By J. Douglas Kenyon
Raiders of the Lost Ark, filmmaker Steven Spielberg’s 1981 Indiana-Jones blockbuster, was not just fictional entertainment. Indeed, seventy two years earlier, a group of rogue archaeologists had set out—taboos notwithstanding—to excavate Jerusalem’s holy Temple Mount in search of the lost Ark of the Covenant and other treasures of King Solomon. In October of 2021, according to the Smithsonian Magazine and its web site, a new book by journalist Andrew Lawler, Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World’s Most Contested City, detailed how an illicit 1909 project failed in its clandestine intentions, but still managed to trigger a mideast crisis, involving Jerusalem, Palestine, the Ottoman empire, and the British Army. (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-secret-excavation-of-jerusalem-180978888/?)
Valter Juvelius, an obscure Scandinavian scholar, Lawler explained, claimed to have unraveled a mysterious biblical code placing the treasure in an ancient tunnel beneath Jerusalem, and he persuaded Captain Montagu Brownlow Parker, veteran of the Boer war and brother of an English earl, to support the plan. With the substantial money raised, they secretly launched a project to carry out their quest. For the rest of their story you will need to read Lawler’s account, but be aware that the Juvelius mission was neither the first, nor the last, serious effort to recover the lost Ark.
After centuries of prominence in Hebrew history the relic first went missing with the beginning of the Israelite captivity by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. Almost eighteen centuries later, the Knights Templars, it is believed by some, actually excavated the Temple Mount, in search of the Ark. More recently, scholars like Tudor Parfitt have suggested that over 2,000 years ago the Ark was taken to Africa by a group of fugitive Israelites now known as the Lemba tribe. In The Sign and the Seal best-selling author Graham Hancock argued that the Ark might be found in Ethiopia where it was brought by the Queen of Sheba.
In 2015 a Canadian-Israeli researcher, Harry Moskoff, attempted to resurrect the Jerusalem narrative. In Atlantis Rising Magazine, #111, we reported that Moskoff, who called himself a Jewish Indiana Jones, had been investigating the missing Ark for 25 years. Everyone, he said, had been looking in the wrong place, but the Ark, he said, may yet be found, and not far from where it was last seen. Citing extensive scriptural and historical evidence, Moskoff believed the Ark was originally secreted and protected in a special chamber built beneath the Holy of Holies by Solomon himself—who foresaw the Temple’s eventual destruction by invading armies. The conventional belief that the first temple was located on the Dome of the Rock, Moskoff thought, was wrong. Solomon’s Temple, he said, was elsewhere on the Temple Mountain. The true location, though, could be approached, Moskoff believed, by following a tunnel used for the cleansing of ritually impure priests, and which is mentioned in the Jewish Talmud. The tunnel, he said, was still intact, but, in an effort to honor the apparent wishes of its builders, had been blocked for a century and a half. The tunnel, he declared, could lead us to the original Holy of Holies, and, potentially, the original Ark of the Covenant. Details of Moskoff’s theory are available in his book The A.R.K. Report—Secret for the Century (https://www.amazon.com/ARK-Report-Covenant-Tunnels-Israel/dp/1501024647).
Alternatively, could the lost Ark of the Covenant, or what’s left of it, actually be sitting on a dusty museum shelf in Harare Zimbabwe? That is the claim of University of London professor, and another Indiana Jones wannabe, Tudor Parfitt. But unlike the cavernous warehouse at the end of the Spielberg epic—where the Ark is seemingly lost once again—the professor said he knows precisely where the real thing is actually located.
It’s called the ‘Ngoma Lungundu’ by its present day guardians, the Lemba tribe of Zimbabwe, who claim to be descendants of the ancient priestly tribe of Levites who guarded the old testament Ark. The Ngoma, they say, came from the “great temple in Jerusalem.”
Parfitt conducted DNA studies of the Lemba priests which he says confirm their claim of Hebrew lineage from the time of the original Ark. Moreover, he has carbon-14 dated the wooden drum in the museum, which he believes is all that remains of the original ark, and he says everything checks out. The original gold covering, it is suggested, was stolen by the Babylonians when the Israelites were taken into captivity. Parfitt’s theory contradicts the better known notion, promoted by Graham Hancock, that the Ark was taken to Ethiopia. Parfitt has told his story in The Lost Ark of the Covenant, a book from HarperCollins (https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Ark-Covenant-500-Year-Old-Biblical-ebook/dp/B0014H32AI/ref=sr_1_1?).
Many other hypotheses have also been advanced for the fate of what is arguably the most important religious artifact in history. The last time we checked, though, the Ark is still lost.
