THE BUILDER FEBRUARY 1926

The Ark of the Covenant in the Light of Modern Research
By Bro. Arthur C. Parker, New York

READERS of The Builder will remember the most interesting and
instructive account of Indian Secret Societies and initiation
ceremonies by Bro. Parker which was reproduced in the May and June
numbers for 1924. The author is the State Archeologist of New York,
which should be sufficient evidence of his qualifications to speak
on the subject discussed in the present article.

SHALL we penetrate the innermost veil of the Temple and view
through the clear light the sun, unobscured by the smoke of
priestly incense, the Holy of Holies?

The Ark of the Covenant is of the most interesting and important
institutions mentioned in the Hebrew scripts as these were finally
codified. Its story gives a wonderful glimpse of Hebrew religion
and history. The dramatic episodes clustering about the story of
the Ark have made it a conspicuous symbol in Freemasonry, and we
find it used in certain degrees of the Scottish Rite, no less than
in the Royal Arch. Of such major importance is the Ark that we find
it displayed upon the seals and arms of almost all Grand Lodges.
Whence came this Ark, and what is its true history? Dare we ask for
more light than that commonly given in traditional explanations? If
so, let us consider the Ark in the light that actual investigation,
archeological exploration, and philological science (1) have shed,
and weigh our present belief in accord with the injunction to
"prove all things".

Critical Hebrew scholars are agreed that the Hebrew word aron,
translated in our English Bible "Ark" means nothing more or less
than box, coffer or chest. Box is the accepted translation. This
same word (aron) is used to describe the coffin in which the mummy
of Joseph was carried out of Egypt and into Canaan (Gen. 1, 26; Ex.
xiii, 19) and it is also used to mean collection-box, being applied
in Kings xii, 10, and 2 Chron. xxiv, 10, to mean the box provided
as the receptacle for the money offerings of the people for the
repair the Temple.

It is this same word which is employed in Ex. xxvii, 1, ff., and we
are told that the aron here described was made from costly material
by Bezaleel after the specifications laid down by Moses (Ex. xxv,
10, ff.) after he descended from the mountain with the second
tables of the law (Ex. xxxiv, 29), but Deuteronomy plainly tells us
that Moses constructed the Ark himself, of plain shittim wood
(acacia) just before he went up to receive the tables of the
testimony in the first instance.

According to the scriptural account the Ark rested for some time at
Gilgal after the passage of the Jordan, and later was removed to
Shiloh. It was from Shiloh that the Israelites took the Ark of the
Covenant in order that it might rest in their military camp before
the battle with the Philistines. To the Israelites Yahweh militant
was a war god to be invoked accordingly; but their shouting was in
vain and the Philistines captured the Ark, hoping thereby to secure
the power within it. But the scriptures relate that the enemy was
afflicted supernaturally and that they sent back the Ark in
consequence, after which it was placed in safe keeping at
Kirjath-jearim. In the reign of Saul we hear of the Ark of Nob.
From Kirjath-jearim David took the Ark to the house of Obed-edom
and from thence to his palace at Zion. Finally we hear of the Ark
in the Temple of Solomon where a special sanctuary had been
prepared to receive it. Here the sacred chest remained as a central
feature of the scribal accounts of the Hebrew mysteries until the
religion of Yahweh had so far fallen into decay that the people
gave themselves over to idolatry and placed their idols in the very
sanctuary itself. The priests of the Lord, unable to endure this
profanation, removed the Ark from the Temple, carting it from place
to place to preserve it from the anger of the princes. Josiah then
ordered the priests to return it to the sanctuary and leave it
there. ( 2 Chron. xxxv, 3.)

THE ARK SAID TO HAVE BEEN CONCEALED

According to tradition, the prophet Jeremiah, before the Babylonian
captivity, foretold the national calamity, and removed the Ark to
a certain cave in that mountain which Moses ascended before his
death. The priests who went with him placed certain marks on the
spot, hoping thereby to remember the hiding place; but when the
priests went back to again discover the Ark they could not find it,
and the prophet reproved them for their curiosity and proclaimed
that the spot should remain unknown until such a time as all the
scattered people should be gathered together again and reconciled.

The Talmudic version differs slightly in that it relates that
Solomon having had revealed to him that the Assyrians would one day
plunder the Temple and carry away its treasure, took the Ark to an
underground chamber and concealed it there together with other
sacred articles, including Aaron's rod, the pot of manna, the
priestly pectoral and the holy oil. Other Hebraists affirm that
Nebuchadnezzer took the Ark to Babylon. In the book of Esdras we
read a lament that the Ark was stolen by the Chaldeans. But all
scriptures and traditions agree that the Ark never reappeared in
the second Temple.

Other Hebrew traditions relate that no one save Moses shall
discover the Ark, but at the second resurrection (and here we quote
st. Epiphanius) "the Ark shall be raised and come forth out of the
rock, it shall be placed on Mount sinai, and all the saints shall
be assembled about it, waiting for the Lord's return, and
endeavoring to defend themselves from the enemy who would take it.
Jeremiah at the same time sealed the stone [where the Ark was
hidden] writing with his own finger the name of God upon the place,
in like manner as if it had been cut with iron. From this moment a
dark cloud spread over the name of God and has kept it concealed to
this very day, so that no one has been able to discover the place
or read the Divine name. This cloud appears every night with great
brightness over the cave, to show, as it were, that the glory of
God does not forsake His Law. And the rock, before mentioned, lies
between two mountains where Moses and Aaron died."

The Mohammedans have distinct traditions of the Ark and relate that
within it are the shoes that Moses pulled off when he communed with
God (Ex. iii, 5). They inform us that the Ark was given to Adam by
God and that it passed through the hands of the patriarch down to
Moses to whom it was given as the dwelling box of the God. They
tell us that the Israelites bore it before them in battle because
the power within it blew as a strong wind and fiercely, so that the
enemy was completely overcome.

SACRED CHESTS USED IN OTHER RELIGIONS

The Children of Israel during their enforced sojourn in Egypt
became familiar with the sacred arks and chests of the Egyptians
and long before Moses is reputed to have enclosed the tables of the
law in the Ark of the Covenant, he had seen arks and holy coffers
in the temples of Egypt. They came out of the land of their
captivity quite familiar with the idea of arks with cherubim and
seraphim and mystical contents. One has only to view the
inscriptions and wall paintings of the Nile land to see what the
Israelites had in mind when their Ark was made. Those of Egyptian
origin were phallic in nature and contained among other things the
symbols of generation and fertility. To them the great mystery of
life and its origin, and the mysterious elements in nature that
contributed to produce or generate life were sacred things to be
venerated by the highest religious rites. Thus, a flowering rod or
a male animal symbolized the father principle in nature, while an
egg, a pot of "manna" or a vase typified the mother principle. Let
us pause to view the well-known "Ark of Phile" where we see amid
emblems of male and female life an ark or chest borne upon a lunar
boat carried by priests with solemn ceremony. This ark shows the
cherubim and seraph in the same attitude as depicted or carved in
representations of the Jewish ark. Over the Ark of Ph is the winged
sun with uraei (representations of the sacred serpent) which the
Jews modified to the shini cloud in which Yahweh manifested
himself, and was metaphorically called in more than one eastern
tong the "Sun of Righteousness." Despite all the attempts of the
prophets the Jews never totally escaped from the influence of their
Egyptian teachings, and orientalists have no difficulty in finding
in the scriptures references to the constant leaning of Hebrew
thought toward Egyptian doctrines, symbols and mysteries. Thus did
the Israelites come out of Egypt with a distinct picture of a holy
ark or box in mind, and in their belief their welfare was bound up
with its safety. (2)

But long before the Egyptian captivity the tribes Israel and their
cognate kinsmen have been familiar with the arks of Babylon and
Assyria. These also were phallic and bore the symbols of the lingam
and yoni -- the male and the female principles in nature. In many
of the Babylonian and Assyrian sculptures we may see winged
figures, sometimes priests and sometimes eagle-headed men, gathered
on opposite sides of a representation of a sacred grove or altar.
These winged priests or angels (seraphim and cherubim) hold in
their right hands the cones of the male palm and in their left
small hand bags, in which the cones, no doubt, had been kept. These
cones are directed toward the thirteen representations of the
female palm or palm flower of seven petals and the action is that
of pollenizing the flower. The tree or sacred lattice from which
these "flowers" project is the female principle, or the mystical
"tree of life." Borne upon a chest or base it becomes an arkite
charm. Abraham, it will be remembered, came out of Ur of Chaldea,
and in Abraham's mind were pictures of these Assyrian shrines.
Indeed, wherever the Hebrews went, they were never far from some
sacred ark belonging to one cult or another. (3)

EARLY HEBREW TRIBES RESEMBLED THE ARABS

The pre-Mosaic Hebrews were nomads with a primitive religion
similar to that of the Arabs of the deserts. Their political
organization was similar. Their culture was more like that of the
nomadic Arabs than of the civilized Phoenicians, Canaanites and
Babylonians. Like the Arabians the Hebrews built shrines of stones,
or set up stones to be worshiped as gods or as the abodes of gods.
Stone worship is apparent all through the scriptures, and we find
a sacred stone or mazzebah in every sanctuary. On these stones were
poured drink offerings and they were anointed with oil. (Gen.  xxv,
14.)

It is not strange that tablets of stone engraven with the words of
the law should be thought sacred and carried in arks as objects of
veneration and that the same phallic emblems employed by the
Egyptians, Babylonians and Assyrians should be associated with
them. The ark idea was one deeply engrafted in the minds of Asiatic
peoples and in entering Canaan the Israelites did not escape it,
for they found arks in the temples and sanctuaries of even the
heathen Canaanites. These arks and their deities were frequently
worshiped by the Israelites, and the Yahwistic prophets are
constantly rebuking them for seeking out strange gods.

Sacred chests or arks were used by the early Greeks and Romans who,
like the nations of Asia, placed in them their sacred relics,
charms and fetiches. Apuleius and Plutarch describe the arks of
Egypt, and Pausanias tells of the sacred ark of the Trojans which
contained all their religious mysteries and which was taken in the
siege of Troy and fell to Euripilus as his share of the booty. Nor
is this idea of a sacred ark holding emblems of heaven's promises
peculiar to Asia and the Levant, for all through the two continents
of America the various tribes of American Indians had their sacred
arks or boxes, and these were carried into battle just as was the
ark of Yahweh militant by the Jews, to give success in battle. Like
the Jews they believed that the god-power within the sacred bundle
would rush out and destroy the foe, and like the Hebrews, their
arks were sometimes captured by the enemy, and as frequently
brought back because they had brought calamity to their captors.


DID THE HEBREWS HAVE MORE THAN ONE ARK?

It was the Rabbi Judah ben Laquish who flourished in the second
century A. D., who first suggests a plurality of sacred arks. He
contended that there were two arks that went with the Israelites in
their wilderness wanderings. In one was the complete tables of the
law and in the other fragments of the first tablets. More recent
investigations seem not only to confirm the suppositions of the
Rabbi Judah but go far beyond in showing that there were many arks
by the Israelites and that even the carefully edited scriptures of
the Hebrews fail to eliminate all evidence of this fact. We now
know that the books of the law were written long after the prophets
and that the Hexateuch is the result of a compilation of several
earlier accounts. It was Jean Astruc, a French physician, who first
called the attention of the theological world to this and his
discoveries have now been generally accepted by Biblical students.
It is shown by these that the Scriptures embrace what are known as
the Elohistic and the Jehovistic accounts, which explains the
apparent differences of certain similar accounts, as for example
the sixth and seventh chapters of Genesis. Thus arose the
designations of J and E to mark the sources of the older stories of
the Bible, later augmented by the Deuteronomic code called D. Then
came the code of the Law of Holiness, H, which forms the greater
part of the Book of Leviticus. Later scribes compiled the
ecclesiastical traditions and religious teachings of the earlier
time, beginning with the creation, and running through the whole
Hexateuch, which is known as P or the Priestly code. After the
captivity JEDHP were once more edited and combined to form the
Hexateuch as we have it at the present time, and it was this
completed work that was issued on the occasion of the Feast of
Tabernacles as recorded by Nehemiah.

Now with all the careful editing received by these old documents of
the Jews certain things have not yet been erased, despite the
attempts of the priests to bend the older writings to fit the
changing faith and beliefs of Israel. With the Jewish faith the
"Ark of the Covenant" became a central religious institution, and
the legends clustering about the Ark make it an object of
extraordinary prominence. It was with considerable care, therefore,
that in compiling the older codes, it was sought to eliminate all
allusions implying the existence of several arks, and the doctrine
of a single holy and mystical "Ark of the Covenant" written into
the P code. This is so far apparent to the critical student of the
Hebrew language and religious writings that Professor William R.
Arnold in his "Ephod and Ark" published in the Harvard Theological
Studies (Cambridge, Mass., 1917), states:

"The historical ark of Yahweh was not a unique but a manifold
object, attaching to every Palestinian sanctuary that possessed a
consecrated priesthood, and the theory of a single ark
corresponding to that of a single legitimate sanctuary, is the last
surviving neuteronomistic conceit in the theological science of the
present day."

THE ARK CALLED AN EPHOD

Reference to the other arks in the Old Testament is hidden behind
the word "ephod," which word had been consistently substituted by
the scriptural editors. We read of the ephod as a loin cloth or
apron, and David is described as wearing a linen ephod when dancing
before the Lord. Again we find that in priestly times the ephod is
used to describe the ceremonial vestment of the priest. But a third
application of this word shows no relation to the former
descriptions and we find it was a solid object used in divination.
In 1 Sam. xxi, 9, we read of the sword of Goliath wrapped in a
cloak lying in the sanctuary of Nob "behind the ephod." What then
is this ephod and why have the priests substituted this word for
another which they wish to blot out ? What is the expunged word ?
This word for which the "solid" ephod has been substituted is none
other than aron, an ark or chest. It is the same priestly
instrument of divination that was used all through the land of
Palestine. In substituting ephod for ark the late priestly editors
sought to protect a doctrine that had grown up and to eliminate the
grosser references to the use of the "sacred coffer."

Let us pause for a moment to read from the original Hebrew through
a careful translation made by Dr. Arnold, professor of Hebrew at
Andover Theological Seminary, what the prophet Jeremiah himself had
to say of the "box of Yahweh." Let us remember that the Israelites
were scattered and that the monarchy of Jeroboam had been broken
up. The wretched remnant of North Israel for three generations had
lived in captivity and their God had been relegated to a position
of equality with other deities invoked with pagan rites among the
sacred groves of Canaan. To these Israelites Jeremiah addresses the
following words:

Return you wandering children, declares Yahweh, for I am your
owner. And I will take you one from a city, and two from a clan,
and will bring you to zion and I will give you shepherds after my
own heart, and they will feed you with knowledge and discretion.
And it shall come to pass that when you increase and multiply in
the land of those days, declared Yahweh, that men will no longer
speak of the box of Yahweh nor will it enter their minds nor will
they invoke it, nor will they resort to it; neither will it be
manufactured any more. (Jer. iii, 14 - 16.)

Professor Arnold commenting on these texts says:

"The box of Yahweh here referred to is not an individual object but
an institution. Neither the fictional Sinaitic box of Jewish dogma
nor yet the supposedly unique historical box of Solomon's temple,
was resorted to and invoked in the days of Jeremiah by the people
of North Israel. Evidently, too, the object which the prophet has
in mind has been reproduced again and again in the past and might
conceivably be multiplied indefinitely in the future, so that he
cannot be alluding to a box whose essential character consisted in
its harboring an ancestral fetich of the age of Moses. Nor should
we overlook the significant implication of the context, it is as
the cherished instrument of divine guidance that the sacred box is
to be superseded by the ministrations of prophecy. For the rest it
is apparent that Jeremiah had never heard of the fiction of 1 Kings
vii, 9, regarding the Solomonic box, and that it would have been
quite foreign to his temper to sympathize with it. To his mind, the
box of Yahweh was a pagan excrescence which could not be too
thoroughly eradicated."

In the judgment of the modern student of Biblical knowledge the
individual ark or chest left in Solomon's Temple was not of such
special intrinsic value as to tempt the spoilers of the Temple,
whether Shishak (1 Kings xiv, 25), Hazael (2 Kings xii, 18),
Tiglathpileser (2 Kings xvi, 8), Senacherib (2 Kings xviii, 15) or
Nebuchadnezzer (2 Kings xxv, 13 ff). Certainly in the elaborate
catalog of objects taken from the Temple by these raiders if the
ark or chest had been a valuable article it would have been
specifically mentioned and its loss proclaimed as a calamity. If by
some chance the box survived the ravages of four centuries of
stormy Hebrew history, a thing scarcely to be expected of a wooden
box of acacia wood, housed in a damp stone building often out of
repair, it would have finally perished in the flames when the
Temple was destroyed. Very likely the Solomonic box fell into decay
long before 586 B. C. when the Israelites lost their independence.
Jeremiah would scarcely have saved it for he was not an advocate of
divination by means of a sacred box but a believer in "inspired
human speech," a long step ahead in the evolution of the Hebrew
faith.

Although, it is true, that priestly divination had taken the place
of the rite of divination by means the box of Yahweh, still the
priests remembered their ancient right of bearing this box before
them and the traditions of invoking the counsel of Yahweh by its
means were still current, though such invocations were frowned upon
by the prophets who now led the religious thought of the Hebrews.

ESTIMATE OF THE ARK CHANGED

Some years after the destruction of Solomon's Temple the question
arose as to the purport of the Solomonic ark about which so many
traditions clustered. The box of Yahweh had now become a dogma and
the scribes to fortify these priestly legends are believed by some
modern theological critics to have deliberately interpolated Deut.
x, 5 and 1 Kings viii, 9, 21. The original accounts of the tables
of the law, according to competent authorities on the Hebrew
scripture had nothing whatever to say of a box or ark. Nor, on the
other hand, did the original stories of Solomon's Temple have
anything to say about the Sinaitic tablets. The fact that the
Hexateuch was compiled long after the writings of the prophets gave
the scribes ample time to interpolate, edit and gloss the original
documents before them, and nothing is clearer than the fact that
scribal midrash has altered completely original meanings and words
in the earlier writings.

The critical student is referred to the Harvard Theological Studies
III, "Ephod and Ark, a study in the records and religion of the
ancient Hebrews," by William R. Arnold, Hitchcock Professor of
Hebrew in Andover Theological Seminary. Dr. Arnold discusses, from
the original Hebrew, this most interesting subject about which so
many interesting traditions have arisen.

The "Ark of the Covenant" as an actual object in the sanctuaries of
Israel served a useful purpose in the religious life of the Hebrew
and directed the attention of an ignorant and wayward people toward
a Jehova (Yahweh) who was a greater deity than man had yet
conceived. And when the arks had passed out of existence as
material things the Hebrew faith took a higher and more spiritual
form. It was mistaken zeal for dogma that led the scribes and
Rabbis to interpolate and gloss their scriptures in later years and
so attempt to efface the real character of the arks or sacred
boxes. That the religion of the Hebrews should have grown out of
varied beliefs in magic, in sacred charms and in the ability of
certain persons to influence the Deity for the purposes of material
gain is no impediment to the religion finally evolved. All mankind
at one time believed in magic and to a large extent still does, but
that does not detract from the fact that through painful errors,
woeful mistakes and vain invocations, man may even yet discover
God, when he his seen his error and searched aright. The story of
the Hebrew faith is a story of an evolution toward spirituality and
toward a higher conception of Deity than ever held before.

(1) During the past fifty years critical students of archeology,
philology and history have produced a vast array of facts relating
to the early history of the Hebrews and the evolution the Yahwistic
religion of Israel. These facts were not available to the compilers
of the canonical books now comprising our Old Testament when the
council met at Nicea or Trent to determine what books were inspired
and what were not. Thus after years of critical research in Bible
lands, we of today a given a totally different perspective of many
of the institutions and doctrines of the Hebrews.

One has only to attend the lectures given in any great Theological
seminary or to read the books prepared by the professors teaching
in these institutions to note that a vast change has come over the
theological world with respect to the externals of religious belief
and dogma.

(2) John P. Peters, D.D., Sc. D., Rector of St. Michael's Church,
New York, and former Professor in the Philadelphia Divinity School,
in his "Religion of the Hebrews" (1914), in discussing the ark
says: "Was the Ark, then, a modification of the Egyptian god-ship,
or is it in any sense due to the Egyptian use of ships to convey
the gods from place to place? It seems to me probable that we
should recognize here Egyptian influence, and that the Egyptian
ship became among the Hebrews a box, very much as in the Hebrew
flood story the Babylonian ship became a box."

(3) The sacred boxes or box-shrines of most oriental nations were
not portable, for, like the pre-Mosaic Hebrews, it was generally
believed by the Asiatics that the gods were localized and fix to
certain spots or mountain peaks. The use of portable arks or
box-shrines as traveling dwelling places for the god was an idea
which the Hebrews developed in a special way. It was an important
link in the evolution of the God idea. With most of the Levantine
peoples the sacred box was not removed from its "holy of holies"
except in emergency, or for the purpose taking it to another
shrine.

