Where Is the Ark?

A box that fills a house with cloud

In today’s haftarah for the second day of Sukkot, 1 Kings 8, Shlomo gathers Israel "at the feast in the month Ethanim, which is the seventh month." The priests carry the Ark of the Covenant into the Holy of Holies, "and the cloud filled the house of Hashem, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud" (8:10–11).

What was this Ark, that the glory came to rest on it? What happened to it? It is missing from every account of the Second Temple. Will it come back? And if it does not, what does that mean? Today we draw on the sages, and on two modern teachers: Rabbi Efraim Palvanov and Rabbi Ariel Cohen Alloro.

What the Ark was

The Torah describes it plainly. It was a chest of acacia wood, overlaid with gold inside and out, with rings and poles that were never to be removed (Exodus 25:10–15). Its lid, the kapporet or mercy seat, was one piece of gold with two cherubim facing each other, their wings spread over it (25:17–20).

Inside it lay the tablets of the covenant. Beside it Moshe placed the Torah scroll he had written, "that it may be there for a witness against thee" (Deuteronomy 31:26). The Torah set the jar of manna and Aaron's staff that budded before the Testimony (Exodus 16:33–34; Numbers 17:10), and Hebrews 9:4 counts them with the Ark's contents. By Shlomo's day, 1 Kings 8:9 says, only the tablets were inside.

But the Torah's own emphasis is not on what was inside. It is on what came from above it:

"There I will meet with thee, and I will commune with thee from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim which are upon the ark of the testimony." (Exodus 25:22)

Moshe alone could enter the Holy of Holies whenever he wished and hear the voice from between the cherubim (Numbers 7:89). Will Messiah, the prophet like Moshe, have the same access in the Third Temple? Ezekiel's "prince" may come no further than the gate (Ezekiel 46:2).

The Mishkan as a small world

The sages saw the Mishkan as a model of the whole creation and of the human being. Rabbi Palvanov, citing Midrash HaGadol, reads the fifteen materials of the offering (Exodus 25:3–7) as the parts of a person:

• Metals: gold is the soul, silver the body, and copper the voice.

• Dyed wool: the blue tekhelet is the veins, the purple argaman the flesh, and the scarlet shani the blood.

• Coverings: the fine linen is the intestines, the goat hair the hair, the rams' skins the skin of the face, and the tachash skins the scalp.

• Wood, oil, spices and stones: the acacia wood is the bones, the oil for the light the eyes, and the spices the nose, mouth and palate. The precious stones are the kidneys and the heart.

Midrash HaGadol on Terumah carries the parallel through the whole structure:

• The boards set in their sockets are like the ribs set in the spine and the mountains set in the earth.

• The curtain between the Holy and the Holy of Holies is like the diaphragm between the heart and the belly, and like the firmament between the upper waters and the lower.

• The seven lamps of the menorah are the seven pillars of wisdom and the seven lights of heaven.

• The showbread is the food within the body and the earth that feeds every creature.

• The four coverings are the four senses and the four directions.

When it reaches the Holy of Holies, the midrash makes the Ark the heart:

• The Ark holds the Torah with its 248 positive and 365 negative commandments. The body has 248 limbs and 365 sinews.

• The cherubim spread their wings over the Ark as the lungs spread over the heart, "the place of wisdom and understanding," and as the birds fly over the earth.

• The voice came from between the two cherubim, as the voice comes from between the lungs.

The midrash ends with a promise. Hashem will renew all three: the Mishkan ("My tabernacle also shall be with them," Ezekiel 37:27), the body in the resurrection ("when I have opened your graves," Ezekiel 37:13), and the world ("new heavens and a new earth," Isaiah 65:17).

Kabbalistic texts match the Mishkan's ten main parts to the ten sefirot. Rabbi Palvanov, a biologist, adds that they match the ten main systems of the body. At the center of that whole world, and of every person, sits the Ark: the heart, where the voice is heard.

Its journey

The Talmud traces where the Mishkan stood from the Exodus to Shlomo's Temple (Zevachim 118b).

It was built in the first year after the Exodus, and Israel carried it through the wilderness for the remaining thirty-nine years. When they crossed the Jordan, it stood at Gilgal for fourteen years: seven while the land was conquered and seven while it was divided among the tribes. From there it went up to Shiloh, where it stood longest, 369 years, through the whole period of the Judges. It left Shiloh when the Ark was lost to the Philistines in the days of Eli. After that it stood at Nov and then at Givon for fifty-seven years, until the Temple was built in Jerusalem.

The numbers add up. The first year, plus 39, 14, 369 and 57, comes to exactly 480 years. That is the figure the haftarah's own chapter gives: "in the four hundred and eightieth year after the children of Israel were come out of the land of Egypt… he began to build the house of Hashem" (1 Kings 6:1).

Rabbi Palvanov notes that the number 39 keeps coming back:

• the 39 kinds of work forbidden on Shabbat, learned from the work of building the Mishkan (Mishnah Shabbat 7:2; Shabbat 49b)

• the 39 lashes, "forty less one" (Mishnah Makkot 3:10)

• the 39 curses of Eden in the Midrash

• tal, the dew of resurrection in Isaiah 26:19, whose letters add up to 39

Perhaps they belong together. The labor that built the Mishkan is the labor we rest from on Shabbat. And the dew that raises the dead answers the curses that brought death into the world.

The Ark went to war. When the Ark set out, Moshe said, "Rise up, Hashem, and let thine enemies be scattered" (Numbers 10:35). Israel carried it into battle. In the days of Eli the Philistines captured it, but plagues and tumors struck them wherever they took it, and they sent it back (1 Samuel 4–6).

David brought it to Jerusalem before there was a Temple. He took Jerusalem and brought the Ark up. Uzzah died on the way when he reached out to steady it (2 Samuel 6). Later David bought the threshing floor on the mount where the Temple would stand (2 Samuel 24). The Mishkan itself stayed behind until Shlomo built the Temple and brought everything into it.

Shishak. In the fifth year of King Rechavam (1 Kings 14:25), Pharaoh Shishak marched on Jerusalem and "took away the treasures of the house of Hashem… he even took away all" (1 Kings 14:26). Rechavam replaced the gold shields with bronze. Did Shishak take the Ark? Rabbi Palvanov notes the Bubastite Portal at Karnak, which records the campaign. He answers no, following the Rambam.

Josiah. The Rambam writes that Shlomo foresaw the Temple would be destroyed and built a hidden chamber deep beneath the Temple Mount to hide the Ark (Hilchot Beit HaBechirah 4:1). The Talmud says it was King Josiah who hid it there, along with the jar of manna, the flask of anointing oil, and Aaron's staff (Yoma 52b). The verse behind it is Josiah's command to the Levites: "Put the holy ark in the house which Solomon… did build" (2 Chronicles 35:3).

The Second Temple had no Ark. The Mishnah says that in its place, on Yom Kippur, the High Priest set the incense on a bare rock, the Even Shetiyah or Foundation Stone, which rose three fingerbreadths above the ground (Mishnah Yoma 5:2). The Talmud says the world was founded from that stone (Yoma 54b), and the Zohar calls it the point from which creation spread out. It lies today under the Dome of the Rock.

Where did it go?

The Mishnah in Yoma says that after the Ark "was taken" (nitlah), only the stone remained. The Talmud (Yoma 53b–54a) asks what "taken" means, and from there the opinions divide.

Exiled to Babylon. Some sages say the Ark went into exile. Rabbi Eliezer learns this from 2 Chronicles 36:10, where Nebuchadnezzar carries Judah's king to Babylon "with the goodly vessels of the house of Hashem." Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai learns it from Isaiah's warning to Chizkiyahu that "nothing shall be left" (Isaiah 39:6).

Hidden where it stood. Rabbi Yehuda ben Lakish says the Ark never left the Temple Mount. He reads the verse from this morning's haftarah, that the Ark's poles "are there to this day" (1 Kings 8:8), as meaning it is there still. The Mishnah tells of a priest who noticed a paving stone in the Temple court that looked different from the rest. He died before he could tell anyone, and so they knew the Ark was hidden there (Mishnah Shekalim 6:1–2). The Talmud names Josiah as the king who hid it (Yoma 52b), and the Rambam writes that Shlomo had built a hidden chamber for it long before (Hilchot Beit HaBechirah 4:1).

Mount Nebo. An older tradition says the prophet Jeremiah carried the Ark out of Jerusalem before the Babylonians came. He hid it in a cave on Mount Nebo, the mountain east of the Jordan where Moshe died, and sealed the entrance (2 Maccabees 2:4–8).

Ethiopia. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church says Menelik, son of Shlomo and the Queen of Sheba, brought the Ark to Aksum, where a church claims to guard it to this day. Rabbi Palvanov rejects this. A British officer and scholar of Ethiopia was let into the sanctuary in the 1940s and found only a medieval wooden box. Palvanov traces the Menelik story to the Kebra Nagast, written centuries after the fact. He notes that it gave rise to the Rastafarian movement, with its talk of Zion, the Lion of Judah, and "Jah."

Egypt, Africa and Arabia. Palvanov mentions a suggestion that the Ark was kept for a time at the Jewish temple on Elephantine, an island in the Nile. Tudor Parfitt, in The Lost Ark of the Covenant, followed a trail to the Lemba people of southern Africa and their sacred objects. He also gathered traditions placing the Ark in a cave near Mecca or near Baghdad. His search took him across Africa, Arabia and Papua New Guinea, and as Palvanov reads it, it ends without the Ark.

Rome. A popular theory says the Romans took the Ark with the Temple vessels shown on the Arch of Titus. Palvanov rejects this on simple grounds. The Romans destroyed the Second Temple, and the Second Temple had no Ark. They took the menorah, as the Arch shows, but not the Ark. He adds that a friend, Rabbi Harry Moskowitz, was given permission to go down into the Vatican vaults and did not find it there either.

Under the Temple Mount, seen. A story from the 1980s says Rabbis Shlomo Goren and Yehuda Getz reached the hidden chamber while digging near the Temple Mount and saw the Ark. Palvanov tells it as a report he cannot confirm, and says the news set off riots when it came out. He also criticizes the decision after 1967 to leave the Mount in the hands of the Waqf, and the removal of earth from beneath it since then.

A spy agency's vision. A 1988 CIA remote-viewing report, recently declassified, described the Ark underground, in a damp, dark place beneath domes, among Arabic speakers.

Not in this world. Palvanov offers one more possibility of his own. The Ark may have been taken out of this world altogether, to return with the Third Temple when it comes down from heaven.

What was it, really?

The cherubim. The familiar image is of chubby winged infants. Rabbi Palvanov says that image comes from the Greek Cupid, not from the Tanakh. The cherubim first appear guarding Eden with a turning, flaming sword (Genesis 3:24). Throughout Scripture, angels carry swords and ride chariots, and Hashem is Tzeva'ot, the Lord of hosts. Ezekiel calls the four-faced living creatures cherubim (Ezekiel 10:15, 20), with the faces of a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle (1:10). The Talmud's definition is ke-ravya, "like a child," meaning a child's face (Sukkah 5b; Chagigah 13b). Rabbi Palvanov relates keruv to merkavah, chariot, and points to the winged guardian figures of the ancient Near East, the shedu, karibu, and lamassu, with a man's face, a lion's body, an ox's feet, and an eagle's wings. He asks whether the cherubim looked more like these.

The sages were troubled by the images themselves: how could a people so opposed to idols set golden figures in the Holy of Holies? One answer is that the whole Mishkan was a concession after the golden calf. Rashi holds the command came after the calf, since "there is no before and after in the Torah" (Rashi on Exodus 31:18), and the Midrash says the gold of the Mishkan came to atone for the gold of the calf (Tanchuma, Terumah 8). The Torah still tells it first because Hashem "brings the cure before the blow" (Megillah 13b).

Rabbi Cohen Alloro takes the chariot imagery further still. He reads the clouds of glory as the clouds around God's chariots, and the angels as a warrior host that will come down to fight for Israel at the end.

The "electric" Ark. Rabbi Palvanov cites the Ba'al HaTurim as finding a letter-substitution code in the words bein shnei ("from between the two" cherubim) that yields chashmal, the word Ezekiel uses for the glow of the chariot (Ezekiel 1:4). The Septuagint translated chashmal as elektron, and in modern Hebrew it means electricity. He also cites Rabbi Chaim Vital, writing the Arizal's teaching, that the secret of chashmal is in "flesh and sinews," and notes that this came centuries before Galvani and Volta found that muscles and nerves run on electric current. From these sources he reads Uzzah's death (2 Samuel 6:7) as the power of the Ark striking him when he touched it, and the Ark's power in battle as the same force.

The Ark that took no space. The Talmud teaches, "The place of the Ark was not included in the measurement" (Megillah 10b; Yoma 21a; Bava Batra 99a). The Holy of Holies was twenty cubits wide, yet from each side wall to the Ark measured ten cubits. The Ark was there, and it took up no room. The Talmud tells of others for whom space contracted: the earth "leapt" for Eliezer, for Jacob, and for Avishai (Sanhedrin 95a), and Jacob's ladder was 8,000 parasangs wide (Chullin 91b), though elsewhere the Talmud gives the whole world as 6,000 (Pesachim 94a). Rabbi Palvanov cites the Zohar, which describes Noah's ark as larger inside than out. He suggests the two arks, tevah and aron, work on the same principle, and offers length contraction in relativity as a possible explanation.

Will it return?

At first our sources seem to answer differently. Read together, they describe one hope in stages.

The Ark above. Moshe did not design the Ark. He built it "after their pattern, which was shewed thee in the mount" (Exodus 25:40; Hebrews 8:5). The Ark in the Holy of Holies was a copy of one that already stood above. John sees that original: "And the temple of God was opened in heaven, and there was seen in his temple the ark of his testament: and there were lightnings, and voices, and thunderings, and an earthquake, and great hail" (Revelation 11:19). It appears at the seventh trumpet, when the kingdoms of the world become the kingdom of Hashem and His Messiah. As when the Ark set out in the wilderness, "Rise up, Hashem, and let thine enemies be scattered" (Numbers 10:35), its going forth means the Lord is going out to war. This is the same picture Rabbi Palvanov gives of an Ark that works like a chariot, and Rabbi Cohen Alloro gives of a warrior host coming down in cloud. So the Ark was never lost. Its original is kept above, and it moves first.

The Temple comes down. Rashi teaches that "the future Sanctuary we await is built and perfected; it will be revealed and come from heaven" (Rashi on Sukkah 41a). Rabbi Palvanov adds "Except Hashem build the house" (Psalm 127:1) and "the Sanctuary, O Lord, which thy hands have established" (Exodus 15:17). What is built above is brought down. Rabbi Palvanov says plainly, "The Ark of the Covenant will return." If the Ark Shlomo hid is still beneath the Mount, as the Rambam writes, it will be brought out. If it has been taken out of this world, it will come with the House. He reads this morning's haftarah the same way: as the priests brought the Ark in and the cloud filled Shlomo's House, "we're awaiting the return of the Ark of the Covenant as well," with the clouds of glory.

Built by human hands too. The Rambam writes that the King Messiah will build the Sanctuary (Hilchot Melachim 11:1). He does not count the Ark among the vessels a Temple must have (Hilchot Beit HaBechirah 1:5), and the Second Temple served for centuries without one. As Rabbi Palvanov puts it, "Even if it doesn't return, we can still build a Third Temple." He also holds that the two are not opposed: what we build from below and what Hashem sends from above meet, as the House built by hand and the House revealed from heaven become one. The Ark's return is a gift that crowns the House. It is not a condition for building it.

Then no one looks for it. Jeremiah describes what comes after:

"In those days… they shall say no more, The ark of the covenant of Hashem: neither shall it come to mind: neither shall they remember it; neither shall they visit it; neither shall that be done any more." (Jeremiah 3:16)

He is not saying the Ark will be missing. He is saying no one will need to look for it. Rashi explains: "For your entire assembly will be holy, and I will dwell in it as though it were the Ark." The next verse says the same about the city: "At that time they shall call Jerusalem the throne of Hashem; and all the nations shall be gathered unto it" (3:17). The mercy seat was Hashem's throne between the cherubim. In that day the whole city is His throne, and the whole people is His Ark.

So the pieces fit together. The heavenly Ark goes out first, to war. The House comes down, and whatever Ark was hidden is revealed with it. And the Presence it once carried comes to rest on a holy people in a holy city, so fully that no one thinks to go looking for a box. This morning we heard the priests carry the Ark into Shlomo's House, and the cloud filled it until no one could stand to serve. That is what we wait for this Sukkot: not a box recovered from a cave, but the glory returning to its place. The Midrash calls the Ark the heart, and the Talmud says the cherubim above it faced one another whenever Israel did the will of Hashem (Bava Batra 99a). If we want the voice to speak again from between them, we begin where the Ark always stood: in hearts turned toward Hashem and toward one another. Chag sameach.