In the Hall of the Hasmoneans, a large chamber that dates from the Second Temple period, is a Corinthian pillar more or less in the center. One of the indicators of the dating of the chamber is the way the stone is dressed, a mark of the way Herod’s builders carried out their work, but the pillar itself dates from medieval times. It was brought in to support the roof, which was cracked and damaged and needed extra support.
In a narrow corridor later in the tour is an absolutely massive single stone. It’s over forty feet long, nearly twelve feet high and between eleven and fifteen feet thick. The best estimates suggest it weighs around five hundred metric tons, which makes it one of the largest, perhaps even
the
largest, stone ever used in any building, anywhere in the world, bigger even than the stones in the pyramids. Most of the cranes available today can only lift about half that weight, so the obvious question is how Herod’s builders managed to shift it. And not just move it, because although it’s only about three or four feet above the level of the floor in the tunnel, the original street level was at least twenty feet below that, and the bedrock a further ten feet down.
That stone forms part of what’s known as the Master Course, and research suggests that it was done for a very good reason. No mortar or cement of any kind was used when the wall was built, and the theory is that these huge stones served to stabilize it. Their massive weight kept the stones below them in place, and provided a firm base for the courses above. It’s known that the wall has remained intact for some two thousand years and has survived several earthquakes, so Herod’s builders were probably right.
Har Megiddo
The name of this historic place is Megiddo, and it’s normally prefixed by either “tel,” meaning “mound,” or more commonly “har,” or “hill,” but sometimes it’s also referred to as Tel-el-Mutesellim or the “Hill of the Ruler.” Over the years, the name “Har Megiddo” has been corrupted into “Armageddon.”
Megiddo was one of the oldest and most important cities in Judea, and the plain below it was the site of the first ever recorded pitched battle. In fact, there’ve been dozens of battles at that location, and three “Battles of Megiddo.” The last one took place in 1918 between British forces and troops of the Ottoman Empire.
But the most famous was the first one, in the fifteenth century BC, between Egyptian forces under the Pharaoh Thutmose III and a Canaanite army led by the King of Kadesh, who’d joined forces with the ruler of Megiddo. Kadesh was in what’s now Syria, not far from the modern city of Hims and, like Megiddo, it was an important fortified town.
There were three possible routes the invading army could have taken as they headed north toward the Valley of Jezreel, where the enemy troops had assembled. The shortest was the middle route, a straight passage through Aruna, part of which would have meant the army marching through a very narrow ravine, or two longer but safer routes to the east and west.
Thutmose sent out scouts and discovered that his enemy had clearly assumed he wouldn’t take the middle road. They’d split their forces to cover the other two approaches, but had left the ravine virtually unguarded, obviously assuming that the Egyptians wouldn’t be stupid enough to send their troops into such an obvious killing ground. So the pharaoh himself led his men through the ravine. Aruna only had a few enemy troops stationed there and they were quickly scattered by the Egyptian forces, who then entered the valley unopposed. They did battle with the King of Kadesh’s forces, defeated them, and ended up besieging Megiddo itself, which eventually fell. Unusually for the time, the Egyptians spared both the city and its inhabitants, and their victory marked the beginning of around five hundred years of Egyptian rule and influence in the area. We know so much about this battle because a record of what happened was carved into the walls of the Temple of Amun at Karnak in Egypt.
The Mosaic Covenant
It’s been generally accepted that the Ark of the Covenant was a real object, probably a highly ornamented acacia-wood box covered in gold leaf, which was carried by the wandering Israelites. The logical assumption is that the Covenant itself was also a real, tangible object, and was kept inside it.
According to the Old Testament, in the third month after the Exodus, Moses gave the original so-called “Tablets of the Covenant,” or more accurately the “Tablets of Testimony,” to the people of Israel at the foot of Mount Sinai. This Covenant was a contract between God and His chosen people, the ten simple rules, the Ten Commandments, that later formed the basis of both the Jewish and the Christian faiths (though, as I state in the book, Exodus actually specifies that there were
fourteen
Commandments).
Moses then went back up to Mount Sinai before later returning to his people to find that they’d already deviated from the path he’d laid out for them. He found that they had ignored the second commandment, which forbade the construction of any kind of graven image for the purpose of worship. Moses’ brother Aaron had made a Golden Calf and erected an altar in front of it. Moses flew into a violent rage and in his fury smashed both the tablets of the Covenant.
God then offered to personally carve a second, duplicate, set of tablets, and Moses went back up to Mount Sinai yet again to receive them, and it was these tablets that were placed in the Ark of the Covenant. In fact, the Ark should have more correctly been called the “Ark of Testimony.”
This Ark vanished in about 586 BC when the First Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians, led by Nebuchadnezzar. But there are no traditions relating to the tablets themselves, only to the Ark, to the box they were kept in. It’s been assumed that when the Babylonians looted the Temple they took away the Ark
and
the Tablets of the Covenant, but there’s nothing in the historical record to confirm this.
But it
is
a fact that the Ark itself had become an object of worship and veneration by this time, so it’s at least possible that when Nebuchadnezzar and his hordes descended on Jerusalem, the tablets had already been taken to a place of safekeeping, just leaving the Ark in the Temple. Whatever actually happened then, the truth is that the Tablets of Testimony, the original Mosaic Covenant, simply disappeared into oblivion over three thousand years ago.
What is almost certain is that, whatever happened to these tablets, they weren’t lost. They were far too important to the Jewish religion to simply be mislaid. If they weren’t seized by Nebuchadnezzar, then they were almost certainly hidden before the conflict began, and probably somewhere outside Jerusalem because the likelihood was that the city would be sacked and plundered by the invaders. Again, the oasis at Ein-Gedi would have been a possible, perhaps even a probable, hiding place for them.
At the end of the book I describe the Israelis hiding the Mosaic Covenant in a cavity behind the Wailing Wall. If this relic was ever found, and the political situation prevented them from announcing they’d recovered the object, I think this is exactly where they’d want to put it, to return the Covenant to the place closest to where the Ark of the Covenant originally stood.
And in doing so, they’d effectively be reuniting the
Shechinah
, the divine presence, with the earliest record of the Covenant between man and God.
Read on for a special sneak peek
at the next pulse-pounding thriller
from James Becker
THE MESSIAH SECRET
Coming from Signet Select
in December 2010
Ldumra AD 72
The nine men had made slow progress ever since they’d left the last village, the simple stone houses a distant ghostly monochrome in the gray light of predawn, and started the final stage of their long climb.
There was no road, barely even a track, leading to where they were going, though they knew exactly the route they needed to follow, a route that would take them high into the mountains and finish in a blind-ended valley. Each of them—bar one—also knew that they were making the last journey of their lives. Only one man in the group would ever leave that valley, or would want to. That journey—or, to be exact, the reason for that journey—was the culmination of everything they’d worked for throughout their adult lives.
They were well armed, each man carrying a dagger and a sword, and all but two of them also had a bow and a quiver of arrows over their shoulders. The whole area, and especially Ldumra, was well-known as a haunt of bandits and thieves. Their principal prey was the laden caravans traveling along what would later become known as the Silk Road, but they would show no compunction in attacking any group of travelers, especially if they believed those people were carrying valuables. And the nine men were accompanying a treasure that every member of the armed escort was fully prepared to die to protect. Only when they reached their destination would they be able to relax, when the treasure would at last be safe—safe, they hoped, for all eternity.
Two of the men rode slowly at the head of the group, each mounted on a woolly two-humped Bactrian camel, an animal surprisingly well-adapted to the harsh terrain. Following them, two yaks were hitched to a small and sturdy wooden cart, one man sitting on the bench at the front, whip in hand. Two other yaks followed, tied with short ropes to the rear of the cart, then half a dozen donkeys, each bearing a single rider and with a heavy pack on its rump.
In the flat loading area of the cart was a heavy wooden box, perhaps eight feet in length, four feet wide and two feet high. The box was invisible, being completely covered in piles of furs and other garments, baskets of food and pitchers of water and wine. The men hoped they looked like a group of simple travelers transporting nothing of value so they would be of no interest to any bandits.
And their appearance was unremarkable. With one exception, they all looked—and indeed were—indigenous to the area. Their skin was brown and heavily wrinkled from a lifetime’s exposure to the sun in the thin air at high altitude, their eyes Mongoloid, their faces broad and flat, their hair black and worn long.
The odd one out was the youngest man, riding one of the donkeys near the center of the group. Perhaps twenty years old, less than half the age of the youngest of his companions, he had fair skin and an almost ruddy complexion. His eyes were a bright and startling blue and his hair—then invisible under his hooded cloak—was reddish-brown. He was known to his companions as “Sonam,” the word translating as “the fortunate one,” though that was not his given name.
The track from the village ran for less than a mile, and then crossed a mountain stream. The small caravan stopped by the bank and the travelers took the opportunity to drink and refill all their water containers. It would be the last stream they would cross before the steepest part of the ascent began, and although the valley was cold, with blankets of snow covering the peaks that surrounded them, an adequate supply of drinking water was essential.
The two men riding the camels remained mounted, alert for any signs of danger lurking behind the hills and within the scrubby vegetation that bordered the tumbling waters, but they saw nothing. In a few minutes all the members of the caravan had remounted and resumed their journey, fording the stream and climbing the bank on the opposite side.
The going became rougher the higher they ascended, the track—such as it was—barely wide enough to accommodate the wooden cart, and their progress was reduced to little more than a slow walking pace.
It was midmorning before they saw the first sign of anyone else on the mountainside. The leading camel walked around a bend in the track, and as the animal stepped forward, a shadowy figure dressed in gray melted back into the rocks, perhaps fifty yards in front, on the left-hand side.
Immediately, Je-tsun, the leading rider, reined in his mount and raised his hand to stop the caravan. He glanced behind him, checking that his companions had seen his signal, and at the same time grabbed his bow, removed an arrow from the quiver on his back and notched it, ready to fire.
“What is it?” the man riding the second camel asked, stopping beside him and readying his own bow. His name was Ketu, and their language was a local dialect that would, in time, become known as Old Tibetan.
“A man,” Je-tsun said shortly. “In the rocks on the left.”
The two men scanned the track that meandered along the side of the mountain in front of them. If the figure was a bandit, he and his fellow thieves hadn’t picked a particularly good place for an ambush. The caravan—apart from the cart, obviously, which was unable to leave the track—could move well over to the right, away from the rock-strewn mountainside, which would give the riders space to maneuver, and to fire their arrows.
“Not where I’d have chosen to mount an attack,” Ketu muttered.
As if in answer to his remark, a figure wearing a gray cloak appeared some distance further away from the track and, behind him, a handful of goats could be seen, moving erratically across the rough and rocky terrain towards a small level area studded with patches of green.
The two men sighed in relief.
“Was that who you saw?”
Je-tsun nodded. “I think so. It looks like him, anyway.”