The Ark of the Covenant

After freeing the Israelites from the harsh captivity in Egypt, God led them to Mount Sinai. There he made known to Moses all the prescriptions of the Law. In his goodness, he also wanted to give this people a sign of his presence: “let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst” (Ex 25:8). In keeping with the nomadic life, this sanctuary was at first a tent. A veil divided the interior into two parts: the Holy and the Holy of Holies, i.e. the Most Holy Place. Only the priests could enter the Holy of Holies and the high priest once a year into the Holy of Holies.

In the Holy of Holies he placed the Ark of the Covenant. It was a chest of acacia wood, the walls of which were covered with gold, both inside and out. Two golden cherubim were placed opposite each other at the two ends of the Ark's lid. This lid, the mercy seat, was made of gold. The Lord said to Moses: “From above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim that are upon the ark of the testimony, I will speak with you” (Ex 25:22).

The ark was called the Ark of the Covenant because it contained the two stone tablets on which were engraved the precepts of the decalogue summarising the conditions of the covenant made by God with his people. In the days of marching, the Ark of the Covenant went before them to seek a place of rest (Num 10:33). To cross the Jordan, when the bearers of the Ark arrived and the feet of the priests touched the waters, the waters that flow down from above were stopped, those that flow down to the sea were cut off, and the people passed through (Josh 3:15-16). When Jericho was taken, seven priests were to carry seven trumpets made of rams' horns before the Ark of the Covenant, and to go round the city seven times on the 7th day, so that the wall would fall down (Josh 6:4-5).

The Ark remained in the sanctuary at Shiloh and it was there that Samuel received his calling as a prophet, until the Philistines attacked Israel and seized the Ark as war booty. However, the presence of the Ark of the Covenant was so evil to them that they wanted to return it to the Hebrews. So “And the men of Kiriathjearim [Qiryat Yearim] came and took up the ark of the LORD, and brought it to the house of Abinadab on the hill; and they consecrated his son, Eleazar, to have charge of the ark of the LORD” (1 Sam 7:1).

About 80 years later, King David, accompanied by all the elite of Israel, 30,000 men, came to Qiryat Yearim (Baalah of Judah) to transfer the Ark to the City of Zion. “And David and all the house of Israel were making merry before the LORD with all their might, with songs and lyres and harps and tambourines and castanets and cymbals” (2 Sam 6:5).

“And when they came to the threshing floor of Nacon, Uzzah put out his hand to the ark of God and took hold of it, for the oxen stumbled. And the anger of the LORD was kindled against Uzzah; and God smote him there because he put forth his hand to the ark; and he died there beside the ark of God. And David was angry because the LORD had broken forth upon Uzzah; and that place is called Perezuzzah, to this day. And David was afraid of the LORD that day; and he said, "How can the ark of the LORD come to me?" So David was not willing to take the ark of the LORD into the city of David; but David took it aside to the house of Obededom the Gittite. And the ark of the LORD remained in the house of Obededom the Gittite three months; and the LORD blessed Obededom and all his household.
And it was told King David, "The LORD has blessed the household of Obededom and all that belongs to him, because of the ark of God." So David went and brought up the ark of God from the house of Obededom to the city of David with rejoicing” (2 Sam 6:6-12).

When the Temple was built, “The inner sanctuary he [Solomon] prepared in the innermost part of the house, [the Debir] to set there the ark of the covenant of the LORD” (1Ki 6:19), “in the inner sanctuary of the house, in the most holy place, underneath the wings of the cherubim” (1Ki 8:6). Debir is from the same root as Davar, the Word. There is an important lesson here for our time. What makes man human is his word: human language is more than computer or animal language, human speech is more than the transmission of information or affect. But speech must have a foundation, because how can you force someone to believe what I tell you? What we must understand is that man can have a human word because at the beginning, God spoke to him. The divine word founded the human word.

The lid of the Ark of the Covenant is called the "mercy seat", from a Hebrew word meaning "to cover", with the metaphorical meaning "to atone for sins". On the Great Day of Atonement, the high priest sprinkled this lid with the blood of the victim offered for the sins of the people

(cf. Lev 16). The mercy seat, as has been said, is also the place of the mysterious presence of God. The blood of the sacrifice, in which all the sins of the Hebrews have been absorbed, is purified by 'touching' the deity, and the men represented by that blood are made pure. Moreover, through the process of the days leading up to Yom Kippur, the Jewish experience of divine mercy has a communal dimension.

Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem in 597 BC and took all the treasures of the temple and the royal palace. Then, in 587, he burned the temple and stripped it of all the precious objects used for worship (2 Kings 24-25; 2 Chr 36:10; Is 39:6). However, out of modesty, the Ark of the Covenant is not named among the looted objects: at the time of the destruction of the temple, obedient to a divine oracle, the prophet Jeremiah took the Ark of the Covenant and hid it in a cave (2Mac 2:4-8). Some rabbinic testimonies say that the Ark has disappeared and that it is destined to last until the future world [1]. God's covenant with Israel is eternal, which is why the Ark is incorruptible. It may even be in heaven if necessary (Rev 11:19).

The Christian faith sees in Jesus the presence of the living God. In him God and man touch each other. In him is realised what the rite of the Day of Atonement wanted to express: on the Cross, Jesus deposits all the sin, not only of the Israelites, but of the whole world, in the love of God and melts it into him. "God has exposed him as an instrument of propitiation" (Rom 3:23-25). "In the Passion of Jesus, all the abjection of the world comes into contact with the immensely pure, with the soul of Jesus Christ and thus with the Son of God himself. In this contact, the defilement of the world is really absorbed, annulled, transformed through the pain of infinite love" [2]. Mercy springs from the heart of Jesus the Messiah who dies asking the Father to forgive men.