Your fallacy is believing that human society is or ever has been anything other than a story upon another story.Originally Posted by T.G.G. Moogly
Stories upon stories upon stories upon...
Your fallacy is believing that human society is or ever has been anything other than a story upon another story.Stories upon stories upon stories upon...
"Banish me from Eden when you will, but first let me eat of the tree of knowledge."
Few if any of us believe the Ark had supernatural powers. It might have had special natural powers, but this is not a focus of this thread. For our purpose the Ark was a wooden box significant to the religion of the Israelites which may or may not have been decorated with precious metals.
In this view, we can assume that an Ark did exist; indeed some writers are concerned with the opposite problem: Were there two or more Arks which have been conflated to make the accounts confusing? Boxes with similar shape and purpose have been attested among Semites and Egyptians, most famously in the tomb of Tutankhamen, successor to the monotheist Akhenaton.
Assuming Solomon's Temple existed and featured an inner room called the "Holy of Holies", should we not assume that something was placed in that special place? Not a magical device perhaps, nor a throne for a powerful alien named Yahweh but something, if only a wooden box containing a few revered writings or trinkets?
And if such an inexpensive or interchangeable box went missing, couldn't one of the Kings or High Priests of Judaea have replaced it, perhaps decorating it with gold leaf? Just building the Temple was a big and very expensive project; we can assume the Temple was equipped with lavish furnishings. Here is a description I found on the 'Net:
Deliberately leaving the inner sanctum empty would seem peculiar to me. Had an unimportant object gone missing, it could have been replaced. I think that an "irreplaceable" object had been lost — before the Second Temple was even built — and the Holy of Holies was left empty as a poignant reminder of that loss.In the year 63 BCE, the Roman general Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, in the process of conquering Israel and all the surrounding territories, entered the most sacred place in the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. What he found shocked him. For this temple was different in one crucial respect from all other temples.
Pompey's incursion was made upon what the Jews called their second temple. The original version of the first temple was supposed to have been a magnificent structure in Jerusalem constructed by Judah's King Solomon on land purchased by his father, King David. No archeological evidence - not one brick - has been found of anything remotely on that scale existing in what appears to have been at the time, the tenth century BCE, a tiny, sleepy kingdom. But by the reign of King Josiah, in the seventh century BCE, a central temple certainly existed in Jerusalem. It was destroyed by King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon in 586 B.C. Construction on a new temple began with the return from exile in Babylon in 537 BCE.
That was the second temple. The sacrifices and purity rituals that were at the center of the Jewish religion were performed in and around such a temple in Jerusalem for more than half a millennium. (Herod, beginning in 19 BCE, built a version that may truly have qualified as magnificent.) And it was into an incarnation of this second temple that Pompey, then perhaps the most powerful man on earth, intruded. "As victor he claimed the right to enter the temple," the Roman historian Tacitus explains. (Tacitus, the only source for this incident, is writing, alas, more than one hundred and sixty years after the fact.)
The temple's inner sanctum - the Holy of Holies: Yahweh's sanctuary - was supposed to be entered by only one person, the high priest, on only one day a year: Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Pompey forced his way in. And here, according to Tacitus, is what Pompey found:
Nothing. "The sanctuary was empty."
So if Solomon did place an Ark in the Temple, when did it go missing?
The most likely solution might be (c) It was confiscated by the 1st Pharaoh of the 22nd dynasty, who treated the "kingdoms" of Judaea etc. as vassals and chose to punish a disloyal king.
What does the original Hebrew look like? "He even took away all"? Doesn't this resemble a euphemism for the mournful "Everything, even the Holiest of Holies."?that Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem: And he took away the treasures of the house of the Lord, and the treasures of the king's house; he even took away all:
If the Ark was taken away by Egyptians in the 9th century, what happened to it? Was it placed in a special hiding spot as in the Indiana Jones movie? Or was it simply burned or discarded after any precious metals were taken?
Another likely solution that I will consider in a later post is (j): Priests of Yahweh removed the Ark at a time when King Manasses was desecrating the temple with icons of Yahweh's enemy Ba'al. Surely this would have been a logical action for those priests to take: Yahweh would not want to cohabit with the worshiping of foreign gods.
The Bible doesn't tell us when the Ark disappears — though presumably some of the top people in Jerusalem would have known! Was the loss of the Ark such a sad topic that they wanted to suppress any discussion of it? Did they leave us a clue in scripture?
It wouldn't be the only time that the Bible's authors preferred to leave a cryptic clue. Genesis Chapter 46 contains a logic puzzle which, when solved, seems to reveal a fact the authors wanted to keep semi-secret: Joseph's wife Asenath was Joseph's own half-niece.
I am drawn to the description of King Josiah's restoration of the First Temple. The account in 2 Chronicles goes into huge detail, e.g.
This passage is full of redundancy, and unnecessary detail. Even the overseers of the construction get their one verse of fame, never mentioned again. Yet for the holiest object in the universe all we get is this cryptic mention
... with only deafening silence about whether the order was even obeyed. This strikes me as exactly what an author might write if he wanted to let us know the Ark was missing, but didn't want to say so explicitly. And, as we shall see, the disappearance of the Ark wouldn't be known to the King and most Judahites until the Levites were unable to obey the command to return it.
The same story is written up in 2 Kings as well, where the Ark isn't mentioned at all. That account closes with
Despite that Josiah was the most obedient of all Kings, Yahweh casts off his chosen city and the sacred house where his Name resided. Was he abandoning his Ark? Or abandoning the Temple and the whole City because the Ark wasn't there anymore?
Another much-praised King was Hezekiah, father of Manasses the Heretic, and great-grandfather of Josiah. Was the Ark still in the Temple in Hezekiah's time? So it would seem, e.g.
Yahweh certainly seems to still be where he belongs: in his house and "between the cherubims." And a few verses later we learn that Yahweh did indeed reply to King Hezekiah.
Contrast this with King Josiah; he gets a message from Yahweh but not directly: it comes via Huldah the Prophetess. When Josiah tries to communicate with Yahweh in the Temple, he "stood by a pillar" rather than approaching the place "between the cherubims." And Yahweh doesn't answer. There's no mention of any cherubim. (These facts are the same in both the 2 Chronicles and the 2 Kings accounts, although 2 Chronicles doesn't mention the "pillar.")
So, if we take all this on face value, the Ark went missing sometime between the reigns of Hezekiah and Josiah. Obviously this tragedy happened in the time of King Manasses, the heretic who desecrated the Temple with icons of Ba'al and other foreign gods.
Be wary of looking around for "secret clues" and ancient conspiracies in Scripture; that way lies madness, and a path well-traveled.
"Banish me from Eden when you will, but first let me eat of the tree of knowledge."
Caution is appropriate, but there can still be much of interest in the Bible. I've already mentioned (#2) that Psalm 104 appears to be borrowed from the Hymn to Aten; surely that is a suggestive tidbit. (Are there other copies of that Hymn outside Egypt?)
Genesis 46 contains apparent arithmetic errors, but if stripped of its verbosity would form an elegant logic puzzle! Find the missing descendant of Jacob. Perhaps it was just arithmetic bungling, but one can still appreciate the (inadvertant?) logic puzzle. Here's an example of how carefully that logic puzzle appears to be constructed:
Jacob's son's wives are excluded (redundant?) ... but not Joseph's wife Asenath: she did not "come with Jacob into Egypt": she was already there. If the writer felt the need to exclude the sons' wives, why did he do it in this subtotal, rather than the grand total? (Jacob had one daughter, Dinah. The Bible doesn't explicitly mention any children for her but tells us she was raped.)
The idea that the Ark was taken away for safe-keeping in the time of Manasses makes sense to me. Why should we assume Pharaoh Shoshank I took it? The inner sanctuary where the Ark was held may have been hard to find, or its doors hard to open. Even if found, the Ark might have been a worthless-looking wooden box.
And there is a recent archaeological discovery which fits this chronology and may tell us where the Levites took the Ark! I'll write about that when I have the energy to compose another long post.
There's a difference between noting literary influences and suposing ancient logic puzzles, though. I think people often make the mistake of treating the Scriptures as though they are and were always meant to be a sort of coded message to themselves in the present. The Bible isn't trying to tell you anything, at the end of the day; it was written in many different bursts in phases as you clearly know, and its original audiences are both unknown for the most part and also long dead.Caution is appropriate, but there can still be much of interest in the Bible. I've already mentioned (#2) that Psalm 104 appears to be borrowed from the Hymn to Aten; surely that is a suggestive tidbit. (Are there other copies of that Hymn outside Egypt?)
Genesis 46 contains apparent arithmetic errors, but if stripped of its verbosity would form an elegant logic puzzle! Find the missing descendant of Jacob. Perhaps it was just arithmetic bungling, but one can still appreciate the (inadvertant?) logic puzzle. Here's an example of how carefully that logic puzzle appears to be constructed:
Jacob's son's wives are excluded (redundant?) ... but not Joseph's wife Asenath: she did not "come with Jacob into Egypt": she was already there. If the writer felt the need to exclude the sons' wives, why did he do it in this subtotal, rather than the grand total? (Jacob had one daughter, Dinah. The Bible doesn't explicitly mention any children for her but tells us she was raped.)
The idea that the Ark was taken away for safe-keeping in the time of Manasses makes sense to me. Why should we assume Pharaoh Shoshank I took it? The inner sanctuary where the Ark was held may have been hard to find, or its doors hard to open. Even if found, the Ark might have been a worthless-looking wooden box.
And there is a recent archaeological discovery which fits this chronology and may tell us where the Levites took the Ark! I'll write about that when I have the energy to compose another long post.
"Banish me from Eden when you will, but first let me eat of the tree of knowledge."
I misled when I labeled my inference a "cryptic clue."
King Hezekiah visits "between the cherubim" and converses with God. King Josiah cannot do this. The inference is clear, not cryptic at all.
The verse in 2 Chronicles would seem logical, had the Ark recently gone missing. If not, how do YOU read that mysteriously brief verse?
I am definitely no Biblical expert; many of you are probably more knowledgeable than I. I hope one of you picks up the burden and provides a complete list of Jewish Temples. Or at least double-check the following summary:
(0) Ignore any shrines or tabernacles prior to the First Temple.
(1) The First Temple, built as early as the 10th century BC, nominally by King Solomon. This Temple was expanded, eg. by Hezekiah, renovated by Josiah, and destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon.
(2) The Second Temple, built after Cyrus the Great released the Jews from bondage.
(2a) Herod's Temple, although a major expansion of the 2nd Temple, is not listed separately.
(3) "The Third Temple" -- a hypothetical future Temple in Jerusalem.
(4) A Temple built at Elephantine, Egypt while the First Temple still stood.
(5a, 5b, 5c) Ignore for now any conjectured shrines or tabernacles built after the Second Temple was built.
Experts? Is this List correct and complete?
ETA: Supporting an early construction of the Elephantine Temple:
http://www.ancientsudan.org/articles...ephantine.html
Most scholars support the suggestion that the Jews settled in Elephantine during the reign of Psammetichusis I. Out of three succeeding Judean kings, contemporary with Psammetichusis I, Manasseh is thought most likely to have been the Judean king who dispatched the Jewish troops that settled at Elephantine.
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