Evening Exchange; Investigating the Ark of the Covenant
Description:
While there is no mention of the Ark of the Covenant getting lost in the Bible, the guests identify early mentions of this in a few psalms, Jeremiah 3, and 2 Chronicles. The legend continues in local histories of Africa, particularly Ethiopia and its Jewish peoples, making the hidden location in Ethiopia a site for the second Zion. The panel includes a historian who wrestles fact and fiction to identify some basis behind the legend and what the legend may actually represent. The legend was so engrained that it was adopted by Christian cultures within and eventually without Ethiopia. One of the theologians cautions about the hegemony of Western historical investigation and to take the historical scholarship as speculative just as much as the legend itself.
