This was strange, I thought, as I gazed out at the night. The Ark at some level was the secret weapon of the ancient Israelites. It meted out death, yet it breathed life into everything. These properties seemed to carry a powerful mystical message. Reuven had explained that for the Kabbalists this dualism expressed different and opposite forces acting in the Universe. When the two properties of the Ark were finally in harmony the Messianic era would arrive. Whatever the Ark expressed symbolically, it was pretty extraordinary. But had it ever been a real, objective thing or was it just a powerfully symbolic multi-layered, multi-tasking myth?
I stayed on the roof for a long time, huddled in my rough woollen cloak, gazing at the sleeping city.
But what, I asked myself, if the Ark were more than just an imagined, mythical construct - the legend of a visible little home for an invisible big God?
Some had said that the Ark was still buried in a secret passage beneath the Dome. Others had claimed it might have been secreted away to the Judean Hills, which I could see all around me on the distant horizon; or further still to the Arabian Desert; alternatively, in the murky depths of the Kinneret.
I had even heard rumours from starving refugees when I had been in Ethiopia a few years before at the time of the great famine, that the Ark had been taken to Africa by the first Ethiopian emperor Menelik. And I had heard about a strange Ark-like object when I was in southern Africa. As I thought of where the Ark might be, I could feel a growing, irrational excitement course through my veins.
The words of Kipling that I had loved as a boy came into my mind. ‘Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the ranges - something lost behind the ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!’
But had the Ark ever really existed? Was there anything hidden? Anything to look for? I had my doubts.
My mind turned to Reuven. Sometimes when I looked at him I could sense an awareness of things which few people had. His eyes, which had been trained to discern the slightest flaw in gems, seemed to see further and with greater clarity than normal eyes. However, I wondered if he was as capable of seeing flaws in arguments as he was of seeing flaws in gems.
I could see that if his quest ever delivered this enigmatic object, as an actual object, in some physical manifestation, its discovery would achieve more than a thousand unread monographs.
But was there any earthly way in which I could help him? Could I help him to change the world? Did I want to?
Protocols Of The Priests
The sirens howled all night. Groggily I faced a new Jerusalem day and realized that I had a growing obsession. Reuven’s infatuation with the Ark had now taken over my dream time as well as a lot of my waking hours. It seemed absurd but I couldn’t get it out of my mind.
When he had come round to my place a week before, Reuven had asked me to provide him with a scholarly reading list and this day would be spent achieving that goal.
It was the day when the scales fell from eyes and I saw the Ark for what it was.
I had made an appointment to see a distinguished academic in the field of Ancient Semitic Studies: Chaim Rabin, Professor of Hebrew at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Many years before, Rabin had taught at Oxford, where I had studied. His successor, David Patterson, who had been my teacher, had often urged me to look him up. To ask Rabin’s help in compiling a bibliography was a perfect excuse finally to make his acquaintance. He was a quite outstanding scholar even though by now he was getting on in age and I had heard that his mind was beginning to wander from time to time.
I walked from the Old City across town to the modern quarter of Rehavia and found the old scholar waiting for me in his neighbourhood café. Rabin was a balding little man with bushy eyebrows, keen probing eyes, and an infectious smile. As we sat drinking a lemon tea in its silver-rimmed glass, I explained the background to my visit, without saying anything about Reuven. I wanted hard facts about the Ark from a wise, unbiased source.
‘Is there any chance at all,’ I asked, weighing my words carefully, ‘that the treasures of the Temple of Jerusalem and Ark of the Covenant will ever be found?’ I grinned at him in what I hoped was a disarming way.
Frowning uncertainly, he scratched his forehead. ‘Oh, not another treasure seeker! Don’t tell me that Patterson has sent me a treasure-seeker!’ He spoke English with a pronounced German accent, which failed to make his tone any more agreeable.
I was embarrassed and confused by this little barb and muttered that I had a sort of marginal interest in the topic and wanted some help in preparing a short bibliography. Briefly, Rabin looked the picture of contrition.
‘Yes, well, I am sorry. It’s just that there’s been so much talk recently about the Temple treasure and quite a few odd characters have beaten their way to my door to pick my brains and waste my time. It’s quite true - they waste my time! A lot of individuals and institutions are looking for the Ark. Some are charlatans and some are downright sinister! There’s a rather overly enthusiastic American gentleman by the name of Mr Wyatt from Tennessee who claimed not long ago to have actually found the Ark in a cave just outside the city walls. No proof of course. And Wyatt is not the only enthusiast of this kind.’
‘But why are people so fascinated by it?’
What Rabin told me opened a small window into the past and changed my view of the Ark forever.
He thought the reason people were interested in it had something to do with its unmythical nature. It was a simple object with strange properties. It had great symbolic importance both for Rabbinic Judaism and for Kabbalists, but it had started off as a real object.
There were so many improbable stories about the powers of the Ark in the Bible that I had failed to perceive it as a truly historical artefact. The historicity of the Ark was substantiated, he said, in the most factual biblical chronicles. If it still existed, I did not know; but on the basis of what Rabin, one of the greatest scholars in the world in this field had to say, there was little doubt that it had existed once.
In addition Rabin explained that the Ark still exercised an enormous amount of power. He told me, in the hushed tones of someone who had difficulty believing what he was saying, of an extremist Jewish organization called Ateret Cohanim (the Crown of the Priests) which was planning the reconstruction of the Jewish Temple. They believed that the world was in End Time: the period before the coming of the Messiah. Restoring worship in the Temple after a gap of 2000 years would further accelerate the coming of the Messiah.
Rabin told me that some of the rabbis of Ateret Cohanim believed that the Ark still existed and had been searching for it behind the Western Wall in the Old City. After Israel’s fateful victory over the Arab states in 1967, this area of the Wall came under Jewish jurisdiction for the first time since the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in AD 70, and a small prayer hall was soon constructed in a tunnel to the left of the Wall. From there, members of Ateret Cohanim and their sympathizers secretly excavated under the Temple Mount at night and penetrated into a system of ancient tunnels that they considered to date from the First Temple. There had even been rumours that the Ark had actually been discovered.
‘If ever they do find the Ark,’ said Rabin, ‘the Temple will be rebuilt. Without a doubt. If the Temple is rebuilt, the Dome of the Rock, you understand, will have to go. Yo u see it is rather in the way. The Temple would be rebuilt on its foundations. On its smouldering ruins. As it is Islam’s third most sacred site, it would be a reasonably efficient recipe, I believe, for the next world war. They want to eject Islam from the site: a couple of attempts by Jewish zealots