“‘Earth, earth, earth, hear the word of the mighty God and receive what I commit to you, and guard them until the last times…’”
It is a phrase out of a work that sits on the edge of every Bible, but it is a response to one of the biggest holes in scripture: the missing Ark of the Covenant. The Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch contains an angel’s command that the earth swallow up the holiest of the objects in the Temple, including the Ark of the Covenant. The language is not gentle. It is a language about custody and control: hide it away where it can’t be picked up by human hands.
This work, also referred to as 2 Baruch, is dated to the latter part of the second centuries CE, and it was composed in the glow of the destruction of the Temple. It was attributed to Baruch, who was the scribe of Jeremiah, although it was classified as pseudepigraphic in most traditions, and thus it is not surprising that there is a tendency to find it less commonly associated with the more well-known versions in biblical tradition. The canonization process, after all, was not a bandwagon.
But this moment of dramatic concealment in 2 Baruch raises exactly this question which history raises in its less dramatic moments: if it was ever there to be found, why is it now so completely absent? In the biographical traditions of the looting of the Temple, as in those traditions of the destruction of the First Temple, there are lists of the loot which do not include the Ark. Perhaps the most famous of these lists is in Josephus: They took all the gold: and the golden table, and the candlestick also: and the Law of the Jews: and they went to their country.
The traditions multiply in order to fill the void. The Ark in the Hebrew Bible is a box of acacia wood overlaid with gold and fitted with carrying poles and a top, the mercy seat, where the divine presence could be accessed. This is more than a box a box merely holds things. This is a sanctum on the move, preceding a people through a desert, a river, a land of fear. Later traditions include all sorts of alternatives: it could have been carried off in triumph, but it could also have been secretly hidden away in order to save it from just such a fate, including the possibility that it could have been hidden away before some sort of catastrophe. Some traditions include a series of underground vaults beneath the Temple, while others attributed hiding to the prophets.
The apocrypha in the Christian tradition is a rich alternative: “2 Maccabees 2:4–10: Jeremiah placed the Ark and the sacred vessels in a cave on the top of the mountain of Neba. He sealed the entrance to the cave, inscribing on it: ‘To those who seek an explanation, Jeremiah made a notation. They would not know where it was until the time of the gathering.’” This is a level of detail akin to a map that insists on not being used.
But far away from the history of the Ark in Judea, the history of the Ark in the post-biblical period is much more legendary. The history of the Ark in the tradition of the Kebra Nagast in Ethiopia places the history of the Ark in Aksum. But in more recent times, those who have visited the church have found not a survival of Israelite worship but a revered image, in accord with the tradition of the tabot in Ethiopian churches. In each of these cases, the object itself becomes less a public thing and more a protected holiness that is, a holiness that is made greater by inaccessibility.
Between prophecy and tradition lies a yet more chilling alternative: that, for many cultures, the Ark is simply a presence of absence. The presence of absence in 2 Baruch is a function of the custody of God, not of history. In a world that hungers to turn the artifact of holiness into the object of proof, of show, of possession, “the older texts again and again put the Ark out of human reach.” This is not a resolution of a mystery or a resolution of a riddle: The Ark is said to be central, and then it is said to be withdrawn, and finally it is recalled as something perhaps not intended to return in any ordinary fashion.
