Feast upon the Word Blog

In the classic Bill Cosby sketch, after the LORD tells Noah to build an Ark, Noah responds with “Right. What’s an ark?”

Recently, University of London professor Tudor Parfitt is challenging our own perceptions of another ark by claiming to have found the Ark of the Covenant in Africa. Unlike the gold-plated weapon of mass destruction from the original Indiana Jones movie, the real ark, according to Parfitt, was and is a wooden drum and primitive gunpowder spewing tribal relic carried by temple priests from Jerusalem to Yemen and eventually to Africa.

Check out the Time magazine summary of the argument here, or for a more complete treatment you can check out Parfitt’s book The Lost Ark of the Covenant: Solving the 2,500 Year Old Mystery of the Fabled Biblical Ark.

But regardless of how close Parfitt is to the truth here, he does provide an interesting challenge to our scriptural preconceptions, as well as a nice case study of how to carefully examine a cherished text.