David

The Ark of the Covenant

Ark could be associated as two different things, one as a box of some sort that represented Israel's most sacred cultic object in ancient times, which Hebrew name is aron, or as the boat that Noah built with the Hebrew name tebah.

There are about 200 references to the ark with different formulations; almost 75% of these references refer to the ark with some sort of qualification. I could point out in connection with the class that nearly a third of the references occur in I-II Samuel.

The most frequent association of the ark is the one with the divine name "Ark of God or Yahweh", which happens about 82 times. Here Yahweh is considered as the most ancient liturgical name of the ark. However, it has been hard to determine whether each designation (Ark of God and Ark of Yahweh) represent different strata in the ark stories. The ark was also designated as the "Ark of Israel", when the ark was being held in Philistine territory.

Deuteronomists designated the ark as the "Ark of the Covenant," this designation appears around 40 times, most of them with various forms of divine names but always with the word Covenant as a reference. In the P work, the term "testimony" is used as a synonym for covenant designating the ark as the "Ark of the Testimony."

Apparently the Ark in the historical writings is only mentioned once during the monarchical period, which led some to the conclusion that the Ark did not existed any more. However, there are facts saying that during that period of time the ark may have been know by some sort of theological term and not by the actual name "ark."

Some other facts relate the procession of the ark as well as the ark's capture by the Philistines, but the ark is never mentioned by name in any of these stories. The ark would be instead denoted with theological terms; one example was the term "glory", which was used by the people of Israel to grieve the capture of the ark, in other words the departure of glory from Israel.

I will point out two important parallels of the ark in order to have a better insight on the antiquity and functions of the ark.

There are different descriptions about how the ark actually looked like. Some early sources recall the ark having some similarity with an Islamic tent shrine. It was said to function as a war palladium and helped the tribes in their explorations. It said that the ark was made