suppose that the most significant thing on the Ark of the Covenant was not on the Ark, but what was not in it? The popular imagination has long regarded the Ark as a kind of sacred strong-room: the gold-covered chest of the Ten Commandments, and, by innuendo, to emit holiness. But there is an academic thread that has brought to the fore the emphasis on contents and put it on construction on the Ark as engineered ritual furniture, produced in a Late Bronze Age world shot through with portable shrines, protective talismans and the belief that divine power must have a physical dwelling.
David Falk, a PhD-holding Egyptologist based at the University of Liverpool, has claimed that the excessive borrowing of Egyptian sacred furnishings which were objects constructed to transport or hold the image of a god inversely dated their fundamental concept. The Egyptian ritual environments had the design of large chests and shrines that visualize and impose sanctity. Protective iconography was not merely ornamental; it proclaimed the fact that a divine presence was within, and was surrounded with symbols designed to keep away the encroacher. According to Falk, this familiar visual grammar was borrowed by the craftsmen of Israel, and then stripped off by them of that which would immediately have been intelligible to their neighbors, an idol.
The construction specifications of the Exodus enhance the point that the Ark was part of a larger family of portable temples. Exodus describes a chest of acacia a veneered in gold, ringed at the corners with poles nearby poles a characteristic of high status ritual transport into the eastern Mediterranean. One such similarity is the boat-shaped chests which were used in the religious festivals of Egypt, and were made to display and be processed. Yet, there is one more echo in the repetitive, gold-plated shrines, which are present among the burial furniture of Tutankhamun, as the sacred space is made through the layers of enclosure instead of the open air.
It is at the lid of the Ark that Falk is provocative in particular. His version of the interpretation does not find holiness in the box, as the charged interval between two winged figures, above the box. Extruded wings are often used to indicate protection and concentrated power in Egyptian royal and divine art; winged goddesses are common on thrones, coffins, and shrines, which creates a symbolic canopy on the object of protection. The two cherubim winged guardians of the Ark facing inwards form a similar canopy, only with one important difference; the event in the book of Exodus does not involve an image, but presence itself, “between the two cherubim.” The artifact is not so much a space of a meeting point but rather a platform.
This also refigures a tradition long observed: how might a tradition which taught against graven images put sculptured cherubim on the crowning object of its sanctuary? A permanent scholarly solution is a functional not an aesthetic one: the figures were not cult images, but a demarcation of a limited area, concealed in the inmost shrine. The cherubim in that reading work rather as architecture than icon, as a ritual guardian, forming at the boundary where presence was reputed to have been, than representing what such presence might have been like.
The Falk Egyptian visual language in the picture refers to the uraeus cobra emblem of royalty, a serpent rearing itself as a sign of divine power and security. These motifs are logical because of a cultural heritage of a people that were being recalled in the scripture as having existed through generations in the field of Egyptian craftsmanship. What Falk means by this, in his phrasing, is not that Israel imitated Egypt, but that it used the instruments of the religious architecture to proclaim another theology: holiness without an idol.
It is only after the subsequent loss of the Ark that drives the interpretive attraction toward design and meaning. Stories of the treasures of the Second Temple taken away to Rome intersectingly omit any mention of the Ark, and legends regarding its destination come in several different ways. Other traditions keep the notion that it was deposited prior to disaster; others incorporate the Ark into more extended lists of hidden treasure trove of temples, such as the later, literary “Treatise of the Vessels”, which shows the treasures of Solomon as being secretly undisclosed.
The more lasting mystery might not be, however, the destination of the Ark, but the purpose of its construction. Considered through the prism of ritual engineering, the most extreme aspect of it is both structural and conceptual: a fancy shrine form that generates sacred space without a god to put within it.
