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The Ark - A Long Tale
 I’ve long been fascinated by the mystery and cause of the Ark of the Covenant. It is different from the Holy Virgin Marys and Saints which parade on the shoulders of costaleros, who wear white protective garments called el Costal (a special scarf on their heads), while bearing the weight of the float as they wander it through the town. It can be the presence in one moment annually of history, or a regular routine every day at 5 p.m. as in Lourdes, when the image of the Holy Mary or a Saint is taken off the altar to appear in the streets lined with worshipers anxious for a glance, for forgiveness, for blessings, for a moment to see the statue, maybe once in a lifetime.
Prayers seem to get answered after this vision carried on men’s backs in each special location. Statues, holy saints, Virgin Marys/Madonnas either black or white once a year will be paraded through streets or places like Lourdes. I had the pleasure of participating in the nightly parade of Virgin of Lourdes carried on the shoulders of a set of men, led by candles and decorated with flowers and images, as the masses - and there are always masses - held on to their lighted candles with its wind protector as we all slow stepped behind the parade from A to B.
Most of us grew up knowing about Noah’s ark, which is tender enough to be a Bible story that got our attention at an early age. All those animals, two by two, fascinated us, wondering why only two per animal, although we young’uns didn’t really know that it took a male and a female to produce duplications of themselves to produce brothers and sisters.
After creation, after the story of God’s seven day invention of earth and all that should be on or in it, God had allowed humans to increase in number. In fact He had rejoiced as He watched the growth of creatures and humans, but the bad news was, and still is, that the humans were and still are so curious and greedy that they cause crime and corruption. How, I wonder, God still stands by us as we mumble and grumble and crawl and crash and love but also hate or do no good, always accompanying things somehow with a bad. There was from the start wickedness in this world, and look at it now. It dances around all of us like twirling dervish and we are pulled one direction or the other, depending on who we follow or trust, what kind of faith we have or lack, laws we kick into the ground to be able to do what one wants to do no matter how it affects the neighbor, and what our words say and mean to us. We get drawn in to evil, and we rarely can breathe out goodness. But about the only way we can manage ourselves is through prayer and reading the stories of how we got here. And those aren’t aways clear or happy events. Evil is as much on a giant billboard as is God’s houses with its open doors around their communities to give people a chance at hope and love, put cash in the plate please.
Interestingly, way back in the beginning, God limited the life span of humans to a hundred and twenty years - which is ironic, since it is about what the most well-kept and faithful and healthy children of God, whatever religion, might reach today, about 120 years. But back in the day, apparently, according to scripture, men lived a lot longer than that, like Abraham lived 175 yrs., Isaac 180, and don’t forget Methuselah, avid in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, survived on earth 969 days, (supposedly son of Enoch, father of Lamech and grandfather of Noah.) I’m sure they were based on the same as our 365 days of a year, which God must have set up in his six days of labor with one time for rest and worship.
Yet, in the early days, it appears God was getting a bit anxious about human beings increasing in number on earth. He was in control of His creation, and yet, the creation multiplication was almost out of hand due to evil. The problem, apparently in the eyes of God, as humans increased in numbers, they were leaping into corruption, which had not been the point. God even said, almost exhaustingly, “My Spirit will not contend with humans forever, because they are mortal.” And so that’s when the Lord corralled life to 120 years.
What a disappointment how most have torn the heart of God when He realized how corrupt and filthy mankind was and still is. Wickedness dominates, overwhelms. Violence and acts of evil were on every corner of the beautiful earth which God created for His humans, and still isn’t getting any better. As God watched growth, I wonder if that also included the huge and spectacular animals that He had created to share the earth He had built for humans. It seems in history those monster animals were also out of control, fighting, killing, and maybe overproducing as the earth rose to what it is today. It wasn’t working out in the fair and peaceful way God had imagined His creation to be. I wonder if He has experimented with other such situations in other parts of the universe and maybe He has had better luck than the sort of mess that exists today on this earth He created billions of years ago.
And the Lord regretted, it says in the sixth chapter of Genesis, when He saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the heart was only evil ALL the time. That’s when the Lord God decided it was time to shut down the original mankind and try a different approach. Sadly, God was heartbroken and regretted that He had even thought of creating man. So, He decided to clean it up. He shouted out, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created - and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground.” But, He kept alive Noah. Noah was His man, a good man. Noah had done it right. Maybe from Noah, God could build a new environment, a new lifestyle, a new hope. It was if you don’t succeed, try again. Noah was our first savior, as such. God loved Noah and Noah loved God and did what he was asked to do. He ran without stumbling and obtained God’s heavenly promises. Noah built and used appropriately the first Ark, the one ordered by God to save the good things He had created.
Now there are issues of Arks. Of course, we all know Noah’s ark from our childhood years. But now after the death of Moses, and the new leadership with Joshua, God appointed and gave a chance to Joshua to be the one to command the 12 priests representing the 12 tribes of Israel to build and care for the Ark of the Covenant. This Ark, had a different power. It was/is a treasure of the Israelites and Christianity, sort of a giant wooden chest covered in pure gold, and it houses the two tablets that God gave, the second time around, to Moses to get his people in order. As vital and important as it was, only one person, the high priest of the Israelites could see this precious Ark and that was only on the day of Yom Kippur, which is the Day of Atonement.
It had a crazy drama history, almost like an Olympic or basketball final. Everyone that saw it wanted to win it, yet it had such a mystery, often really bad results, so was questioned if it had bad results or brought victory. In the beginning of the Ark - all of its gold parts and holy pieces - the Levites toted the Ark as they wandered through the wilderness. After the arrival in the Promised Land, it resided at Shiloh, but could be taken into Battle. King David hauled it to Jerusalem, where it was placed in the Temple built by his son King Solomon. But when the Tabernacle was no longer needed to travel, King Solomon had constructed the enormous Temple in Jerusalem divided into two rooms, the Holy Place, and the Most Holy Place (Holy of Holies). The inner room was supposedly to be the dwelling place of the God of Israel, sitting on a solid slab of gold that rested on the Ark of the Covenant.
At last, God had a symbol of Israel’s special relationship with Him. Hezekiah was the last noted with the Ark. And since then, no one has been able to find it. Pompey had desecrated the temple in 63 BC. After Pompey de-sanctified the Holy of Holies by entering it, he did leave the temple intact, but plundered the Temple treasury. When Herod the Great built the second Temple in Judaea - took 46 years - Gentiles were forbidden to enter, so who knows where it was and is hidden today although there are claimants.
There has been speculation for many centuries that the Ark of Covenant is possibly in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. There are replicas of the tablets. But interesting is the story of Menelik I, who is said to have brought the Ark to Ethiopia while a forgery was left in the Temple of Jerusalem. Menelik I was the first Emperor of Ethiopia, possibility a son of King Solomon of Ancient Israel, and of Makeda, the Queen of Sheba. He was conceived when his father Solomon tricked his visiting mother, the Queen of Sheba, into sleeping with him. Menelik was raised as a Jew in his homeland of Egypt. A possibility is that his father gave him the Ark of Covenant (that’s a whopper of a gift and who carried it) but since no one has seen it, not even the holiest of the holies, no one has proof. Apparently the Solomonic dynasty of Ethiopia, that survived with few interruptions over 3000 years, ended with the death of Hailie Selassie in 1974. It’s a toss here or there. Are there records about this? But the exclamation point is that no one has seen the Ark of Covenant in centuries. So rumors live on and somewhere, one prays, there really is the original Ark in a safe place, even though we will probably never see the golden Ark that twisted and turned and was victorious to the great religious heroes.
~ Rev
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audrey@audreytaylorgonzalez.com
www.audreytaylorgonzalez.com
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