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I nterest in the ark of the covenant catapulted Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones into the forefront of American pop culture. Melting flesh and imploding bodies aside, mystery and drama have surrounded the ark since the Lord first said to Moses: "Have them make a chest of acacia wood—two and a half cubits long, a cubit and a half wide, and a cubit and a half high" (Exod. 25:10). The ark found the Israelites "a place to rest" as they wandered in the wilderness (Num. 10:33); it stopped the flow of the Jordan River when the Hebrews crossed into the Promised Land (Josh. 3:15 –16); the Israelites were routed when they recklessly took the ark into battle (1 Sam. 4); and the Philistines tried to be rid of it because of the scourge it brought to the towns that housed it. King David danced before it, and when Solomon brought it into the newly built temple, "the priests could not perform their service because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled his temple" (1 Kings 8:11).

What happened to the ark after Solomon gets sketchy. It is mentioned in the Old Testament only one other time, in 2 Chronicles 35:3, when the reforming king, Josiah—who lived hundreds of years after Solomon—orders that the ark be put back into the temple. Except for a reference in Hebrews, the only other mention of the ark is in Revelation after the seventh trumpet is sounded (11:19): "Then God's temple in heaven was opened, and within his temple was seen the ark of his covenant. And there came flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder, an earthquake and a great hailstorm."

Ethiopian Christians—specifically, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church—have staked their religious and cultural identity on their heritage as keepers of the line of David and guardians of the real ark. They say it resides in the Ark Temple on the grounds of the Church of Saint Mary of Zion in Axum, the original capital of the biblical Cush, where a priest guards it (no one is permitted to see it). Question or mock it, this identity has left its mark on Ethiopia. It is the only African nation never to be colonized and has preserved a mystical religious identity among the Orthodox.

A king and queen in love
Ethiopia's biblical connections go back to Noah, whose grandson Cush (son of Ham) had two sons named Seba and Sabta (Gen. 10:6 7; 1 Chron. 1:8–10)—"the original settlers of Ethiopia," according to Abune Paulos, patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, in the little booklet "The Church of Ethiopia Past and Present." (The queen of Sheba's name is derived from the Hebrew for "Seba.") Moses married a Cushite woman (which the Septuagint translates as "Ethiopian," Num. 12:1), and it is believed that the gospel came to Ethiopia c. A.D. 34 through the Ethiopian eunuch who was evangelized by Philip (Acts 8). Tradition maintains that the disciples Matthew, Nathanael, and Thomas also preached there.

But the tradition that has forged Ethiopians' religious identity goes back to around 1000 B.C. when Queen Makeda, "a lonely young woman reigning by herself over Sheba," author Lester Brooks speculates in Great Civilizations of Ancient Africa, took great interest in seeing the wonders of the kingdom of King Solomon whom she had heard about through her merchants. According to the Kebra Nagast (Glory of Kings, a fourteenth-century Ethiopian history), and in keeping with what we already know about Solomon, when they met, he thought: "A woman of such splendid beauty has come to me from the end of the earth. Will God give me seed in her?"

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June 14 1999, Vol. 43, No. 7