What was inside the Ark of the Covenant?

A gold box for two stones

The Ark was a chest, not a ship. The Hebrew word is aron, a box or coffer, not the tevah of Noah’s ark. Exodus gives the plan: acacia wood, two and a half cubits long and a cubit and a half wide and high, about 1.1 by 0.7 by 0.7 meters (45 by 27 by 27 inches), covered with pure gold inside and out. On top sat a lid of pure gold, the mercy seat, with two golden cherubim facing each other across it (Exodus 25:10–20).

You shall put the mercy seat on top of the ark, and in the ark you shall put the covenant that I will give you.

“The covenant” here means the tablets themselves, the written terms of the bond. That is why Hebrew often calls the chest the ark of the testimony.

The second set of tablets

The first tablets never reached the Ark. Moses came down from Sinai, saw the golden calf and smashed them at the foot of the mountain (Exodus 32:19). God told him to cut two new ones and to make a wooden chest to keep them in.

I turned and came down from the mountain, and put the tablets in the ark which I had made; and there they are as Yahweh commanded me.

So the Ark held the second tablets. Jewish tradition adds the pieces of the first: the Talmud says the whole tablets and the broken ones lay together in the Ark (Bava Batra 14b). The book of the Law that Moses wrote was kept close, but the text is careful: “by the side of the ark,” not in it (Deuteronomy 31:26).

The jar of manna and Aaron’s rod

Moses also told Aaron to keep a jar holding an omer of manna, the bread of the desert, for later generations (Exodus 16:33–34). After a revolt against Aaron’s priesthood, his staff sprouted, blossomed and bore almonds overnight, and God ordered it kept as a warning (Numbers 17:1–10). Both times the text says the object goes “before” the testimony, in front of the Ark. The Letter to the Hebrews puts them inside:

the ark of the covenant overlaid on all sides with gold, in which was a golden pot holding the manna, Aaron’s rod that budded, and the tablets of the covenant

Yet 1 Kings, on the day the Ark entered Solomon’s Temple, is flat: “There was nothing in the ark except the two stone tablets” (1 Kings 8:9). Readers explain the gap in different ways. Some think Hebrews follows a Jewish tradition that grew up after Exodus. Others point out that Hebrews describes the tent in the wilderness, while Kings describes the Temple centuries later, after the Philistines had captured the Ark and sent it back (1 Samuel 4–6). The Talmud lists the jar and the rod among things kept beside the Ark and hidden with it (Yoma 52b).

Where it stood in Solomon’s Temple

In the Temple the Ark had a room of its own, the Holy of Holies, a cube of twenty cubits, about 9 meters (30 feet) each way, lined with gold (1 Kings 6:19–20). Two olive-wood cherubim, ten cubits tall, filled it from wall to wall, their inner wings touching in the middle (1 Kings 6:23–27). The priests slid the Ark beneath those wings. Its carrying poles were so long that their ends could be seen from the hall in front of the inner room (1 Kings 8:6–8).

No one was meant to look inside. When the men of Beth Shemesh did, the text says, they were struck down (1 Samuel 6:19). Only the high priest entered the room, once a year (Leviticus 16:2, 34; Hebrews 9:7). Where it went is its own puzzle: is the Ark in Ethiopia?