Ark of the Covenant: Interesting Twist!

Story from Haaretz.com:
Published 15:36 30.05.10
Latest update 15:36 30.05.10
Scholar's Ark of the Covenant claims spark African storm
Tudor Parfitt claims 700-year-old bowl-shaped relic is a copy of the sacred object made by one of Israel's lost tribes that may have wound up in Southern Africa.
By The Associated Press

HARARE, Zimbabwe — Tudor Parfitt has spent years chasing a theory that a lost tribe of Jews wound up in Southern Africa. But his latest leap has landed him in a minefield.

The subject at hand is this British scholar's contention that the remains of a 700-year-old bowl-shaped relic which he tracked down in a Zimbabwe museum storeroom in 2007 could be a replica of the Ark of the Covenant that carried the Ten Commandments. (Image source).

According to African legend, white lions of God and a two-headed snake guarded the "drum that thunders" in a cave in southwestern Zimbabwe's sacred Dumbwe mountains. Parfitt's theory has sparked fierce reactions from some Zimbabwean scholars, who suspect a plot to superimpose foreign origins on what is purely a product of African culture.

Having long disappeared from public view since its discovery in the 1940s, the artifact is now on display at the Harare Museum of Human Sciences. It is about 45 inches by 24 inches in diameter and 27 inches tall with a pattern of shallow engraving on the outside that could have held gold threads. Scorch marks on the base inside were possibly left by primitive gun powder.

Parfitt, a professor of Modern Jewish Studies at the University of London's prestigious School of Oriental and African Studies, says he first heard of the vessel during his two-decade search for Jewish tribes lost in Africa.

At the center of that research is a southern African ethnic group variously called Lemba, Remba or waLemba. Parfitt says 52 percent of them carry a Y chromosome known as the Cohen Modal Haplotype (CMH) - unique to ancient priestly Jewish communities and raising the possibility they are descended from Aaron, Moses' brother. Other groups in Zimbabwe have no CMH.

The waLemba are also set apart from other tribes by such Jewish customs as observing a weekly Sabbath, practicing circumcision, shunning pork and slaughtering animals by methods similar to Jewish kosher rules.

Parfitt acknowledges that theories counter to his are "wholly plausible," and the museum is careful not to take sides. The materials accompanying the exhibit that opened this year outline both the theories behind the relic.

One says the original Ark of the Covenant may have been destroyed when the Babylonians invaded Jerusalem in 586 B.C., that several copies likely were made and that one was taken to Ethiopia by Prince Menelik, the son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Another could have found its way to ancient Zimbabwe, says the exhibit.

The other posits that it is a purely African relic, and that according to legend, was made by waLemba craftsmen for royal elders to give them magical powers.

In the Zimbabwean Shona language, the artifact is called "Ngoma Lungundu," the "drum that thunders," while the waLemba call it "the voice of God."  Parfitt says that according to oral tradition, the waLemba could have been among peoples who left Judea in biblical times and migrated through Yemen to east Africa, Ethiopia and beyond, bringing the ark with them.

Eminent Zimbabwean historian Rob Burrett disputes Parfitt's theories.

"He is on the wrong track. Wooden drums - ceremonial drums and war drums with great powers similar to those attributed to the ark — are an integral part of African culture," Burrett said.  The genetic test "doesn't prove anything," he said, noting that early European explorers of the east African coast found a strong presence of Arab and Jewish traders moving into the African interior. "These people were certainly not celibate and would have created mixed-blood communities along the way," Burrett said.

African traditionalists believe the Ngoma is a royal drum so powerful that it imploded and was rebuilt on the original wooden base 700 years ago. Indeed, a splinter from the top of the artifact has been carbon-dated to about 1300, making it probably the oldest surviving wooden object in southern Africa.

Only carbon-dating of the entire object, including its scorched base, would resolve the debate, but Zimbabwe authorities are reluctant to let that happen. In a nation striving to eradicate tribalism, a result favoring Parfitt's claims might stir tribal divisions by implying the waLembas' origins are not truly African.

"Everyone has placed this object in a context of their own," conceded Giles Mutsekwa, co-minister of home affairs, the body in charge of archives and antiquities.

One context that arouses anger in Zimbabwe is race. During the colonial era, Europeans defended white-supremacist ideas by arguing - wrongly - that Africans could not have built advanced civilizations such as the massive citadel of stone houses called Great Zimbabwe. Harald von Sicard, the Swedish-German missionary who discovered the Ngoma, theorized in the same vein — that the artifact couldn't have been crafted by Africans. Burrett describes von Sicard as "an old-fashioned, Old Testament" preacher whose views bordered on racism.

Parfitt says he spent weeks living in a waLemba community looking for clues about the ark and getting nowhere. He says he was about to give up when he met a retired train driver in a bar in the southern city of Bulawayo. The man said he recalled hauling a boxcar of artifacts 440 kilometers (275 miles) from Bulawayo to the capital, Harare, for safekeeping during the country's war of independence.

Parfitt searched the Harare museum in 2007, and there it was - in a dusty storeroom littered with mouse droppings. But after he published his findings a year later, controversy flared.

"Some people thought it was all a sinister plot and I was interfering. There was open hostility," he said.

Tempers erupted at a February meeting on the topic at the main Zimbabwe university, with one Zimbabwean academic, historian and former education minister Aenias Chigwedere, storming out of the discussion, denouncing the presence of the British scholar.

Ken Mufuka, a professor of history from Zimbabwe who teaches at Lander University in South Carolina, called Parfitt a "publicity-monger" and "a charlatan" in a newsletter published in Harare.

Burrett, who is also an associate researcher at the Bulawayo museum, said the furor is rooted in the nation's more recent political history.

"There is a fear of undermining the post-independence myth that we are one people, not divided by tribe or origin," he said. "It's as though we are in denial of having a multicultural society."

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Here is an article on the subject from a few years ago:  article from Time Magazine, published on February 21, 2008.

Ark of the Covenant to be Revealed?

LOL! How did I miss this story? MUCH ABOUT HISTORY 'Ark of the Covenant' about to be unveiled? Ethiopian patriarch tells pope he will show artifact to world Posted: June 24, 20099:35 pm Eastern © 2009 WorldNetDaily The patriarch of the Orthodox Church of Ethiopia says he will announce to the world Friday the unveiling of the Ark of the Covenant, perhaps the world's most prized archaeological and spiritual artifact, which he says has been hidden away in a church in his country for millennia, according to the Italian news agency Adnkronos. Abuna Pauolos, in Italy for a meeting with Pope Benedict XVI this week, told the news agency, "Soon the world will be able to admire the Ark of the Covenant described in the Bible as the container of the tablets of the law that God delivered to Moses and the center of searches and studies for centuries." The announcement is expected to be made at 2 p.m. Italian time from the Hotel Aldrovandi in Rome. Pauolos will reportedly be accompanied by Prince Aklile Berhan Makonnen Haile Sellassie and Duke Amedeo D'Acosta. Rest of article. Well, I sure didn't read about any announcement, did you? If you would like an entertaining read on the legends surrounding the disappearance of the Ark of the Covenant, I suggest Graham Hancock's The Sign and the Seal: A Quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant.

Firefighter Claims Amazing Discovery in France

Not sure what to make of this. If it's true, it would be an amazing discovery, but chances are the Solomon treasure was melted down long long ago and this fella is just trying to cash in on Dan Brown's popularity (a new novel is rumored to have been completed and will soon be published) and the public's never-ending fascinating with treasure mysteries. (Photo: Tim Correira/The Enterprise - Mike Bishops points to the "locking rods" on a photograph of the mysterious stained glass window he says he discovered) From Enterprisenews.com Brocktonian claims discovery of religious artifact Brockton man claims stained glass may unlock religious discovery By Maria Papadopoulos ENTERPRISE STAFF WRITER Posted Feb 10, 2009 @ 03:04 AM Last update Feb 10, 2009 @ 03:15 AM BROCKTON — Retired New York City firefighter Mike Bishop says he was in a firehouse in Staten Island in 1995 when he saw the first signs of what would become his religious adventure across France. The copy machine at work had malfunctioned, and an image similar to Jesus’ face on the Shroud of Turin came out of the machine, Bishop said. When Bishop hit the copy machine button again, a second image came out, similar to Mary Magdalene, he said. “This was probably a clue that I’m going to find something or something’s going to happen,” Bishop, 55, recently recalled from his Brockton home. “I didn’t know until now what it was.” Bishop claims he has since discovered something crucial to religious history — a stained glass window in a stone room in France that depicts locking rods on the Arc of the Covenant, which is described in the Bible as a sacred container holding the Ten Commandments. Bishop said the locking rods are on the list of treasures of Solomon’s Temple that are on the Copper Scroll, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, several hundred religious documents found near the Dead Sea in 1947. Religious historians “have never found any of this stuff,” Bishop said of the stained glass depicting the locking rods. “I spoke to professors, rabbis, art historians and they’re all stumped. They’ve never seen it before.” Bishop said he discovered the stained glass while visiting southwestern France in 2004. He said the stained glass is located in a stone room in a French cloister circa 1540-1560 A.D. near Rennes-le-Chateau, a small medieval castle village that receives thousands of visitors each year and considered the center of various conspiracy theories. The village gained international fame after it became the origin for religious hypotheses in the bestselling books “The Holy Blood” and the “Holy Grail” and “The DaVinci Code.” In the fictional DaVinci Code, author Dan Brown points to the possibility of Jesus having been married to and fathered a child with Mary Magdalene. Bishop said he began researching the connection between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and read several books on the subject, in 1999, after he retired and before “The DaVinci Code” was published. "Dan Brown is all conjecture," Bishop said of the book’s author. “This is factual.” Bishop said he started writing his own book on the subject two years ago. “It’s a work in progress,” he said. He claims that he has “solved the mystery” of Rennes-le-Chateau by researching tombstones and other historical symbols in the French region. “I have an idea of where everything is buried,” he said of the treasures of Solomon’s Temple. “I’m on a lead to where the items are buried.” He said he is trying “to get backing” on his historical project from National Geographic and the History Channel. Bishop said he was one of the firefighters who responded to the terrorist attacks in New York on Sept. 11, 2001. “I knew 150 of the firefighters who died,” he said. A divorced father of three, Bishop said he moved to Brockton in 2006 to live with his fiance, Lynn. He believes that he was destined to make a great discovery in France, one that the Brooklyn, N.Y., native plans to share with the world. “Why me? I don’t know. Because I went searching, that’s why,” Bishop said. “If you think outside the box, you see a little more than everybody else does.”

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"Why me? ...Because I went searching... ." Yeah, as if nobody else has ever gone searching for buried treasure, hidden Templar underground chambers, the grave of Mary Magdalene, etc. etc., in this region of France.

For Adults Only

From - brace yourself - The Biblical Archaeology Review: Did Captured Ark Afflict Philistines with E.D.? BAR 34:03, May/June 2008 By Aren M. Maeir I’ve always been troubled by the Philistine hemorrhoids. The Hebrew word is ‘opalim (Mylpe). That was supposedly their affliction when they captured the Ark of the Covenant and placed it before a statue of their god Dagon. The story is told about the Ark (sometimes called the Ark of God) when it was resting at Shiloh, cared for by Eli the priest, before it was ultimately brought to Jerusalem by King David. The Israelites had engaged their enemies the Philistines in battle at Ebenezer.a The battle went badly for the Israelites, and Eli’s sons allowed the Ark to be brought from Shiloh to the battlefield at Ebenezer as a paladin in the hope that this would turn the tide of battle. Instead, the Philistines captured the Ark (1Samuel 5–6). The Philistines took the Ark to Ashdod and placed it before a statue of Dagon in the Philistine temple. The next day, the Philistines found Dagon toppled, lying on the ground. They set him back up, but the same thing happened the next day. The text goes on to tell us that “the hand of the Lord was heavy on the Ashdodites.” The Lord afflicted them with “hemorrhoids” (‘opalim). The Philistines then took the Ark to Gath, another city of the Philistine pentapolis. This time the men of Gath were afflicted with “hemorrhoids.” Finally, the Philistines decided to send the Ark back to the Israelites. To mollify the Israelite God, the Philistines included five golden “hemorrhoids” (one for each city of the Philistine pentapolis) and five golden mice. (The text tells us that “hemorrhoids” and mice had been ravaging the land of the Philistines.) Rest of article (including footnoted articles).

The Ark of the Covenant is in - Zimbabwe...

From Time online A Lead on the Ark of the Covenant Thursday, Feb. 21, 2008 By DAVID VAN BIEMA When last we saw the lost Ark of the Covenant in action, it had been dug up by Indiana Jones in Egypt and ark-napped by Nazis, whom the Ark proceeded to incinerate amidst a tempest of terrifying apparitions. But according to Tudor Parfitt, a real life scholar-adventurer, Raiders of the Lost Ark had it wrong, and the Ark is actually nowhere near Egypt. In fact, Parfitt claims he has traced it (or a replacement container for the original Ark), to a dusty bottom shelf in a museum in Harare, Zimbabwe. As Indiana Jones's creators understood, the Ark is one of the Bible's holiest objects, and also one of its most maddening McGuffins. A wooden box, roughly 4 ft. x 2 ft. x 2.5 ft., perhaps gold-plated and carried on poles inserted into rings, it appears in the Good Book variously as the container for the Ten Commandments (Exodus 25:16: "and thou shalt put into the ark the testimony which I shall give thee"); the very locus of God's earthly presence; and as a divine flamethrower that burns obstacles and also crisps some careless Israelites. It is too holy to be placed on the ground or touched by any but the elect. It circles Jericho behind the trumpets to bring the walls tumbling down. The Bible last places the Ark in Solomon's temple, which Babylonians destroyed in 586 BC. Scholars debate its current locale (if any): under the Sphinx? Beneath Jerusalem's Temple Mount (or, to Muslims, the Noble Sanctuary)? In France? Near London's Temple tube station? Parfitt, 63, is a professor at the University of London's prestigious School of Oriental and African Studies. His new book, The Lost Ark of the Covenant: Solving the 2,500 Year Mystery of the Fabled Biblical Ark (HarperOne) along with a History Channel special scheduled for March 2 would appear to risk a fine academic reputation on what might be called a shaggy Ark story. But the professor has been right before, and his Ark fixation stems from his greatest coup. In the 1980s Parfitt lived with a Southern African clan called the Lemba, who claimed to be a lost tribe of Israel. Colleagues laughed at him for backing the claim; in 1999, a genetic marker specific to descendents of Judaism's Temple priests (cohens) was found to appear as frequently among the Lemba's priestly cast as in Jews named Cohen. The Lemba — and Parfitt — made global news. Parfitt started wondering about another aspect of the Lemba's now-credible oral history: a drumlike object called the ngoma lungundu. The ngoma, according to the Lemba, was near-divine, used to store ritual objects, and borne on poles inserted into rings. It was too holy to touch the ground or to be touched by non-priests, and it emitted a "Fire of God" that killed enemies and, occasionally, Lemba. A Lemba elder told Parfitt, "[It] came from the temple in Jerusalem. We carried it down here through Africa." That story, by Parfitt's estimation, is partly true, partly not. He is not at all sure, and has no way of really knowing, whether the Lemba's ancestors left Jerusalem simultaneously with the Ark (assuming, of course, that it left at all). However, he has a theory as to where they might eventually have converged. Lemba myth venerates a city called Senna. In modern-day Yemen, in an area with people genetically linked to the Lemba, Parfitt found a ghost town by that name. It's possible that the Lemba could have migrated there from Jerusalem by a spice route — and from Senna, via a nearby port, they could have launched the long sail down the African coast. As for the Ark? Before Islam, Arabia contained many Jewish-controlled oases, and in the 500s AD, the period's only Jewish kingdom. It abutted Senna. In any case, the area might have beckoned to exiled Jews bearing a special burden. Parfitt also found eighth-century accounts of the Ark in Arabia, by Jews-turned-Muslims. He posits that at some undefined point the Lemba became the caretakers of the Ark, or the ngoma. Parfitt's final hunt for the ngoma, which dropped from sight in the 1940s, landed him in sometimes-hostile territory ("Bullets shattered the rear screen," of his car, he writes). Ark leads had guided him to Egypt, Ethiopia and even New Guinea, until one day last fall his clues led him to a storeroom of the Harare Museum of Human Science in Zimbabwe. There, amidst nesting mice, was an old drum with an uncharacteristic burnt-black bottom hole ("As if it had been used like a cannon," Parfitt notes), the remains of carrying rings on its corners; and a raised relief of crossed reeds that Parfitt thinks reflects an Old Testament detail. "I felt a shiver go down my spine," he writes. Parfitt thinks that whatever the supernatural character of Ark, it was, like the ngoma, a combination of reliquary, drum and primitive weapon, fueled with a somewhat unpredictable proto-gunpowder. That would explain the unintentional conflagrations. The drum element is the biggest stretch, since scripture never straightforwardly describes the Ark that way. He bases his supposition on the Ark's frequent association with trumpets, and on aspects of a Bible passage where King David dances in its presence. Parfitt admits that such a multipurpose object would be "very bizarre" in either culture, but insists, "that's an argument for a connection between them." So, had he found the Ark? Yes and no, he concluded. A splinter has carbon-dated the drum to 1350 AD — ancient for an African wood artifact, but 2,500 years after Moses. Undaunted, Parfitt asserts that "this is the Ark referred to in Lemba tradition" — Lemba legend has it that the original ngoma destroyed itself some 400 years ago and had to be rebuilt on its own "ruins" — "constructed by priests to replace the previous Ark. There can be little doubt that what I found is the last thing on earth in direct descent from the Ark of Moses." Well, perhaps a little doubt. "It seems highly unlikely to me," says Shimon Gibson, a noted biblical archaeologist to whom Parfitt has described his project. "You have to make tremendous leaps." Those who hope to find the original biblical item, moreover, will likely reject Parfitt's claim that the best we can do is an understudy. Animating all searches for the Ark is the hope — and fear — that it will retain the unbridled divine power the Old Testament describes. What would such a wonder look like in our postmodern world? What might it do? Parfitt's passionately crafted new theory, like his first, could eventually be proven right. But if so, unlike the fiction in the movies, it would deny us an explosive resolution.

The Cherubim

I've always been fascinated by the biblical accounts of the Ark of the Covenant and the gold "Cherubim" that guarded it. It's popularly believed that the Ark, along with all the other Treasures of Solomon's Temple were taken by the Babylonians in 586 BCE when Jerusalem was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar. Some of the Temple "implements" were restored to the Jews when the were sent back to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem by - I believe it was Darius - in about 537 BCE, but there was no mention of the Ark of the Covenant and/or the Cherubim being among those Temple implements. Graham Hancock has theorized that the Ark was removed from the Temple a long time before its destruction, perhaps due to the apostasy of the Jewish kings, and that the Ark could be hidden in a church in Axum, Ethiopia. Now, Dr. Sean Kingsley has a new theory about the Cherubim that used to guard the Ark of the Covenant. According to the Catholic Encylopedia, "the Jews at the time of Christ had completely forgotten the appearance of the Temple cherubim. Josephus (Antiq., VIII, 3) says that no one knows or even can guess what form they had." This obviously means that there were no Cherubim present in the reconstructed Temple at the time of Jesus or at the time of the Temple's destruction in 70 CE by the Romans. The latest issue of Minerva magazine features new research by archaeologist and explorer Dr Sean Kingsley, who believes he has found evidence not only for the survival of replicas of the cherubim in Jerusalem in the Roman period, but also what they originally looked like... According to Dr. Kingsley, in the sixth century AD the ancient historian John Malalas was sifting through the municipal archives in the city of Antioch in southern Turkey for material for his book, the Chronicle, when he chanced upon a centuries-old wrinkled report about the fate of Jerusalem's Cherubim. Malalas tells us that after pulling down a local synagogue in AD 70 and replacing it with a new theatre inscribed Ex Praeda Iudaea, 'From the Spoils of Judaea', the emperor Vespasian "built in Antioch the Great, outside the city gate, what are known as the Cherubim, for he fixed there the bronze Cherubim, which Titus his son had found fixed to the temple of Solomon. When he destroyed the temple, he removed them from there and brought them to Antioch with the Seraphim, celebrating a triumph for the victory of the Jews that had taken place during his reign." "This was no tall story invented by John Malalas to spice up his Chronicle", confirms Dr Kingsley. "In fact, the area where the Cherubim were set up over the gates became so famous that the Temple statues lent their name to the entire city district. And there they stayed for over five hundred years. So the Life of St Simeon Stylites, who died in AD 597, describes how the saint saw a vision of Jesus Christ 'at the old wall called that of the Cherubim' and during a later visitation by the devil 'there arose from the so-called Cherubim. a great cry, and weeping and much lamentation'. The co-existence of references to the Cherubim district in different sources proves John Malalas was reporting fact not fiction." Based on the prophet Ezekiel's biblical description of the 'divine presence', accompanied by hybrid guardians incorporating calf's feet, wings, and composite faces of a human, lion, ox and eagle, Dr Kingsley visualises the cherubim as sphinx-like winged creatures with a human head: "Sculpted ivories of the First Temple period excavated at Samaria in Palestine and Arslan Tash in Syria capture the exact confused form described by the prophet Ezekiel. The lion's body is inspired by the sphinx and the human head also wears an Egyptian headdress. However, the graceful wings are purely Near Eastern in inspiration, drawing on the tradition of winged animals like the demon Pazuzu and the Akkadian lion-demoness Lamashtu, which were so popular from Iraq to Palestine in the second and first millennium BC." ...Dr. Kingsley has identified two images which most closely resemble the physical form of the Temple Cherubim in the first century AD: a statue of a rearing woman with outstretched wings and sphinx-like lion body excavated in a bath-house at Ephesus in Turkey in 1896, and a sphinx-like cherub sculpted on to a basalt disc dug up in a house at Antioch itself and now in the Hatay Archaeological Museum. From the Daily Grail (posted June 28, 2007) So - was Josephus full of baloney about no Cherubim being in the Second Temple?