David A. Falk
May 28, 2021
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The Ark of the Covenant as we know it from the Hebrew Bible is
steeped in the culture and context of its time (Late Bronze Age, c.
1500–1200 B.C.E.). The people of that age believed in angelic snake
spirits spitting fire, entrapped demons, and gods wandering the land.
Into this milieu, Moses introduced the Ark of the Covenant, which takes
many of these concepts and flips them on their head to create new
religious meaning.
Most readers will be familiar with the ark as a reliquary (a box
holding holy relics) that was used by Moses to contain and transport the
two tablets of the Ten Commandments. Yet the ark was constructed using a
visual language that everyone knew 3,300 years ago but is mostly lost
to us today. And although ancient writers said more about the ark than
any other artifact from ancient history, little of this information is
reliable apart from what is found in the biblical texts. Despite the
immense progress in biblical studies over the past 200 years, modern
scholars have produced relatively little of a serious nature on this
subject. This gap provides an opportunity to ask exciting questions and
explore the context of the ark in a new and meaningful way.1
DIGITAL RECONSTRUCTION of the Ark of the Covenant according to its descriptions in the Book of Exodus.
Credit: © David A. Falk
Even though it might seem obvious, few of us ever consider that the
Ark of the Covenant was a piece of furniture. Furniture is defined as a
piece of large movable equipment that creates a space suitable for
living or working. So if all you have is an empty room, the space in
that room is not very useful. Add a chair, and you have a sitting room.
Add a bed, and you have a bedroom. Add a religious altar, and now you
have created a ritual space. In short: Furniture helps create and change
the nature of a space.
In the ancient Near East, furniture was the preeminent status symbol
of opulent wealth. Beds, chairs, and boxes were high-end luxury goods
that only few could afford. And the best furniture was fit to be used in
rituals to the gods. But to make the furniture suitable for the gods,
it had to be decorated with sacred iconography. In ancient Egypt, this
iconography included friezes of uraeus (cobras) that spat fire, to keep
profane things out, and the <em>Nekhbet</em> (vulture)
goddess, who made holy the space between her wings. These icons
separated sacred space from profane space. And by using different icons,
the Egyptians were able to create different kinds of sacredness. They
could even intensify sacredness by putting one frieze inside another,
creating a holy of holies.
A TEBET BASKET, now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Credit: Photo by David A. Falk
This brings us to ritual furniture used in the Bible. For example, biblical Hebrew uses an Egyptian loanword tebah, meaning a “basket” or a “box.” A tebah (Egyptian: tebet)
was the basket that the baby Moses is placed inside and floated among
the reeds (Exodus 2:3), but it is also used of Noah’s ark (e.g., Genesis
6:14). With both Moses and Noah’s ark, the tebah was being used to sanctify the contents of the chests to consecrate them for God’s purpose.
A
DJESER CHEST of Thuya, who was the mother of Queen Tiye (the principal
wife of Amenhotep III) and grandmother of Akhenaten. Discovered in her
tomb in the Valley of the Kings, Western Thebes, it is now in the
Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Credit: Photo by David A. Falk
However, the Ark of the Covenant is referred to as an aron, not a tebah, which offers different connotations. An aron
can be a coffer, chest, or coffin. For the Egyptians, a coffin was more
than simply a box for a corpse. A coffin was a proxy body that served
as a place to where a spirit could return. Similarly, other chests had
parallels to the ark.
A pega chest was a finely crafted piece of furniture that
was draped in scarlet cloth, similar to the cloth that was used to cover
the ark (Numbers 4:8). A djeser chest (see image
[directional]) had tall legs that elevated items off the ground, and it
was used for storing holy or sacred things. Yet another type of chest,
the pedes chest, was used in a ritual that took profane
offerings and sanctified them so that the offerings could be used in
temple rituals. The pedes also had a uraeus frieze, which made
the space inside it sacred, and carrying poles near the feet of the
chest. This is remarkable because of the four pieces of the Israelite
Tabernacle furniture, only the ark is said to have its pole rings
attached to its feet (Exodus 25:12).
Finally, there is the Chest of Anubis, a special canopic chest that
was used only to carry canopic jars (containing the body’s selected
organs) to a tomb. It was covered in gold inside and out (as the ark in
Exodus 25:11; 37:2), held sacred objects (as the ark in Deuteronomy
10:2, 5), and had its poles attached to its base. Its lid, which fit
over the lip of the chest and was known as the “mercy seat,” bore a
statue of Anubis (god who escorted the dead to the afterlife) made in
one piece with the lid. These features are markedly similar to the ark.
AN
ANUBIS CHEST from the tomb of King Tutankhamun in the Valley of the
Kings, Western Thebes, now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Credit: Photo by David A. Falk
As we have just demonstrated, the Ark of the Covenant was similar to
ritual chests. But it was also similar to Egyptian shrines. Shrines are
important in this analysis because they developed out of Late Bronze Age
concepts of divinity. People in the Late Bronze Age believed in localism,
the belief that a god could only be in one place at a time. This idea
often manifested in idolatry. Like the Egyptian coffin, an idol acted as
a physical body where a god maintained its presence, becoming one with
the substance of the statue. In Egyptian rituals, this idol was
“enthroned” on a standard and placed inside the holy space of a shrine.
For small chapels or private worship, that shrine was housed inside a
small tent, forming a tabernacle. For larger chapels and temples, the
shrine was replaced with a barque.
A barque was a special shrine that was built as a model boat. It had a
hull, rudders, and figureheads like a boat, all of which makes sense
since Egypt was a river culture, where daily life and much of the
religious beliefs revolved around the Nile River. Since Egypt’s earliest
days, barques had been the ritual furniture par excellence.
Every major temple in Egypt had a barque at its center, even the
funerary temples of kings. And every day, the Egyptian priests fed and
clothed their gods and placed them upon their thrones. Then at night,
the priests put their gods to bed in naoses at the back of the temple.
SACRED
BARQUE OF AMUN-RE being carried by priests in a procession. This model
boat with a shrine for the Egyptian god is depicted in low relief in the
Great Hypostyle Hall of the Karnak Temple in Luxor Credit: Photo by David A. Falk
Yet when the Israelites built their tabernacle, they did so without
an idol. A sacred shrine without an idol was unprecedented in the
ancient Near Eastern world. By excluding idols from the ark, Yahweh
flipped the notions and symbols of ancient Near Eastern religion and
demonstrated that he was not cared for by human hands, never slept, and
was always on the throne. Thus, Yahweh worked within human religious
understanding but utterly transformed it.
Furthermore, even though the Ark of the Covenant was a reliquary, the
most important part of it was the space above the Mercy Seat, the lid.
This is similar to Egyptian palanquin thrones, which incorporated the
sacred iconography of barques to create a sacred space where the king
(or image of a god) would be seated. Unlike barques, where the sacred
space was enclosed and hidden, palanquin thrones had the king or god on
full display but still protected in holy space—between a pair of winged
goddesses. The Mercy Seat was a lid with a pair of cherubim (angels)
whose wings stretched out over the lid of the box (Exodus 25:20). God
met with his people from the sacred space between the wings of the
cherubim.
WINGED
GODDESSES on the corners of the sarcophagus of King Tutankhamun in the
newly restored tomb in the Valley of the Kings, Western Thebes Credit: Photo by David A. Falk
When we look at Egyptian ritual furniture during its 3,000-year
history, boxes, biers, shrines, barques, and palanquin thrones develop
and change over time, augmented with distinct iconography. Sufficient
examples of this iconography survive to allow for typological dating
with granularity down to the reigns of specific kings. Likewise, some
iconography and furniture types fall out of favor so that they form a terminus ante quem,
or the latest possible date a particular object might have been made.
This means that, when we consider the stylistic influences relevant for
the Ark of the Covenant, the iconography as described above suggests a
period no earlier than the reign of Amenhotep III (c. 1389–1351 B.C.E.)
and no later than the end of Dynasty 20 (c. 1194–1073 B.C.E.). This
means that the Ark of the Covenant is consistent with the kinds of
ritual furniture that would be expected from Late Bronze Age Egypt.
Therefore, even though Yahweh is not bound to human limits, he
condescended to mankind deferring to human expectations of divinity. The
cherubim had wings that stretched out over the Mercy Seat, and the
shekinah glory met with man from between the wings of the cherubim above
the ark. God did not try to change the beliefs of the people before
engaging them, but instead respected human frailty and human notions of
the divine, inverting or modifying those beliefs to teach humanity new
ideas about himself.
[1] I have recently addressed this subject in my book The Ark of the Covenant in Its Egyptian Context: An Illustrated Journey (Hendrickson Publishers, 2020).
