Sheba
Sheba
Sheba
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174<br />
THE ARK OF THE COVENANT AND ISRAELITE INFLUENCES<br />
they may have brought it to Najran when they gave up control of the<br />
Ka’bah.<br />
The best account of the Ark of the Covenant is by Roderick Grierson<br />
and Stuart Munro-Hay, published in 1999. They state that Yusuf, the sixthcentury<br />
A.D. Jewish ruler of Himyar, may have inherited or come into<br />
possession of the Ark. If he had indeed stolen the Ark from Aksum that<br />
could explain his nickname of Masruq (Stolen), and it would certainly have<br />
been a matter of national and religious honor for Aksum’s Christian king<br />
Caleb to retrieve it. Conversely, the Ark may have been in Najran since<br />
early times and Masruq was an ancient Sabaean title known to be used<br />
hundreds of years B.C.E. on the Ethiopia plateau. Grierson and Munro-Hay<br />
suggest that if Caleb had captured the Ark from Yusuf, the Ark culture of<br />
Aksum may have entered the kingdom for the first time around A.D. 520,<br />
hence the Arabic name. Another hypothesis is that Christians fleeing<br />
Himyar before Caleb’s invasion brought the Arabic text of the <strong>Sheba</strong>-<br />
Menelik Cycle with them to prove that Aksum was the resting place of the<br />
Ark, and that Yusuf had stolen the tradition claiming he had the true Ark. If<br />
they had invented the <strong>Sheba</strong>-Menelik Cycle, its geography would of course<br />
been very different and matched a Palestinian setting. Therefore it is likely<br />
that arrival of the <strong>Sheba</strong>-Menelik Cycle Arabic text revived the Ark story<br />
rather than introduced it to Aksum for the first time.<br />
Ethiopian culture is obsessed with the Ark of the Covenant. The main<br />
weakness of Grierson and Munro-Hay’s book, from this writer’s point of<br />
view, is their acceptance that Solomon’s kingdom was in Palestine. Despite<br />
this, Munro-Hay is a leading authority on Aksum, and his work with<br />
Grierson demonstrates the Ark’s extremely nebulous nature (unfortunately<br />
Stuart Munro-Hay died in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in late 2004, six weeks<br />
before this writer arrived to visit him). Even the account in the <strong>Sheba</strong>-<br />
Menelik Cycle does not describe the Ark, only the size of the wooden frame<br />
that Azariah built to replace it. The text refers to the Ark as “Our Lady,”<br />
and traditions report that Azariah stole a very large tablet. The Ethiopian<br />
Orthodox Church is of course fully aware of the description in Exodus, but<br />
its Ark tradition is centered around tablets, not gold boxes adorned by<br />
cherubim.<br />
Every Ethiopian Orthodox church possesses a tabot, a replica of the<br />
original held in the Chapel of the Tablet next to the Church of Mary of Zion<br />
in Aksum. The Ark, under the care of a monk with the title of Atang<br />
(Keeper of the Ark), has never been publicly revealed, but clergy have<br />
occasionally described it as a milky colored stone tablet that emits a bright