The Claim of the Ark

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church teaches that the original Ark of the Covenant, the gold-covered chest the Book of Exodus describes as holding the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments, rests at Aksum, in a small chapel within the precinct of Saint Mary of Zion. The account is set out in the Kebra Nagast, the fourteenth-century national epic, which holds that Menelik I, son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, carried the Ark from the Temple in Jerusalem to Ethiopia. The Ark is kept in the Chapel of the Tablet and is guarded by a single monk, appointed for life, who alone may see it and who never leaves the enclosure; no outsider, cleric or scholar is permitted to view or examine it. This absolute inaccessibility means the claim cannot be tested, and historians and biblical scholars generally regard it as a tradition rather than a demonstrable fact, noting that the Hebrew Bible itself gives no record of the Ark after the destruction of the First Temple. Within Ethiopian Christianity, however, the presence of the Ark is a foundational belief, and it gives Aksum and its church an authority unmatched anywhere else in the country.