theophiles.org - The Lost Ark book

Written by ScriptureMenu

Thursday, 17 April 2008 16:52

I've blogged my reactions to the new Tudor Parfitt book The Lost Ark of the Covenant: Solving the 2,500 Year Old Mystery of the Fabled Biblical Ark. I'm very interested in your reactions!

Blog entry

Comments

grizzly - Excellent review

|2008-04-17 21:46:45

How about posting it as an article here in the Reviews category?

ScriptureMenu - posting as review

|2008-04-18 10:03:45

I'll do that, although I'm afraid we may not get a lot of comments since they're here already. I'm still getting my feel of the new site. (On X. I was Guidetopetra-dot-com.) I'm about to write a review of the new "Christ The Lord" book from Anne Rice, too, so I'll include that one as well.

wezlo

|2008-04-18 11:29:49

It's interesting how many people changed nicks for ThP - fresh start and all...

WebbedFeetOfClay

|2008-04-18 12:17:32

one or two I'm still trying to figure out. I considered a switch as well, but i just really like this username.

grizzly

|2008-04-18 12:18:49

And then there's those of us who didn't.

jester

|2008-04-18 16:12:10

Then there's people like myself who saw it as a timely reminder to stop lurking and start participating

grizzly

|2008-04-18 18:02:44

cool! welcome aboard.

patronpeter - snakes? i hate snakes...

|2008-04-17 22:10:03

i thought it was going to be positive, but the review started off a lil' negative, especially with that part about a "coft" being used in a derogatory way, however, after reading this;

Quote:

But then Parfitt goes on to theorize that there may have been dozens of arks, and that scribes went back later and cleaned up the text so that it didn't show that, forgetting that one inconsistency. I can't imagine why scribes who would leave in things like their most celebrated king, an ancestor of their promised messiah, forcing sex on the wife of one of his officers and then having the officer killed in battle to cover it up, but then turn around and change the text over a gold box. It doesn't make any sense to me. It makes sense to Parfitt.

i realized it would be a fun read, isn't paranoia and misconstrueing the truth and characters of history more interesting than some boring biography of the "real" arc anyways?

emperorbma

|2008-04-17 22:35:17

Dag nabbit, hating snakes reminds me of Samuel L. Jackson. No, I won't quote him since these are not words for polite company.

ScriptureMenu - he had to have SOMETHING I guess

|2008-04-18 10:01:09

You're right... especially since there hasn't been any record of the Ark since like 300 years before the time of Christ anyway. It would have left a lot of blank pages in the book... he had to come up with something!

I did enjoy the book. I just didn't agree with a lot of it. hehe

patronpeter

|2008-04-18 10:55:48

is it anything like The Davinci Code then?

ScriptureMenu - DaVinci

|2008-04-23 09:50:34

I never read The DaVinci Code or saw the movie (it seemed like a tempest in a teapot to me), but judging from the stuff I heard about it secondhand, this book is not very much like that. for one thing, this book is a work of nonfiction... the author actually did the things he describes doing, although I suppose it is somewhat fictionalized. And his conclusions aren't nearly as controversial as the ones in the DaVinci book; none of them would seem to directly fly in the face of anyone's theology, although a few things (like that David thrusting into the Ark thing) could be controversial.

Jim - Some of it makes sense

|2008-04-17 22:44:14

While I think that Parfitt is wrong about the ark being a "ngoma," I think he's pretty spot on about multiple arks. The idea isn't his, but is in several articles by Karl Van der Toorn, Mark S. Smith and others in Hebrew Bible.

Sometimes when the Deuteronomistic History speaks of an "ephod" it is talking about some kind of cult item that can be used for divination and is indicative of the presence of YHWH. Also, this "ephod" can only be carried by priests. At one point the phrase is word-for-word what we'd expect for a reference to the ark.

Also, Parfitt is probably spot on when talking about the idea of the ark being nicked from the surrounding culture (though not from the Arabs -- not sure if it was you or he who made that assertion). There are references to similar structures found in Ebla documents (Dan Fleming has worked on this); and the iconography is consistent with what we find in some Iron I depictions from Phoenicia and the Neo-Hittites (e.g. the Ahiram Sarcophagus).

I haven't read the book (nor do I intend to), but his biblical material seems to be based on some solid scholarship, though the novelty of the "ngoma" theory is just plain silly.

emperorbma

|2008-04-17 22:53:32

He does make a pretty interesting case, since he did discover a tribe which are really descendents of the Jews, but I agree that his theory is probably bunk.

ScriptureMenu - ephod

|2008-04-18 09:58:19

I probably misused the word "Arabs"... I took the book back to the library so I can't look to see exactly what he said, but he did mention that there were ark-like objects used in Egypt, and it seems like he said there were ark-like objects in other religions in the area also. Probably exactly what you said, Jim. :)

He also did mention the ephod, and theorized that it and the Ark were indeed one and the same... if I remember correctly, that was another thing that he thinks the theoretical revisionist scribes forgot to clean up.

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Last Updated on Thursday, 17 April 2008 20:39

Our valuable member ScriptureMenu has been with us since Monday, 07 April 2008.

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