We’ve answered the question, “What was the ark of the covenant?” The next question we must ask is “What happened to the ark of the covenant?” Specifically, what happened to it from the time it was made until the time it disappeared.
As we have seen, from the day of its construction, the ark was the central object of Israel’s faith. The second commandment prohibited Israel from having images of the deity, as other nations had. Instead, Israel had the ark, the invisible deity’s footstool. But what was its story in Israel’s national life? And what happened to the ark of the covenant in the end?
FROM TABERNACLE TO ZION TENT
Where the ark went, the Lord went (Num. 10.34); its presence ensured his (1 Sam. 4.3). He spoke from between the keruvim on the ark, amidst a glowing cloud (Exod. 25.22; 30.6; 40.35). The honour due him was paid to the ark. When the ark appeared in public, sacrifices were offered before it, people bowed to it and cried on every side, Yehovah Ts’vaot! Yehovah Ts’vaot![1] Wherever it went, it was fêted by singing and shouting, by praising and praying, by blowing of trumpets and rams’ horns, by rattling of sistrums, drumming of drums, and striking of tambourines.[2] Israel’s entire life and faith revolved round this most sacred object.
Since the ark equalled the presence of the Holy One, it was particularly associated with Israel’s military campaigns. Like any king, the Lord took his footstool with him to war, so that he might sit in state above the field and command his hosts. At such times, Moses would send forth the ark with the words,
Arise, O Lord! May your enemies be scattered;
May your foes flee before you (Num. 10.35).
And when the ark returned victorious to camp, Moses would say,
Return, O Lord, to the countless thousands of Israel (Num. 10.36).
In the desert, the ark’s presence gave Israel victory in every campaign, while its absence brought defeat (Num. 15.44). It spear-headed the conquest of the promised land under Joshua. During the period of Joshua and the Judges, it rested in Joshua’s town, Shiloh, from where it went briefly to Bethel in Benjamin, and then back to Shiloh again.[3] From Shiloh it went against the Philistines and, for the sin of Eli’s house, was captured.
What happened next to the ark of the covenant is well known is documented in 1 Samuel 4. When the ark arrived in Philistine territory, plague broke out around it. The panic-stricken Philistines shunted it from one city to another before returning it to Israel, to the priestly town of Beth Shemesh. There the townsmen who thought they might peek inside it did not live long enough to regret their presumption. The survivors bundled it off to Kiryat-Ye‘arim, to the house of Abinadab, where it stayed throughout Saul’s reign, undisturbed.[4]
Finally, David, having conquered Jerusalem, sought out the ark to bring it to his new capital. But the ark, illicitly borne and touched, asserted its power by striking the offender dead, and was hastily deposited at the house of Obed-Edom.[5] Finally, after a three-month regroup, it was carried to Jerusalem by its poles on the shoulders of the Levites, as the law prescribed. Amidst psalms and rejoicing, the gatekeepers of Zion citadel theatrically challenged the ark’s approach, while the ark’s Levite entourage replied that the approaching conqueror was not to be defied.
Gates: Who is this King of Glory?
Bearers: Yehovah, mighty and a hero;
Yehovah, hero in battle (Psalm 24.8).[6]
The ark was brought into the city and placed in the tent which David had set up some months before.[7] There it remained throughout David’s reign, going out to battle, as in former times, and quelling Israel’s enemies on every side.[8]
Meanwhile, since the ark’s Philistine captivity, Moses’ Tabernacle and altar of burnt offering had made their own way, first to Nob, and then, after Nob’s destruction, to the priestly city of Gibeon in Benjamin, where they became the focus of Israel’s foremost shrine until Solomon’s temple was dedicated. Thereafter, if Josephus is correct, the Gibeon ministry ceased and its artefacts and personnel were transferred to the newly-built temple.[9]
THE ARK IN SOLOMON’S TEMPLE
After the ark was installed on Zion, David conceived the idea of building a dwelling for it. However, Nathan the prophet brought word that the Lord himself would build a house – an eternal dynasty – for David, but that the house of the Lord would not be built by David but by his son. David therefore did all he could to enable his successor to complete the task. He made ‘extensive preparations’ and went to ‘great pains’, working ‘with all his resources’ and denying himself every comfort to achieve this goal.[10]
He purchased land for the site. First, for the sum of fifty silver shekels, he bought the threshing-floor of Araunah the Jebusite, near the summit of Mount Moriah, for the site of an altar. Then, for the much greater sum of 600 shekels of gold, he bought the entire mountain.[11] He built up the Mount on all sides – a vast feat of engineering – to provide a level upper surface 500 cubits square, almost ten times the size of a soccer field.[12] And through the supporting substructures and through the limestone rock – soft to the chisel, but hardening in the air – he constructed a network of secret tunnels and chambers and galleries..
Under divine direction he drew up architectural plans for the building, its ministry, and the golden keruvim-chariot.[13] He amassed, we are told, unimaginable quantities of precious metals: three and a half thousand tons of gold, thirty-four thousand tons of silver, and vast quantities of bronze, iron, fragrant cedar, and noble stone; he received the plans for the building under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit; he provided craftsmen of every kind to do the work: builders, masons, carpenters, and goldsmiths.[14] He provided detailed plans for the future ministry of the kohanim and Levites; he set apart 4,000 Levites to support the ministry of song, with the 288 best and strongest singers selected to minister in twenty-four courses of twelve, serving in rotation a week at a time, and playing fine instruments provided by the king.[15] He provided gatekeepers, treasurers, and accountants. In short, he provided everything required for the temple and its worship, and then he committed the execution of the plan to his son Solomon at his accession.[16]
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE ARK OF THE COVENANT: IN SOLOMON’S TEMPLE
Solomon, in the fourth year of his reign, in the spring of 966 BC, began building according to the heavenly plan. The work was completed seven years later, in the late autumn month of Bul (October-November) 960 BC. Eleven months later, at the Feast of Sukkot in the month of Ethanim (September-October) 959 BC, the temple was dedicated. The books of 1 Kings and 2 Chronicles relate the event. Solomon instructed all Israel to come to Jerusalem for the great day. The ark was brought up from Zion citadel into the temple and installed in the place prepared for it, in the inner sanctuary, the Holy of Holies, beneath the overspreading wings of the keruvim chariot.[17] With it went up the sacred vessels and Moses’ tent, to be stored in the temple.[18] Solomon dedicated the building with solemn prayer, the divine glory filled it, and vast numbers of sacrifices were offered on the altar and in the temple courts.[19]
After its installation in the temple, the next three hundred years of the ark’s comings and goings are cloaked in mystery. There is no record of it going out to battle after David’s time. Solomon’s reign was a time of peace. And when, after Solomon’s death, Shishak looted the temple and took many of the holy things, the ark was not among them, for we hear of it in Israel some three hundred and forty years later, during King Josiah’s reform, around 621 BC. At that time, Josiah instructed the Levites, Put the sacred ark in the temple that Solomon son of David king of Israel built; it is not to be carried on your shoulders (2 Chr. 35.3). Its whereabouts before Josiah’s time can only be guessed. But, since it was under the supervision of the Levites, we may imagine that it was kept outside the temple by the Levite ark-keepers, the Elizaphanite families of Shimri and Jeiel, and had been committed to them for protection during Manasseh’s reign of idolatry.[20]
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE ARK OF THE COVENANT
Then, after Josiah’s Levites returned the ark to the temple, it disappeared, for Jeremiah cryptically remarks that it will not be remembered or missed and that no replacement will be made.[21] The comments suggest more than its withdrawal from public view. Rather, Jeremiah the kohen is writing of something known to the kohanim: the ark’s complete disappearance. So what happened to the ark of the covenant? Or, to put it another way, Where Is The Ark Of The Covenant now?
This is an extract from Chapter 5 of my book The Songs of Ascents (2015).
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NOTES
[1] 1 Sam. 6.15; 2 Sam. 6.13; 1 Kgs 8.5; 2 Sam. 6.2. Ts’vaot or ‘hosts’ is the plural of tsava, the standard word for Israel’s army, both in Bible times and now. The plural implies that Yehovah commands many armies. The name Yehovah Ts’vaot first appears in the mouth of Korahite Hannah, the mother of Samuel (1 Sam. 1.11). The Korahites held that the dead would ascend from Sheol to dwell among the stars (Mitchell 2006a: 365–84). Yehovah ts’vaot is therefore the head, not only of Israel’s army, but of the armies of heaven.
[2] 2 Sam. 6.5, 15; 1 Chr. 13.8; 15.16–22; 2 Chr. 5.12–13; 7.6.
[3] Josh. 18.1, 8–10, 21.1–2; Judg. 18.31; 20.26–28; 1 Sam. 1.3; 3.3. A sanctuary at Shechem served as a cultic centre in Joshua’s time, though the ark is not mentioned (Josh. 24.1, 25–26).
[4] 1 Sam. 4.1–7.2. The Hebrew of 1 Sam. 14.18 has Saul call for the ark in his war against the Philistines, while the Septuagint speaks of the high-priestly ephod, not the ark.
[5] Num. 4.4–15; 2 Sam. 6.3–11; 2 Sam. 6.3–12; 1 Chr. 13.7–14.
[6] Ps. 24 was certainly the liturgy of the ark’s ascent to Zion. The Holy One and his ark are entering for the first time. (If it were not the first time, there would be no demand to open and no enquiry as to who was entering.) And the ‘ancient doors’ (vv. 7, 9) must be the gates of Zion citadel, for the gates of the temple were new not ancient, when the ark first entered. The summons for them to ‘Lift your heads,’ suggests that they were lifting gates, portcullisesor cataracta.
[7] 1 Chr. 15.1; 16.1.
[8] 2 Sam. 11.11.
[9] 1 Sam. 21.4–6; 22.18–19; Gibeon: Josh. 21.17; 1 Chr. 16.39-42; 21.29; 1 Kgs 3.4; 2 Chr. 1.3–6. Josephus (Ant. VIII.iv.1) says that ‘the tabernacle (skēnē) which Moses pitched’, which had been in Gibeon, accompanied the ark from Zion to the temple (1 Kgs 8.4). This is confirmed by the fact that Heman and Jeduthun, who initially ministered at the Gibeon shrine, went to join Asaph in Jerusalem in the ministry of the temple (see chapter nine).
[10] 2 Sam. 7.2; 1 Chr. 22.5, 14; 29.2; Ps. 132.1–5.
[11] 2 Sam. 24.24; 1 Chr. 21.25.
[12] 500 cubits square is 68,906 m2 (Appendix II); Old Trafford field is 7,140 m2.
[13] 1 Chr. 28.2, 11–12, 19.
[14] 1 Chr. 22.3, 4, 14; 29.2–8; 28.14–19; 22.15–16. The temple and the royal palace were called the houses of Lebanon, for their quantity of cedar (Zech. 11.1; 1 Kgs 7.2; Jer. 22.23).
[15] 1 Chr. 28.13; 2 Kgs 11.5–9; 2 Chr. 23.4, 8; 1 Chr. 23.3–5; 25.7–31.
[16] 1 Chr. 22.6–23.1.
[17] 1 Kgs. 8.1–7; 2 Chr. 5.7–8.
[18] 1 Kgs 8.4. Josephus says (Ant. VIII.iv.1) that this was Moses’ tent, not David’s Zion tent. It would have been brought from Gibeon, whose shrine would have ceased to function as the temple ministry began.
[19] 1 Kgs 8; 2 Chr. 5.1–7.11.
[20] Num. 3.27–31; 2 Chr. 29.13; 2 Kgs 21.1–18; 2 Chr. 33.1–9.
[21] Jer. 3.16.