kings sometime after 561 BC but they do not give any further clue as to the time of the writing. Two of the references are somewhat problematic as they would seem to point to an earlier pre-exilic time. The first is First Kings 8A, which we just read which states that the poles for carrying the ark that was in Solomon's temple were still there, quote, to this day. The statement presupposes that the temple was still standing which is certainly not the case after 586 BC. This is either a statement from the book of the acts of Solomon, some book that's now been lost which is mentioned in first Kings 1141 that was carried over and unchanged into the final form of the book, final form of first and second Kings or it's a much later addition to the first and second Kings. The statement is not found in the original Greek versions. Isn't that interesting? It's not in the Septuagint, which lends credence to the later suggestion that it gets added later. Now, a little rabbit trail here. This is not necessarily an issue of inerrancy either as whoever wrote first Kings would merely want to portray the Solomonic temple with the ark in it. Okay, that's just what you would do because that was the historical circumstance. Now some charge that the parallel, here's the point of bringing first Kings 8 up, there's a parallel to it in second Chronicles 5.9. Second Chronicles 5.9, which says this, it's gonna be basically the same thing. The polls were so long that the ends of the polls were seen from the holy place before the inter sanctuary they could not be seen from outside and they are there to this day. The logic here is that first and second Chronicles was written long after the temple had been destroyed. This for sure Chronicles was written after the exile, after the temple was destroyed because the last recorded event in second Chronicles is the decree of Cyrus in 538 BC, which permitted the Jews to return from exile. So first and second Chronicles is definitely late. And here you have second Chronicles saying that the polls of the ark are still in the temple unto this day. And it's clearly written after the temple's destroyed. So some would say, well, it's wrong. It's just historically incorrect. We don't have inerrancy, this whole kind of thing. But again, that's an overstatement. The argument is that the author of second Chronicles is somehow being deceptive or he's just stupid. That's silly because no Jewish reader would be ignorant to the fact that the temple had been destroyed. So somebody reading first and second Chronicles when it comes hot off the presses after the exile, they're not going to read second Chronicles 5, 9 and think you're an idiot. You're a moron. You're lying to me. Because the polls aren't there anymore. There is no time. No, they're not going to think any of that stupid stuff. They're going to know that the writer is just writing what he wrote because it's a parallel. It's lifted from First Kings. And First Kings is a record of the Solomonic era, his time period. So end of rabbit trail. The point here is that First Kings 8, 8, it's referenced to the polls in the Ark that shows up in a book. Now catch me. The reference to in First Kings 8, 8, to the polls of the Ark that shows up in a book written after the temple is destroyed. That can't be used to establish a chronology of the Ark remaining in the temple or surviving the temple. Because the chapter records events at a previous time in Solomon's own day. It doesn't matter when the book was written because it's a retrospective comment. So First Kings 8, 8 is not really any help to establishing Ark's survival in any respect. So what do we have here? Let's just pause. I'm going to cover nine of them. We're two views in. Don't panic because most of them are a lot shorter than this. This idea that the Ark was removed from the temple by Shishak in 920 BC. Well, we've got significant problems with that. If Shishak is Shoshank, then Shoshank doesn't mention that the Ark or the temple in his own Egyptian records. And you'd think that since that's the biggest prize, you'd think it would be mentioned. So we've got a significant problem here. And even biblically, the Ark isn't specifically mentioned. So this view is very weak. And what we did in discussing this view was talk about certain phrases in certain verses that people will use for this view to say that the Ark is gone or to rebut this view, the Ark is still there. And we're going to see those same phrases and those same verses used in views that we'll cover from this point on. Because if you're arguing that the Ark is taken out of the temple before Nebuchadnezzar gets there and everyone who has a theory of Ark survival has to argue that because we know the temple was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar. So to avoid the Ark being destroyed, you have to get it out of the temple before Nebuchadnezzar gets there. So everyone who has a view on this has to have it out there. And then these verses become a battleground, these references to the Lord and thrown above the cherubim, the glory rising above the cherubim. These verses become arguments for either saying, nope, the Ark is still there or no, these phrases don't refer to the Ark proper, they refer to the giant cherubim or we have a replica here. That's what you got. That's what you're dealing with in most of the theories of Ark survival because the issue is getting it out of the temple before Nebuchadnezzar shows up in 586 BC. So we've introduced you to these phrases in the verses when we've discussed here view number two, the Shishak view, which is the movie view. On to number three, some would say the Ark was removed by the Israelite king, Jehoash. This is an obscure one, but it deserves mention because it's actually biblical, okay? Jehoash was a king of Israel. Remember that the monarchy splits after Solomon dies, it splits into northern and southern parts, northern kingdom, southern kingdom. Jehoash was a northern king who invaded Jerusalem during the reign of Amaziah in about 800 802 BC. And this is recorded in 2 Kings 14, 13 and 14. It says this, and Jehoash king of Israel captured Amaziah king of Judah, the son of Jehoash, the son of Ahaziah at Beth Shemesh and came to Jerusalem and broke down the wall of Jerusalem for 400 cubits from the Ephraim gate to the corner gate. And he seized all the gold and silver and all the vessels that were found in the house of the Lord. And in the treasuries of the king's house, also hostages, and he returned to Samaria. He goes back to the northern kingdom. Again, there is no specific mention of the ark. And since there's no specific mention of the ark, people are gonna say, look, that's because the ark is still there. The ark was not touched. We know the ark is there because of language in Ezekiel about the glory on top of the cherubim or about Hezekiah. In the 700s, 100 years later, he's praying to the Lord who was enthroned above the cherubim, the ark is still there. And again, it's hard to not accept this language because it's the language used of the ark when there's no question about the ark being there. And if that's the case, then Jehosh didn't take it. Also, if that's the case, it's there when Nebuchadnezzar shows up. And that's the realm because to save the ark, to have it surviving today, you've got to get it out of there before Nebuchadnezzar destroys the temple. On to view number four. And we're gonna take four and five here together. And five is one, if you're into the Ark of the Covenant, you're gonna recognize this one right away. View number four would be the ark was removed by faithful priests and or faithful Yahweh worshiping kings of Judah during the reign of Manasseh. And number five related to this is that the ark winds up in Ethiopia. Okay? Now again, if you're into the Ark of the Covenant stuff, you're gonna recognize the Ethiopia stuff. We're gonna take these together because they're related because all of these views, if you think faithful priests took it out during the reign of Manasseh, if you think some kings took it out because of apostasy or you think Manasseh, you know, Manasseh himself took it out, that's gonna be view number six. But a lot of this revolves around apostasy. The idea is that you have a godly king or faithful priests and the king candidates usually Ahaz, Ahaz or Hezekiah or Josiah or you know, again, some unnamed priests that they feared apostate worship occurring in the temple. And so to avoid the pollution of the ark, the most holy object, they took it out. Again, that's the idea. Manasseh is accused of moving an image of Asherah into the holy of holies. We're gonna, I say it that way deliberately accused because the verse reference there, you know, may or may not support that. We're gonna get to 2 Kings 21, 7 in a moment, but you get the idea. So either Ahaz or Hezekiah or Josiah or some unnamed priests, they're fearing that the people that might inherit the throne or other people, maybe the priesthood, we've got theological compromise here. We gotta get the ark out of here before people start polluting this, the sacred object. So that's the idea, one of those people. Now, Josiah is typically a favorite candidate for this in the rabbinic writings anyway. Randall Price, you know, whose name I've mentioned before we've interviewed Randall on the podcast. He accepts this idea. He thinks that Josiah took it out, but other than him, the Josiah of you has basically been rejected by every scholar who's legit. You'll find it in sort of amateur speculations on the internet, but nobody really buys this. And it's because of the problems just generally with the idea that the ark was taken out for these reasons at this time. Well, what are the obstacles? Well, again, there's no biblical passage that actually says the ark was removed by anyone at any time. Isaiah 37, again, if that's a reference to the ark, then it's in there at least into Hezekiah's reign that would rule out his father Ahaz. Okay, if you've got the ark language in Ezekiel about the glory moving, the glory that was above the chair, but moving to the threshold, that's to be considered factual, the ark is still there in Ezekiel's day. And so that rules out Hezekiah and anybody else. So this is why you have these problems. Now, other than silence, and other than these sort of obvious problems with this cherubim language, there are some other issues too. If the presumed setting for this removal is the reign of Manasseh, and that's kind of how everybody sort of moves that way because Manasseh was so awful, it should be noted that 2 Kings 217 doesn't actually say that the Asherah that Manasseh put into the temple was actually put into the holy of holies. Let me read you the verse. It says, and the carved image of Asherah that he and Manasseh had made, he set in the house of which the Lord said to David and Solomon his son in this house and in Jerusalem, which I have chosen for all the tribes of Israel, I will put my name forever. So it certainly moved into the temple, but it actually doesn't say that Manasseh moved the Asherah into the holy of holies. And so some would argue, look, if the priesthood felt this way, but Manasseh didn't actually put it in the holy of holies, the priest probably looked at this and saying, well, the ark is safe. It's not defiled because it's by itself in there. So Manasseh, regardless of what he did, he was a fiend, but he's not guilty of this particular thing that he often gets accused of. On the other side, there are scholars who think that the verse can describe or should be interpreted as though Manasseh did pollute the holy of holies, but I got to be honest with you. It just doesn't say that. I would need it to say more to really accept that. But again, maybe it's in material. It's only a possibility. Deuteronomy 1621, interestingly enough, has a command against setting up an Asherah next to Yahweh's altar. Okay, that's not in the holy of holies, next to Yahweh's altar. So if Deuteronomy, and again, this would be contrary to traditional Mosaic authorship, but if Deuteronomy was written at the same time as 1st and 2nd Kings, and most critical scholars believe that, it's called the Deuteronomistic history. The belief that Deuteronomy through 2nd Kings was written all at the same time as a continuous history. If that's the case, then the command in Deuteronomy 1621 might be the reference point for what Manasseh actually did. In other words, when Manasseh moves the Asherah into the house of the Lord, he puts it next to the altar. And you were just supposed to sort of kind of figure that out and know it. It doesn't say holy of holies, but because of the command in Deuteronomy, the idea is that Manasseh would have violated this particular command in what he did. And so that's where he put the Asherah. Again, ultimately we don't know, but that's just the way it is with this whole topic. I'll add one more thought on the Josiah idea. Again, Randall, you know, has in one of his books, I don't know if he still believes in his books a little older, but he took or takes this view. When it comes to the Josiah view, I find it personally really hard to believe that such a pious deed, if Josiah really did this, it's hard to believe that such a pious deed would go completely unmentioned in the biblical account about Josiah, because the biblical account about Josiah basically glorifies the guy. He is the best of the Judahite kings after the monarchy splits. So if he did this, it just seems incredible that this wouldn't get mentioned to his credit, but there is nothing here. Now that takes us to another variation of this, and that is the, for lack of a better term, the Graham Hancock view. Hancock again, since he believes in arch survival once the Ark out of the Holy of Holies before Nebuchadnezzar gets there, and he does think the time of Manasseh is the right time for this, because Manasseh was so awful. Now, some of you, again, if you're really into arch stuff, you may have read Hancock's best-selling book, The Sign and the Seal. Again, it's about the history of the Ark, what happened to the Ark. And this is part of what Hancock says. Okay, this is part of what he argues. Now I have an article length review of Hancock's book, The Sign and the Seal. It was written in the 1990s. This was the first conference paper I ever gave at an academic convention, a paper-length review of Hancock's Sign and Seal. It's titled Moses as High Priest and Sorcerer, question mark. The book, I gotta be honest with you, about sort of where I'm at on Hancock, just generally. I mean, we've corresponded with each other on email, and I've helped him out do some research recently on something about Zechariah Sitchin. And he's very cordial, very nice, very likable. His book, Sign and Seal, and he knows how I feel, is a mixture of wonderful stuff and just ridiculous speculation. So it's, I can't really endorse it. I kinda want to because there's a lot of good stuff in it, but it goes downhill in a number of places. There are serious problems with it. Now, having said that, again, I wanna take you through his view. I don't think that some of the things I'm gonna say might give you the impression that I think Hancock is hiding evidence. I'm not gonna say that. Okay, I can't say that for sure. I don't think it's slight of hand. I think he just misses things and his research lapses or gets sloppy at points. And he has a number of non-sequitur conclusions, but we're not gonna get really into them because most of them are, he wants to link the Ark with the Opet Festival in Egypt and that just doesn't work. It's based on false etymologies all over the place and that's really what my article's about. But anyway, Hancock argues that the Ark was removed during Manasseh's reign. Okay, that's pretty normal. And then it was moved to Elephantine. It's spelled elephant with I-N-E on the end, if you wanna look it up. Elephantine, where there was a Jewish colony. This is a little island in the Nile, okay? Down from, way down from the Delta, okay? The Ark, he believes, was moved to Elephantine because there was a Jewish colony there. And archeologists know this. There was also a temple there at that colony. Now Hancock makes it sound like the temple was constructed according to the dimensions of Solomon's temple. We're gonna find out and I'm gonna give you a source. That's not actually the case, but I'm gonna try to just give you his argument here. So he says, there's a temple there. They move the Ark to this island, the Jewish colony. They put it in the temple and that's where it stays safe. And the implication is that faithful worship of Yahweh was conducted at this colony in this alternative temple. And eventually Hancock argues that the Ark was transported up the Nile. The Nile flows south to north into Ethiopia, where it stayed and where it still is. Now why Ethiopia? Well, the real answer is because of Solomon. Now the theory is, and again Hancock didn't come up with this notion. This is a very long standing legend in Ethiopian material, ancient Ethiopian material or at least medieval. We don't have anything really beyond. We don't have anything older than the sixth century AD for this, which is pretty old, but it's not antiquity. It's not the biblical time period anyway. So Hancock is getting this idea, the core idea from Ethiopian material. But the key figure here is Solomon. Here's how the theory goes if you've never heard it. The theory is that the queen of Sheba was from Ethiopia. And when she visited Solomon, he gave her, quote, this is First Kings 1013, all that she desired, unquote, which it is speculated by the Ethiopians, not just Hancock, included a child. In other words, she left pregnant with Solomon's baby. Now this belief is entrenched in Ethiopian legend in a book called the Kevra Nagast, which translated out of Ethiopia means the glory of kings. And to some extent, Ethiopian history. Again, it's entrenched in Ethiopian history. Now the Kevra Nagast has its story. The queen's child is born, the son of Solomon, and she names him Menelik, M-E-N-E-L-I-K. All of the modern Ethiopian monarchs bore that name. The last one was Haile Selassie, who died in 1975. The throne of the Ethiopian monarchy was offered to Haile Selassie's son, Amha Selassie, in 1975 by those who had deposed his father. Amha refused the throne. The monarchy was then declared defunct by the military coup that had overthrown Haile Selassie. And Amka later died in 1997. Now Ethiopian Jews, there are lots of Ethiopian Jews in Ethiopia. They're called phalashas. It's F-A-L-A-S-H-A-S, phalasha, Judaism. They still practice the Mosaic law and certain Mosaic sacrifices. Their status as practicing Jews isn't questioned, although their genetic origins from actual Old Testament Israelites is ambiguous at best. If you wanna read more about this, go to Wikipedia and look up the entry on beta, Israel, or phalasha. And you'll get to read all about the genetic tests. So there's a strong Jewish presence in Ethiopia, is the whole point. And the Ethiopian monarchs believed they were descended from Menelaik I, who was the son of Solomon, all the way into the late 20th century. Other points of interest. It's curious that the last Jew to receive the gospel in the New Testament before the first Gentile was, guess who? The Ethiopian eunuch, to the Jew first, and then to the Greek, okay? That's just a really, really interesting point of curiosity. Now, since the Ethiopian records we have only date back to the sixth century, maybe, we know, it's not a maybe, there was a Jewish colony in Elephantine. It doesn't mean that the Ark was there, but there was a Jewish presence. And we talked about this in our series now on the book of Acts, I do believe that the Ethiopian eunuch does play this role, that we have to make sure that all the Jews hear the gospel first and then the Gentiles. There's certainly Jews there, but does that mean the Ark of the Covenant is there? Well, you know, Hancock says, yeah, it does, for lots of other reasons in his mind. Another curious thought, Ethiopia was once predominantly Christian. The Abyssinian church there still is quite a bit Christian. The book of Enoch, of course, is preserved in its entirety, only in ancient Ethiopic, which is Ga'ez, and it's still considered canonical by Ethiopian Christians today. So you've got a lot of circumstantial stuff connecting Jews with Ethiopia. And this becomes fodder for the Ark survival theory, not only of Graham Hancock, but also in Ethiopian medieval text, late antiqu, text from late antiquity, onward, they believe this, they believe that their monarchs were descended from Solomon. It's just, that's just a historical reality of their belief on this point. Now, supposedly, Ken Hancock covers this material in detail. Supposedly, the Ark of the Covenant is now in the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Oxum, Ethiopia. Now, you can go there, like to celebrate a New Year's, the New Year's Day Festival, and there are medieval accounts of this kind of thing, an early modern accounts, where the quote Ark is taken out of the Church annually, but it's not really the Ark. And people know this because people have gone there and taken photographs and written about it. It's actually something called a taboat, which is a replica of the two tablets of the Mosaic law, which of course were kept in the Ark. So nobody's bringing the Ark out if it's even there. They're bringing the taboat out. Now Hancock argues that there is a medieval description by a person called Abu Saleh of the Ark being taken out of the Church. We're gonna get to that point in a little bit because it's not really what Hancock is arguing here, but that's the view. And then there are the circumstantial points to this. So it springs from, again, getting the Ark out of the Holy of Holies before Nebuchadnezzar shows up. During the time of Manasseh, there's a Solomonic connection because the priests that take the Ark out and to get it away from evil Manasseh, where do we put this thing? Where do we put? Wait a minute, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. There's a bunch of us, a bunch of Israelites at that colony in Elephantinae down there in the Nile in Egypt. And we can trust them because they're descendants of Solomon. So let's take the Ark there and then it'll be safe. Again, that's the view. Let's talk about some problems with the view. First, Sheba, remember the Queen of Sheba in the story? Sheba is not Ethiopia. Ethiopia, the identification doesn't work. Sheba is the land of Sabah in the Southwest Arabian Peninsula, which is modern Yemen. So that's a problem. The Kebra Nagast in the Ethiopian book about the glory of kings, about this whole legend here, has actually received thorough critical study. It received that in 1956, a dissertation by David Allen Hubbard, who was an evangelical and he's deceased now, but he taught at Fuller Seminary for a while. And it's called The Literary Sources of the Kebra Nagast. It's a University of St. Andrews dissertation supervised by Edward Eulendorf, who was a very famous scholar of Ethiopic and ancient Ethiopian studies. I have put that dissertation in the folder for newsletter subscribers. It's available free online. You can search for it and find it, but it's in the folder. Now Hubbard establishes with high certainty that the Kebra Nagast was composed no earlier than the sixth to seventh century AD. So it has no attachment to any provenance contemporary to the events and purports to describe. Again, that's a problem. Another problem. There's no really good reason to presume that the quote desire of the queen amounts to a pregnancy. You just have to read that into it. There's no linguistic argument to be made there. There's not even a bad etymological argument to be made there. It's pure imagination. Another problem. There's no evidence the Ark was taken to Elephantine or was ever at Elephantine. The Elephantine papyri, and there we actually have papyrus material that comes from this place, say that Yahweh quote, dwelt at Elephantine, that's true, but there's no reference to the Ark in the papyri. And the papyri date to after the temple at Elephantine was destroyed. There's nothing there now. It was destroyed at some point. So even the papyri are not contemporary to the temple at this place. Old Testament references from texts after the Ark would have been destroyed. Use the Yahweh dwelling terminology. So the phrase that Yahweh dwelt somewhere doesn't mean that the Ark is there because that language is used in Old Testament texts that post-date the destruction of the temple. Further, excavations of the Elephantine temple found no altar, which is a curiosity. It would be a disconnect from Solomon's temple. But the altar, to be fair, may have occupied a place where the ground has now given way. Now, contra Hancock, the Jewish temple at Elephantine was quite unlike that of Solomon. And for this, I have put another article in the folder by Rosenberg called the Jewish temple at Elephantine. It's from Near Eastern Archaeology Journal, a 2004 issue, and he gives you some details that are clear disconnects between the Elephantine temple and Solomon's temple. Moving on to another problem, Hancock's medieval reference does not present the full story. He doesn't give the full description that is found in Abu Saleh. And I'm gonna read this just a little bit. It's a book on the Ark of the Covenant by Munro Hay Stewart. And he discusses the Abu Saleh record here, page 76 of the book. So I'll just read a little section of the book here. Abu Saleh resided in Egypt in the late 12th to early 13th century. He therefore probably lived during the latter part of the reign of the saintly Zagwe King Yim Rahana Crestos and the reign of Harbeg into fairly famous kings in Ethiopian history anyway. He goes on and said, Abu Saleh's record is fascinating, but it is certainly not the, quote, eyewitness account of the Ark, unquote, that Graham Hancock affirms, very far from it. Abu Saleh's comments on Ethiopia amount to repetition of things he was told in Egypt. Though his description of the, quote unquote, Ark is evidently based on some genuine information. This probably came from Ethiopians or Egyptians, you know, involved in the whole story, the cause, celeb, Munro Hay Stewart writes of the time. Abu Saleh's report is very valuable although we have concerning Ethiopian sacred paraphernalia at so early a period. Now, here's the entry. Here's the actual entry from Abu Saleh. One little comment that Stewart makes. According to Abu Saleh, the Ark of the Covenant, which he referred to in Arabic as tabutu al-Akhdi, contained the two tables of stone inscribed by the finger of God with the commandments, which he ordained the children of Israel. Here's the entry. The Ark of the Covenant is placed upon the altar, but it's not so wide as the altar. It is as high as the knee of a man and is overlaid with gold. And upon its lid, there are crosses of gold and there are five precious stones upon it, one at each of the four corners and one in the middle. The liturgy is celebrated upon the Ark four times in the year, within the palace of the king. And a canopy is spread over it when it is taken out from its own church to the church, which is in the palace of the king. And that is the entry. Now, what do you notice right away? The description of the Ark doesn't match the Old Testament description. In fact, it's been altered. If it's the Ark, then apparently you have to believe that the phalloshes were very free, felt very free to touch it and to modify it. Again, that's just a significant disconnect in my mind. Lastly, part of Hancock's defense of the Ark at Elephantine is also that the phrase Lord of Hosts occurs a couple of times in the Elephantine papyri. Hancock mistakenly says it's frequent, it's not, it's two times. The phrase is associated with Yahweh's presence in the temple era when there was an Ark. But that phrase is used dozens of times in the Old Testament in books written after the temple's destruction. All you gotta do is find a concordance and look up the phrase Lord of Hosts in Haggai, Malachi, and Zechariah. There are dozens of them. There's no Ark, there's no temple. The phrase does not point to the Ark. So in short, Hancock's view depends upon silence, the Ark's removal, a questionable medieval reference, inadequate knowledge of the biblical text, and circumstantial details, and of course, speculation. Again, the theory is not original to him. If you want more detail on this, subscribe to the newsletter, get my paper. A lot of it's about how he tries to connect the Ark to the Egyptian Opet Festival. It's probably the worst part of the book. It's based entirely on speculation and false etymologies. But again, there's lots of stuff in the book that's really good too. View number six, okay? Or the Ark was removed by Manasseh himself when he installed the Asherah. The idea here is that Manasseh didn't want competition. Gonna move Asherah in there, gonna move Yahweh out. Now again, the problems here are obvious. There's no specific reference to Manasseh doing this. The verse that we read doesn't have him putting, you know, the Asherah actually in the Holy of Holies. There's a disconnect there. It's also doubtful that Manasseh would have thought this way, apostate Israelites would have thought that Yahweh was Asherah's husband. Since Yahweh and El were merged in the Israelite mind, and El, Canaanite El and Asherah were a divine couple. If you were an apostate, you would think, well, this is Yahweh and Asherah. They're married, they're a couple. There'd be no reason to move Yahweh out, the Ark out when you moved Asherah in. If you wanna read a little bit about that, I do not have this in the folder, but I recommend Rick Hess' book, Israelite Religions Plural, pages 283-290. It's certain that there were apostate Israelites who believed that Yahweh and Asherah were a divine couple. We actually have references to quote Yahweh and his Asherah from Kuntelet-Ajrud and Kirbet El-Kom and a few other places, and Hess discusses those inscriptions in detail in his book. View number seven. This one is pretty common and it takes us into some silly territory, but also some territory that might be worth thinking about, but again, the problem, the problem in my view is the Isaiah 37 reference and of course the Ezekiel language about the Ark above the cherub. But anyway, number seven, the Ark was hidden by the prophet Jeremiah. This view is pretty ancient. It goes back to the Second Temple period and it's preserved in a couple of Second Temple sources. One, it gets credited to the Jewish historian Eupolimus whose words are recorded in the Greek history of Alexander Polyhistor, which is the mid-1st century BC. His work was entitled On the Jews and Polyhistor's work is preserved in Eusebias' Preparatia Evangelica, chapter nine. It's 939.5, I'm just gonna read you this section here. Eusebias, again, preserving Alexander's material says, when Nebuchadnezzar, king of the Babylonians, had heard of the predictions of Jeremiah, I guess the prophecies or whatever, he summoned Ostobarus, the king of the Medes, to join him on an expedition. And having taken with him Babylonians and Medes and collected 180,000 infantry and 120,000 cavalry, nice expedition there. And 10,000 chariots, he first subdued Samaria and Galilee and Scythopolis and the Jews who lived in the region of Gilead. And afterwards took Jerusalem and made Johnachim, the king of the Jews, a prisoner. And the gold that was in the temple and the silver and the brass they chose out and sent to Babylon, except the ark and the tables, the tablets that were in it. But this, Jeremiah retained, okay? So there's the idea that Jeremiah got the ark and the tablets out. Second Maccabees, another second temple source. Second Maccabees two, I'm gonna read verses one through eight. This is the King James Version translation of the Apocrypha. And for those of you, I'm guessing we don't have anybody who's King James only in the audience, but if you do, you might wanna close your ears because the 1611 King James did have the Apocrypha in it. Starting in verse one here in second Maccabees two, it is also found in the records that Jeremy, Jeremiah, the prophet commanded them that were carried away to take of the fire as it hath been signified. And how that the prophet, having given them the law, charged them not to forget the commandments of the Lord and that they should not err in their minds when they see images of silver and gold with their ornaments. And with other such speeches, exhorted he them that the law should not depart from their hearts. So he's sending the captives away here. Verse four, it was also contained in the same writing that the prophet being warned of God, commanded the tabernacle and the ark go with him as he went forth into the mountain where Moses climbed up and saw the heritage of God. Of course it would be Mount Nebo. Verse five, and when Jeremy, Jeremiah came thither, he found a hollow cave wherein he laid the tabernacle and the ark and the altar of incense and so stopped the door. And some of those that followed him came to mark the way but they could not find it. Which when Jeremy perceived, he blamed them saying as for what place it shall be unknown until the time that God gather his people again together and receive them unto mercy. Then shall the Lord show them these things and the glory of the Lord shall appear and the cloud also as it was showed under Moses and as when Solomon desired that the place might be honorably sanctified. And the mountain of course referred to here as Nebo. I mean that's the end of the quote. So Jeremiah takes the ark up to Mount Nebo, it's just east of the Jordan and that's the second temple idea. Now there are other references to this. There's one in the pseudopigraphy to the Lives of the Prophets book chapter two verses 11 through 13. That dates to the first century AD. I'll read you that because it's a little bit different. This prophet, again this is about Jeremiah, book two of the Lives of the Prophets is about Jeremiah. This prophet, before the capture of the temple sees the Ark of the Law and the things in it and made them to be swallowed up in a rock. Remember as he hid it and it came. And to those standing by he said, the Lord has gone away from Zion into heaven and will come again in power. And this will be for you a sign of his coming when all the Gentiles worship a piece of wood." On quote. Now again all of these sources are three to 400 years, I mean really even 500 years. Let's just use around number 500 years removed from the events in 586 BC. They're over 500 years removed. So again take that with a grain of salt. They're not contemporary, not even close. So that's a problem. There's another problem that other pseudopigraphical texts, tech Jewish texts from the same period actually contradict the idea. Second Baruch six, which is first century has Jeremiah scribe, that's Baruch. Jeremiah scribe, so the book is named after him. Jeremiah scribe, Baruch sees an angel take the Ark and sacred vessels of the temple and swallow them. Gulp, okay. You know, what are we to make of that? Jeremiah 316 to me is a factor here. You could argue, again I've mentioned Isaiah 37, 16. I've mentioned the language in Ezekiel. You could say, well look, those verses do indicate that the Ark survived and was in the holy of holies after the time of Manasseh, it wasn't removed. But these references to Jeremiah here have Jeremiah taking it out just before Nebuchadnezzar got there. So both his Ezekiel can be correct. You know, he just sees a vision of the glory departing and the glory actually departing is when Jeremiah takes the stuff out and goes and hides. So that's how you would reconcile these things. Again, these texts are 500 years after the fact. We've got a few contradictory texts from the same period. But Jeremiah 316, again, to me has to be part of this discussion. This is an actual contemporary reference by the same guy, Jeremiah, okay. And what does Jeremiah 316 say? Let me read it. And when you have multiplied and been fruitful in the land in those days, declares the Lord, they shall no more say the Ark of the covenant to the Lord. It shall not come to mind or be remembered or missed. It shall not be made again. Verse 17 is interesting too. At that time, Jerusalem shall be called the throne of the Lord and all nations shall gather to it, to the presence of the Lord in Jerusalem. And they shall no more stubbornly follow their own evil heart. I want you to think about those verses because what people argue on the basis of this Jeremiah idea is that, you know, the Hasidic Jews over there, they know where it's at. They wanna bring it out and rebuild the temple. Doesn't Jeremiah 316 and 17 just contradict that? It shall not come to mind. It won't be remembered or missed. It will not be made again. In fact, we don't need it. Jerusalem is the throne of the Lord when all the nations gather to it. You know, again, that's an eschatological claim. Of course, Jerusalem, if we look at the end of the book of Revelation, it is the throne of the Lord. It is the temple. I mean, you know, we don't have need of these things when the Lord returns. So why we have Christians running around saying we need to go find the ark so we can rebuild the temple. Jeremiah 316 sort of is a bit of a slapdown there, which is probably why it might be new to some hearing this. I think it's an important verse. It does imply when it says it shall not be missed. It implies, and this is Jeremiah writing. Now, it doesn't say explicitly, but it implies the ark is not there. Now, if Jeremiah is writing this after he himself escapes, because he does at the end of his book, he escapes Jerusalem before Nebuchadnezzar gets there. He gets taken to Egypt. If he's writing this after the fact, then apparently he believes that it's gone, that Nebuchadnezzar got it. Nebuchadnezzar either took it or destroyed it, and he's saying it shall not come to mind or be remembered or missed. Now, if he's writing during, you know, like right before Nebuchadnezzar gets there, you can actually take this and say either that the ark wasn't there already, okay, maybe it was taken out, you know, some of the, one of these other views, or you could say that Jeremiah knew it was gone, it was done for. Jeremiah knew Nebuchadnezzar was gonna show up, and he knew what that meant. He knew that the temple was gonna be destroyed. He knew that the ark was gonna be destroyed. So this is a verse that has to be dealt with, but at the very least, this notion that the ark is somehow some end time is catalyst, you know, to connect with the second coming, and then all the nations are regathered. The verse contradicts that idea, okay, it will not come to mind. It will not be remembered. It will not be missed. It will not be made again. We don't need it because Jerusalem will be called the throne of the Lord. By the way, when does the glory return? You know, these references in second temple texts connecting the resurfacing of the ark with the return of the glory. Well, I think the, you know, Acts two looks suspiciously like that because it's the coming of the spirit. And if you say it's the second coming, then you're in Jeremiah 316 land. We don't need it. So I think you've got some significant problems here. Again, if you're taking this view, again, and I don't want to rehearse the other, you know, the other passages, let me just throw in a couple of new ones, other than Isaiah 3716, other than the cherub language and Ezekiel. There's some other things going on here too. Lamentations to one. Boy, we actually have a reason to go to lamentations. This is after the destruction of the city, okay? This is why it's called lamentations. Jerusalem has been destroyed. The temple has been destroyed. And here's what Jeremiah or lamentations to one says. And it's presumed catch this. This is important. It's presumed that Jeremiah is the author. And there's a really good case to be made for that. And if that's the case, this is going to be consistent with what I've just said about Jeremiah 316. It's going to be totally inconsistent with the second temple text about Jeremiah hiding the ark. Now listen to this. How the Lord in his anger has set the daughter of Zion under a cloud. He has cast down from heaven to earth the splendor of Israel. He has not remembered his footstool in the day of his anger. Now the ark is mentioned and described as the Lord's footstool in several passages. First Chronicles 28, 2, Psalm 99, 5, Psalm 132, 7. You could read this verse as saying, the Lord didn't care about the ark. He has not remembered his footstool in the day of his anger. This needs to be factored in to any discussion as well. Now I personally, again, let's just pull back a little bit and talk about the whole idea a little bit more. I personally think it's really unlikely that Jeremiah would touch the ark. He isn't commanded by God in any of those second temple period texts to hide the objects by virtue of touching them. So like, does he have priests or what are they that just isn't mentioned? It would be an assumption that he felt he would live if he touched the ark, you know, Contra Osa, we all know that story. He wasn't one of the authorized Levites who were to transport the ark. Again, even though you have these references, there's still points, there's still details in what they describe or what people think they describe that have to be thought about. And one of them is actually touching the ark and moving it. What help did he have that sort of thing? So there are some content omissions there. Now, people who have searched for the ark on Mount Nebo, you know, there's been a number of these, Tom Krotzer who claimed to have taken a picture of the ark. He said he found the ark on Nebo and took a picture of it. You know, again, you'll read about this on the internet. The picture was seen by archeologist Siegfried Horn who was a very famous, very respected archeologist connected with the Seventh-day Adventists who are really big into biblical archeology. And Horn saw the picture and said it was a fake. He was a modern model. It had an ale in it that he saw in the picture. So this idea has sort of become a cartoon searching for the ark on Nebo and other places. Ron Wyatt claimed to have found the ark in Jeremiah's Grotto. And there's a place, you know, in the Holy Land here in Jerusalem. That's called Jeremiah's Grotto because of the folklore that this was the place where Jeremiah was held in prison. And there's no way to know that. It's a hole that gets the name, okay? It's located underneath what is Gordon's Calvary. And so this is where the, I think, totally silly view that Christ's blood, you know, seeped through the ground and landed on the ark, you know, it comes from. This is, you know, Ron Wyatt stuff. And Ron Wyatt, to say the least, does not have a good reputation for being forthright. Very prone to embellish things and just make stuff up. A Randall Price, interestingly enough, has a four page critique of Wyatt's speculations in his book, In Search of Temple Treasures. If I'm gonna read that, go ahead. It's pages 152 to 156, but I'm not gonna spend any more time on it here. You have other people searching for the ark, you know, trying to, maybe not focusing on Nebo, but they're taking the Jeremiah story and they're looking for it somewhere else in the Holy Land. So we have, you know, some looking for Nebo. We have this Jeremiah's Grotto thing with Ron Wyatt. There was a guy for many years, Vendell Jones. He claimed to be the namesake for Indiana Jones, but I think George Lucas would contradict that. But Vendell Jones, kind of an interesting guy. He was a Baptist minister that became sort of a Christian Jew or Jewish Christian or, you know, which is the adjective, which is the noun there. It's a little confusing because Jones had some really odd theology to him, to say the least, but he spent really his lifetime over 30 years snooping around at Qumran, trying to avoid the authorities, looking for the ark. He was convinced that the Ark of the Covenant was in one of the Qumran Caves. And he used it as his real basis for that, not only the idea that Jeremiah hid it, but the copper scroll, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The copper scroll is essentially a treasure map or describing temple treasures. And Jones claimed, you know, for a number of years to have found some objects mentioned in the temple, in the copper scroll based upon his translation. Basically his translations for a lot of what's in the copper scroll don't jive with anybody else in scholarship. So again, it's one of those cases where a very idiosyncratic treatment of materials, you know, to sort of prop up the view. Frankly, if the copper scroll mentions temple treasures, news alert, it would be treasures from the second temple, not the first temple. There's no reason to believe that there are first temple things in here. The copper scroll does not, you know, mention the Ark. Now six weeks ago, okay, so this is pretty up to date. Six weeks ago, there was news in some, you know, online papers. I don't know if the Jerusalem Post covered this now, but some of the semi-tabloid kind of, you know, news agencies in Israel covered this. A new theory of the copper scroll and of course where the Ark of the Covenant is. I'm not gonna, I could probably give Trey the, I think I will, I'll give Trey the link to this, to the article, it shows a picture of the copper scroll that talks a little bit about this particular guy. I'm looking for his name here. Jim Barfield is his name. Now he's sort of a disciple of Vendell Jones, who again was a Baptist preacher, turned amateur archeologist again, and sort of pseudo epigrapher for the copper scroll. You're looking for the Ark, you know, but Vendell Jones is now deceased. And so Barfield has sort of taken up his work. Barfield is not a trained archeologist. He doesn't read Hebrew either. He is, let me try to get the description here. He piloted helicopters in the US Army. He has strong map reading skills. Basically, he's looking from the air and he thinks he's found some anomaly, an anomalistic things at the Qumran settlement. So the short version is he asked an archeologist, he met with the Israeli antiquities authority, which is good to do. I mean, Jones basically tried to avoid them a lot. And Jones was restricted from the country a few times because of the stuff he was doing over there. But Barfield contacts IAA Director Shuka Dorfman, talks to another archeologist, you know, about, hey, look what I found, let's go check this out. And again, the short version is they drill in a place where Barfield says to drill and they find something that isn't rock. You know, they find something that was manmade where they didn't expect to find it. Now, Barfield thinks it's a seal to a cave in which the Ark is, of course, and other treasures. There's been no excavation. The drilling was halted. It is supposedly from this article under review and has a few comments about Barfield, like, hey, I understand, I just want artifacts returned to the rightful authorities. If there is something here that Palestinians are gonna claim that they were here before and it's gonna be this big political brew, ha ha, so I get it. So he's not antagonistic toward the IAA, which again is another good idea. To not tick off the people you're gonna need permission for, but that's the state of it. So is there something at Qumran associated with the copper scroll and is that something in the Ark of the Covenant? Who knows? Again, the copper scroll does not specifically mention the Ark of the Covenant. Let's be clear there. And people have been, you know, speculating about this for many years. So it could be nothing, could be something, who knows? It's just something to stay tuned to. But it's linked here, again, and I bring it up here because a lot of these people running around different places in Jerusalem looking for the Ark, build off the idea that Jeremiah hid it. Even though the Second Temple text have it associated with Mount Nebo, again, the idea has just sort of taken hold because some of the texts don't mention the mountain. They just say, God says to Jeremiah, hey, go take that stuff and keep it safe. And so they figure, well, Jeremiah would have thought to himself and thought, hey, what better place than the pit that I spent all that time in? Let's put it down there. Or let's go find a cave. This is what you're dealing with. Again, there are plenty of arguments from silence, virtually no data, and lots of speculation to connect data points. So again, this is the nature of the beast. But again, I think Jeremiah 3.16 really has to be a factor here. Jeremiah 3.16 and 17, it's the only contemporary text we have that connects Jeremiah and the Ark and then Lamentations 2.1. The Lord has not remembered his footstool in the day of his anger. These are biblical texts and they're the only contemporaneous data we have to connect Jeremiah to the Ark. So my question would be, why don't we take these two texts seriously, which strongly suggest that the Ark is no more? Why don't we take them seriously instead of this Jeremiah talk from 500 years later that isn't quite consistent anyway, but yeah, it exists. Why do we prefer one over the other? Well, I'll tell you why we prefer one over the other. There's several reasons. It's sexier and it factors into what some people wanna think about end times, never minding the fact that Jeremiah 3.16 and Lamentations 2.1 don't really go well with it with some of these end time scenarios. But anyway, that's just me. Okay, I would prefer the biblical material. Number eight and number nine, these are the last two views and they sort of go together. Eight is that the Ark was taken away or destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar. Okay, well, let's make that eight and nine. The Ark was taken away or destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar. So eight taken away, nine destroyed. Now, in 2nd Esdras, again, this is another pseudopigraphic text. Okay, this is not contemporary, but it's still old like the Jeremiah text. We read 2nd Esdras 1022, it says this, the Ark of our Covenant has been plundered. As simple as that. This is also a view that you'll see in the Talmud. Again, the Bible is, to be honest, silent. We don't have a biblical statement that clearly explicitly says the Ark was taken or destroyed. We do have, again, Jeremiah 3.16 and Lamentations 2.1 that suggest it, but they're not explicit references. Again, so this is where we are. The reason we even have the discussion is because of this ambiguity. When Nebuchadnezzar comes into Jerusalem, does what he does, 2nd Kings 2413, he destroys everything. The Ark is not actually listed. Let me just read you the verse. Nebuchadnezzar 2nd Kings 2413 carried off all the treasures of the house of the Lord and the treasures of the king's house. By the way, it does say all there, but sometimes all doesn't mean all, I'll grant that. He carried off all the treasures of the house of the Lord, the treasures of the king's house and cut in pieces all the vessels of gold in the temple of the Lord, which Solomon, king of Israel had made as the Lord had foretold. Kind of an interesting comment there about the Lord foretelling. Could that be a Jeremiah 3.16 reference? Again, I don't know. I don't know. We don't have any way to be clear there, but it could be, could be. But the Ark is not specifically mentioned there. And when the exiles are allowed to return and they bring stuff back in Ezra chapter one, verses seven through 11, the Ark is not listed there either. Now, it's interesting these two verses, if you take them together, 2 Kings 24, 13 sounds very exhaustive. Nebuchadnezzar cut up all the stuff that he brought back. Well, apparently he didn't because some of it's brought back by the Jews in Ezra one. So, you know, maybe Nebuchadnezzar took the Ark and it wasn't one thing he destroyed or had melted down. Maybe he kept that okay. And then went up and on, wait a minute. It's not mentioned as being taken back by Ezra. You'd think if he didn't destroy it and then the Jews were allowed to return. If that was sitting in Babylon, the Persian king after the conquest of Babylon would have said, make sure you take that back because I'm gonna help you build the temple. And he does. So if the Ark was sitting in Babylon, it stands to reason that the king, the Persian king would have let him take it back, but it's not listed. Again, this is a circumstantial argument that the Ark was destroyed either on site in Jerusalem or later in Babylon. But again, we don't have explicit reference to that. There's also no Ark in the second temple account of the return. Josephus writes about it. Tacitus in his histories writes about it. There's a list of objects brought back in 1st Maccabees 4. The Ark is not in any of them. That's what you've got. So to wrap up the episode, my own take here is I think you can tell. I think, you know, I will admit there's no conclusive argument to be made. One way or the other, as far as explicit data. That's true. That also means there's no good reason to suspect that the Ark survived. All of the theories about the Ark not being there or not being there before Nubican Ezra gets there are not very good arguments. They have serious weaknesses. And on the other hand, we have the omission of the Ark from a list of objects both in the Bible and in other ancient texts, second temple texts, that the Ark is not among the stuff that was brought back. We have Jeremiah 3.16 and Lamentations 2.1 that suggests that God just didn't care. God allowed it to be destroyed. And but he told Jeremiah, look, you know, when this all wraps up and the glory returns and the nations are gathered back to Israel, nobody's going to care. Nobody's going to miss it. There'll be no talk of it, you know, making another one. We're not going to worry about it because we don't need it. We'll have the Lord. And you know, I think that's the way the New Testament plays out. We don't need these objects. So that's where I'm at. I think the most likely scenario is that the Ark was destroyed either on site or in Babylon, but I'm not going to reject out of hand every other possibility. The Qumran news from six weeks ago, hey, that's interesting. That's the kind of thing that I would hope that people would pursue one way or the other. I have my doubts that it'll ever get pursued because it's so politically charged. It's kind of like, we have the correct location of the temple or not. Again, there are reasons to make you wonder there, even though, you know, 99% of biblical scholars and archeologists are going to say that's a done deal. Well, there are disconnects between what we think is the temple and some of what Josephus says for sure, but nobody seems to care. So, you know, there you go. So I'm not suspecting that anybody's going to be digging at Qumran looking for the Ark, anybody official. Maybe somebody will be foolish and then get arrested, but I don't think anybody official is going to be doing this for the same reason I don't think anybody official is going to be talking about, well, do we really have the temple precincts correct here or not? It's just too controversial. It's too politically charged. So I'm not optimistic, although it is something I'll pay attention to. And my theory number 10 is the Knights Templar have it. And if any current Templars want to reach out to me, please feel free. I think I'd make a good night. I think I'd make a good night, so please. You just want me to call you Sir Trey. That's what you want. Hey, no, honestly, what's your thoughts on the Templars? Just I'm just curious, just overall. I think I just think a lot of what's said about them today is just kind of a lot of hooey. You know, I don't see much evidence for any kind of medieval, you know, excavation over here, North America bringing stuff over here. I think it's part of the Lost Tribe stuff, which I think is pretty nonsensical. So I think the Templars actually get a bad name because of stuff like that. People who are interested in this, you should go to Jason Colovito's site and just search for the word Templar. You're gonna, he'll keep you busy for a few weeks talking about Templar mythology. Yeah, what's your thoughts on the Templars? I mean, you a fan, not a fan? I'm just ambivalent. You know, I'm just, I'm not into the stuff. I mean, yes, I've seen the movie. I did see last crusade and really liked it. But so I guess it makes for a good story, but again, I don't have any reason to put a whole lot of eggs in that basket. I just got one more real quick theory. I wanted to mention that the late David Flynn has a book, Temple at the Center of Time. And in that, he talks about how Isaac Newton believed that scriptures contained a hidden code revealing the Ark's location and that the measurements of the first temple was the key to solving that equation. And it's been a long time since I've read that book, but you had a relation with David Flynn and I remember reading that book probably 10 years ago or not quite and it connecting Isaac Newton with the Ark of the Covenant. And that's an entertaining read too. So if anybody's interested in theories, fun stuff, I would highly recommend that. Yeah, I haven't read the whole book. I've read part of it. But see, stuff like that gets ruined for me pretty quickly. I mean, I've commented on Flynn's work before I knew Dave and really liked him. And of course, it's tragic that he's not around. What I say about Flynn, some people feel it is contradictory, but it's not. I don't look to any of Flynn's work to do biblical exegesis at all, but what Flynn does and did is very important. And that sounds contradictory, but there's a reason why I assign importance to it aside from biblical stuff. I mean, I don't wanna, it would take a whole episode to talk about Flynn, which is really outside the orbit of this. But when I got the book, the first thing I'm looking for is use of biblical texts and he starts getting into codes and mathematics. And again, the problem is he's doing ELS sequencing in the book, that kind of Bible code stuff. And that is just dead on arrival because you have to pick one text, an arbitrary Maseridic text. You're not factoring in any textual variations. You're not factoring in the oldest form of the text, which is the Qumran material, which uses Pliné spelling, which is lethal. It's lethal to any ELS sequencing and anything based on it. For people who are interested in this, go to Biblecodemyth.com and click on the link there. When I was on Coast to Coast one time, and this was an episode that did not translate well to radio, believe me. I debated Grant Jeffrey on the Bible code and basically 95% of the stuff I said Jeffrey just didn't understand. And I couldn't visually show it, but what I did was he had a book out on how Isaiah 52-13 through Isaiah 53. If you put that into a computer program and do ELS sequencing, they're like all these hits that point to Jesus. Well, I took his text, the text he used, and I put them into a PDF file and then I, underneath them, I put the Qumran scrolls of the exact same passage. And then I highlighted all of the letter differences between them because the Qumran scribes use Pliné spelling. And what Pliné spelling is they use consonants for vowels. So they're adding consonants. They're added consonants in the oldest form of the text we have that are not in the text that Grant Jeffrey and every other Bible codeer uses. It just kills the Bible code. If you wanna say that God encrypted information in the biblical text, then use the oldest form of the text that we have. Use the Qumran material because if you're just arbitrarily picking the Masoretic text with the little dots and dashes taken out, the medieval vowel pointing system that the Masoretes developed, it alters the text. There are 112, I think it's 112. I haven't looked at the file recently. It's 112 or 113, something like that. Letter differences in 15 verses. Just one of them, just one letter difference would shift the whole code if you're doing equidistant letter sequencing, you know, the classic Bible code stuff, which is what Flynn was doing in the part of the book that I read. I've got 112 of them in 12 verses. It just blows it to smithereens. So when I read stuff like that, it just kills my interest and my enthusiasm I shouldn't say that. It kills any sense that the conclusions reached here could be right. I don't think they're correct at all, but I will say, and again, I have all together different reasons for saying this. I view and I viewed what Flynn did as really, really important, but for all together different reasons. So I'm a fan. I just don't use his work to do biblical stuff. All right, well, good deal. Next week, another good topical episode, which is The Sin of Ham and the Curse of Canaan. Oh boy, some, you know, it's not quite Ezekiel 16, but it's in the same territory. Let's just put it that way. Well, no rating are, so. No, I don't think we need that for this one. We don't need to put up any disclaimers for this one. It's not quite that bad. Good deal, Mike. Okay, well, just like that, Mike, we're done and we appreciate it. And I just want to thank everybody for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. God bless. Thanks for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit www.nakedbibleblog.com. To learn more about Dr. Heizer's other websites and blogs, go to www.ermsh.com.