Is the Ark of the Covenant in Ethiopia?

What the church in Aksum says

Aksum, in the highlands of northern Ethiopia, was the capital of an ancient kingdom whose king, Ezana, became a Christian in the fourth century. Its Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion, founded in his reign by tradition, has been destroyed and rebuilt several times, and a large new cathedral rose beside it in 1964. Nearby stands a small chapel, paid for by Empress Menen, wife of Haile Selassie. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church says the Ark of the Covenant is inside.

One monk keeps it. He is chosen for life by the guardian before him and spends his days in the chapel, praying and burning incense. He alone may look at the Ark. No one else, the church says, may see it.

Every Ethiopian Orthodox church also keeps a tabot, a consecrated tablet that stands for the Ark and the tablets of the Law. At Timkat, the Ethiopian Epiphany, the tabots are carried out in procession under rich cloths. In Ethiopia the Ark is not only a lost relic. In a sense it is in every church.

Where the story comes from

The claim goes back to the Kebra Nagast, the “Glory of the Kings,” written in Ge’ez, the classical language of Ethiopia, in the early fourteenth century. It makes the queen of Sheba the mother of Solomon’s son Menelik. When Menelik leaves Jerusalem, the firstborn sons of the city’s elders steal the Ark by night and go with him, leaving planks of wood under its covering in the Holy of Holies.

The book served a dynasty that had taken the throne in the thirteenth century and called itself Solomonic. Its kings were Solomon’s heirs, and Ethiopia was the new Israel, keeper of the Ark. Scholars read the work as a weave of older legends, biblical, Jewish, Christian and Islamic.

What the Bible says happened to it

The Bible’s own trail points the other way. Solomon’s priests set the Ark in the Temple’s inner room (1 Kings 8:6). Three centuries later, in the Chronicler’s account, it is still in Judah, when King Josiah, around 622 BC, gives an order about it.

Put the holy ark in the house which Solomon the son of David king of Israel built. It will no longer be a burden on your shoulders.

Then it vanishes. When Babylon burns the Temple in 586 BC, 2 Kings 25:13–17 lists the bronze pillars, the bronze sea and the pots carried off, and says nothing of the Ark. Nor does it appear among the 5,400 vessels sent home in Ezra 1. Jeremiah even foresees a day when no one will miss it (Jeremiah 3:16). When Pompey walked into the Holy of Holies in 63 BC, Tacitus says, he found the shrine empty (Histories 5.9).

Other traditions fill the gap. Second Maccabees says Jeremiah hid the Ark in a cave on the mountain where Moses saw the promised land and sealed the entrance (2 Maccabees 2:4–8). The Talmud records rabbis arguing over whether it was carried to Babylon or hidden beneath the Temple itself (Yoma 53b–54a).

What can and can’t be checked

The church exists, and its tradition is at least seven hundred years old. The claim itself has never been tested. No outside scholar has been allowed to examine or date the object. In 1992 Edward Ullendorff, a scholar of Ethiopia, said that as a British army officer in 1941 he had seen it, and described an empty box of medieval make. His word cannot be checked either.

Most historians doubt the Ark left Jerusalem in Solomon’s day, since the Bible keeps it there for centuries. That is where the evidence stops. The Ark of Aksum belongs to faith and tradition, and those who keep it have chosen not to open it to proof.