Sheba

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CHAPTER SEVEN The Ark of the Covenant and Israelite Influences T his final chapter discusses the Ark of the Covenant tradition in the Old Testament and in Arabia and Ethiopia. It also examines Hebraic groups in northeast and southern Africa and the Israelite nature of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. The Old Testament tells us that Hebrew and Arabs share the same ancestry, respectively descended from Abraham’s sons Isaac and Ishmael. Hagar, Ishmael’s mother, was a concubine from Msrm, translated in Genesis 21 as Egypt, but more likely a settlement in Asir, Arabia. Sarah, Abraham’s wife and Isaac’s mother, was angry about the birth of Ishmael, so Abraham told Hagar to leave. Desolate, she wandered in the direction of br sb (probably Khamis Mushait in Asir) and abandoned her baby under a bush. Then she heard the voice of an angel, who told her that she must care for the child because he would father a great nation. Arabs and Jews share many traditions, so when Muhammad began preaching Jews and Arabs alike recognized him as the long awaited Arab prophet. Muhammad declared that he had not come to found a new religion but to return the world to the faith of Abraham, from which it had deviated. For that reason the Muslim sacred text, the Qur’an, refers to the Queen of <strong>Sheba</strong> as a convert to Islam not the Israelite faith. Until the reign of Solomon the Ark of the Covenant played a major role in the Israelite religion. There are two Old Testament accounts describing the Ark. First, Exodus states that after the Hebrew had fled from Egypt God instructed the Prophet Moses at Mt. Sinai to construct a goldcovered wooden box (Latin: arca), measuring 115 by 70 by 70 centimeters, surmounted by two kneeling gold cherubim (high-ranking angels) facing each other. It was here that Moses received the Ten Commandments and
QUEEN OF SHEBA AND BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP 169 ordered the slaughter of 3000 Hebrew as punishment for worshipping Ba’al, symbolized by the Golden Calf. After the massacre, Moses climbed the mountain a second time to convince God to spare the remaining Hebrew and to replace the divinely inscribed stone tablets he, Moses, had smashed in anger. When Moses returned he had become a mysterious being whose face was hidden by a veil, and in this new frightening persona he supervised the building of the Ark of the Covenant and its ritual accouterments. The new tablets were placed inside the box and were carried by the Levites, who had massacred the deviant worshippers of Ba’al. The second Old Testament account of the Ark is from Deuteronomy and states that it was a plain box made from acacia wood. Both Arab and Ethiopian traditions adhere to the description of a wooden box. The story of the Exodus is marked by phenomena associated with volcanic activity; therefore it should come as no surprise that the Mt. Sinai in the Sinai peninsula near modern Israel has no record - until about the fourth century A.D. - of veneration as a biblical site. The area is igneous but lacks a volcanic past. It is more likely that the original Sinai was a part of the volcanic ring of fire in northern Yemen. The Hebrew set out for the Promised Land: by day guided by a column of smoke; by night, a column of fire. They believed that God himself was in the Ark. During encampment the Ark was placed in a tent of its own. Hebrew and Arab traditions maintain that the Ark brought terrible destruction to its enemies. It was supposed to have leveled the walls of Jericho but, as Kathleen Kenyon discovered, the present site of Jericho does not correspond with the Old Testament account and was, as this book argues, in another yet unexplored location. After Joshua overran the Promised Land the Philistines captured the Ark in battle but returned it after they were decimated by plague. Other reports say that people were struck dead if they approached the Ark inappropriately or disrespectfully. Many theories have been advanced that the Ark was a primitive but powerful device of electrocution. Some, who believe the box to have been silk-covered, suggest that it was used like a giant Van der Graaf accelerator to generate a lethal electrical charge. Others believe the sacred stones inside the Ark and at other shrines were meteorites that for a number of years retained some sort of radioactive or other destructive force such as a virulent bacillus. Arab traditions also associate the Ark and holy tablets or stones with death. Arab accounts say an Amalekite-Jurhum tribal alliance captured the Ark from the Israelites some time after Solomon’s death, when the latter unsuccessfully attacked Mecca. The Jurhum threw the Ark on to a
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Queen of Sheba and Biblical Scholar
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CHAPTER ONE Sheba, Zionism, and the
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CHAPTER TWO The Search for Evidence
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CHAPTER THREE Writing the Old Testa
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Sheba

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