The End Time Church: From the Cathedrals to the Catacombs

By Dan L. White

Copyright 2021 by Dan L. White, all rights reserved.

Scripture quotations are from the World English Bible (WEB) which is in the public domain.

Chapter 89

Who Hid the Ark?

The Babylonians didn’t destroy the Ark when they burned the Temple. They didn’t take the Ark to Babylon, either. Yet since that time, the Ark has remained hidden.

Some “rabbis” wrote that Josiah said to hide the Ark in a tunnel —

Under the Temple.

It’s a verse we went over before.

2Chr 35
3) He [Josiah] said to the Levites who taught all Israel, who were holy to Yahweh, “Put the holy ark in the house which Solomon the son of David king of Israel built. There shall no more be a burden on your shoulders. Now serve Yahweh your God, and his people Israel.

Nothing’s said about a tunnel or hiding there, but Jewish religious rulers say this was a command from Josiah to hide the Ark in a subterranean Temple tunnel.

Keil & Delitzsch Commentary on the Old Testament, 2 Ch 35:3
Several Rabbins regard it as a command to remove the ark from its place in the most holy place into some subterranean chamber of the temple, so as to secure its safety in the event of the threatened destruction of the temple taking place. But this hypothesis needs no refutation, since it in no way corresponds to the words used.

“…in no way corresponds to the words used” — In other words, the verse doesn’t say that at all. That doesn’t mean that Josiah didn’t hide the Ark, but he didn’t say it in that passage.

K&D goes on:
Most ancient and modern commentators, on the other hand, suppose that the holy ark had, during the reigns of the godless Manasseh and Amon, either been removed by them from its place, or taken away from the most holy place, from a desire to protect it from profanation, and hidden somewhere; and that Josiah calls upon the Levites to bring it back again to its place. Certainly this idea is favoured by the circumstance that, just as the book of the law, which should have been preserved in [by] the ark of the covenant, had been lost, and was only recovered when the temple was being repaired, so the ark also may have been removed from its place.

So if the priests had removed the Ark in a previous time of trouble, then they might also have moved the Ark because of Babylon’s attack.

Based on that premise, there are multiple ideas on the location of the Ark.

Some claim that the Ark is tucked away in Iraq, the modern site of ancient Babylon. Apocryphal 2 Esdras, apocryphal meaning false, discusses the destruction of the first Temple. It says “the ark of our covenant has been plundered.”

That statement indicates that the Babylonians took the Ark.

However –

2 Esdras is said to have been written not during the time of the first Temple, but after the New Testament was written. Since 2 Esdras was written long after Babylon’s siege, it has no historical value discussing an event seven centuries earlier. The writer may have assumed that the Ark was taken in the attack, but nothing in the Bible shows that Nebuchadnezzar took the Ark to Babylon/Iraq.

Besides, why would Yahweh want to leave his earthly throne in Babylon?

Rev 14:8 WEB
8) Another, a second angel, followed, saying, “Babylon the great has fallen, which has made all the nations to drink of the wine of the wrath of her sexual immorality.”

Whether literal or symbolic, Babylon is not a likely place for God’s throne.

Others claim that the Ark is in Ethiopia, in a Christian church, taken there by the Queen of Sheba during her visit to Solomon. But Josiah put the Ark back into the Temple more than three centuries after that. Plus having the Ark in Ethiopia brings up the same type question as with Iraq.

Did Yahweh want His throne taken to Africa?

The apocryphal 2 Maccabees places the Ark on Mt. Nebo, the mountain where Moses looked over into the land of Canaan and was buried.

2 Maccabees 2:4-7 (New Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition)
1) One finds in the records that the prophet Jeremiah ordered those who were being deported to take some of the fire, as has been mentioned,
2) and that the prophet, after giving them the law, instructed those who were being deported not to forget the commandments of the Lord, or to be led astray in their thoughts on seeing the gold and silver statues and their adornment.
3) And with other similar words he exhorted them that the law should not depart from their hearts.
4) It was also in the same document that the prophet, having received an oracle, ordered that the tent and the ark should follow with him, and that he went out to the mountain where Moses had gone up and had seen the inheritance of God.
5) Jeremiah came and found a cave-dwelling, and he brought there the tent and the ark and the altar of incense; then he sealed up the entrance.
6) Some of those who followed him came up intending to mark the way, but could not find it.
7) When Jeremiah learned of it, he rebuked them and declared: “The place shall remain unknown until God gathers his people together again and shows his mercy.

If the Ark was hidden in Mt. Nebo, this again would put Ark out of the Holy Land.

Ps 9:11 WEB
11) Sing praises to Yahweh, who dwells in Zion, and declare among the people what he has done.

Ps 50:2 WEB
2) Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God shines forth.

If the Ark is in Mt. Nebo, that is out of the Holy Land. Iraq, Ethiopia and Mt. Nebo are all lands of the Gentiles. There is no reason to think that Yahweh wanted the Ark, His throne, to rest for nearly three millennia in a Gentile land. That leads to the conclusion that if the Ark is hidden, it would be in the Holy Land. We must also remember that Maccabees are apocryphal books.

The Talmud also says that the Ark was hidden.

Surely it has been taught: When the ark was hidden, there was hidden with it the bottle containing the Manna, and that containing the sprinkling water, the staff of Aaron, with its almonds and blossoms, and the chest which the Philistines had sent as a gift to the God of Israel, (B. Yoma 52b).

The key phrase there is “when the ark was hidden.” Near the end of the time of the first Temple, the Jews had ample time to hatch a plan to hide the Ark.

Huldah’s prophecy to Josiah, discussed in the previous chapter, showed that the Temple would be destroyed. That gave several decades from that prophecy to plan for removing the Ark.

The Babylonians carried the Temple vessels to Babylon at two different times.

2Kgs 24:10-13 WEB
10) At that time the servants of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came up to Jerusalem, and the city was besieged.
11) Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came to the city, while his servants were besieging it;
12) and Jehoiachin the king of Judah went out to the king of Babylon, he, and his mother, and his servants, and his princes, and his officers: and the king of Babylon took him in the eighth year of his reign.
13) He carried out there all the treasures of the house of Yahweh, and the treasures of the king’s house, and cut in pieces all the vessels of gold, which Solomon king of Israel had made in the temple of Yahweh, as Yahweh had said.

Jehoiachin was the next to last king of Judah, deposed about a decade before the final destruction of the kingdom. As already cited, when Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the Temple in c. 586, he carried away everything that was left.

2Chr 36
18) All the vessels of the house of God, great and small, and the treasures of the house of Yahweh, and the treasures of the king, and of his princes, all these he brought to Babylon.
19) They burnt the house of God, and broke down the wall of Jerusalem, and burnt all its palaces with fire, and destroyed all the goodly vessels of it.

After Jehoiachin’s fall and the loss of some Temple items, that decade gave ample time to lay plans to remove the Ark before the final destruction.

Talmud references cause some to strongly believe the Ark is hidden under the Temple site.

“Where is the Ark of the Covenant?”, by Thomas S. McCall, 1997 Zola Levitt Letter, https://www.levitt.com/essays/ark
Rabbi Shlomo Goren and Rabbi Yehuda Getz, the rabbis in charge of the Western Wall area, are convinced that the Ark has been hidden in a cave in the Temple Mount directly under the site of the Holy of Holies, since the time of King Josiah…

Rabbi Getz believes that in 1982 he was very close, within 40 feet, to finding the cave in which the Ark resides. He was conducting a search in an old tunnel that had been filled with the debris of centuries, which runs perpendicular to the Western Wall and under the Temple Mount. However, when the Moslems discovered that there were diggings being conducted under the Dome of the Rock, they threatened a general riot and the diggings were stopped. The rabbi explains that, for the sake of maintaining peace with their Moslem neighbors, the Israelis had to reseal the entrance to the tunnel, and it remains blocked up to this day.

Archaeologist Leen Ritmeyer has done research on the Temple Mount and inside the Dome of the Rock. He says he has established the site of the Holy of Holies.

jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-ark-of-the-convenant
He claims to have found the spot on the Mount where the Holy of Holies was located during the First Temple period. In the precise center of that spot is a section of bedrock cut out in dimensions that may match those of the Ark as reported in Exodus…Based on his findings, Ritmeyer has postulated that the Ark may be buried deep inside the Temple Mount.

Another researcher claims the lost Ark of the Covenant is not lost at all.

Jerusalem Post, “The Enigma of the Lost Ark of the Covenant”, By Harry Moskoff, September 10, 2017
I wrote a book (“The ARK Report”) based on 25 years of research on the Jewish perspective, where I quote primary sources from the Bible and the Talmud, with Midrashic and Haggadic references throughout. What I found is something compelling. I found that the Ark was not “lost” as many assume. In fact, it has been situated in the same place for all this time. Reminiscent of that great Disney movie with Nicholas Cage, National Treasure, this particular priceless Jewish treasure is about 4 stories (15m) underneath the present-day surface of the Temple Mount, to the southwest of the Dome of the Rock. Any biblical archaeologist worth his/her salt will tell you that there are over 45 known tunnels underneath the Temple Mount, with several entrances that may lead to this subterranean area…

The fact is, approximately 35 years before the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BC, King Josiah ordered that the Ark be brought into a special (what I call) “off-site” chamber that King Solomon had built as part of the original plan for the Temple, as found in a special Temple scroll that was given to him by his father King David, and the prophets Samuel and Nathan (II Chronicles 35:3). After happening upon an ancient Torah scroll of his ancestors, the righteous King Josiah foresaw that the Temple would be destroyed, and ordered the Ark’s placement into this secret chamber well before Jerusalem was even being threatened. Nobody knew that the Holy of Holies would then be empty, except for the King himself, the High Priest at that time, and some other priests that helped place it into the chamber below…

The Rambam (Maimonides) quotes the Talmud in a number of places that state that the Ark was buried “in its place” and for “generations after generations,” and “to this very day” (I Kings 8:8) in the warren of tunnels beneath the Temple Mount. In fact, according to my theory, directly beneath the Holy of Holies.

The Temple Institute, dedicated to building a third Temple, says that the Ark is hidden, but not lost, because they know where it is.

Temple Institute, “Where Is the Ark of the Covenant Located?” https://templeinstitute.org/frequently-asked-questions/
In reality, the expression “lost” ark is not an accurate description for the Jewish people’s point of view – because we have always known exactly where it is. So the Ark is “Hidden,” and hidden quite well, but it is not lost…. This location is recorded in our sources, and today, there are those who know exactly where this chamber is. And we know that the ark is still there, undisturbed, and waiting for the day when it will be revealed.

The key phrase there is “waiting for the day when it will be revealed.”

David wanted to build the first Temple as a place to house the Ark. If the Ark should be found, that would give enormous impetus to the drive to build a third Temple.

Let’s summarize.

1. Was the Ark destroyed by the Babylonians?

• No. They even carried out pieces of brass so they certainly would have preserved a gold covered chest had they found it.

2. Was the Ark carried to Babylon?

• No. Since what the Chaldeans took is carefully listed, taking the Ark would certainly have been mentioned. It is not.

3. Was the Ark secretly carried to another nation, like Ethiopia or Iraq/Babylon?

• No. The Ark belonged in Israel. Just as it did not stay with the Philistines, it was not meant to stay in Ethiopia or Babylon.

If the Ark was not destroyed, or taken to a Gentile country, then where could it possibly be?

1. It is hidden in Israel.

But there is one more alternative.

Like the Temple that was twice burned and has been gone for nearly 2000 years, might the physical Ark no longer be relevant?