Imagining the Ark of the Covenant, From Exodus to Indiana Jones
October 2025 | Vol. 13.10
By Kevin McGeough
For two thousand years, there has been a rich interpretive history of the Ark of the Covenant. In my new book Readers of the Lost Ark: Imagining the Ark of the Covenant from Ancient Times to the Present, I explore how different communities have been inspired to think about the Ark and create new meaning for it within different contexts. While there has been a diversity of readings of the Ark, it is its presentation in the Bible that seems to remain central. That presentation is one in which the physical description of the Ark is offered in detail and most biblical interpreters agree, roughly, as to what the Ark looked like.
The Ark Passes Over the Jordan (c. 1896-1902), by James Jacques Joseph Tissot.
And yet, the Bible is less clear about what the Ark was and what it was supposed to have done. Biblical accounts are somewhat contradictory and professional bible scholars still disagree. Was it a container for the Ten Commandments? Was it a throne or footstool for God to sit upon in the Temple? Was it a vehicle for transporting God’s presence while the Israelites wandered in the wilderness? Was it a weapon that Joshua could use to help defeat the Canaanites? All of these interpretations of its function are justifiable based on the biblical stories, and most readers don’t feel the need to think about what the ark could do very deeply.
Stacks of Arks for purchase in Shabban’s shop in Jerusalem’s Old City. Photo by Kevin McGeough.
Most readers of this article, when thinking about the powers of the Ark, will think of how Steven Spielberg imagined it in the climax of his 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark. This is one of the most memorable scenes in motion picture history, one in which a Jewish filmmaker enacts a fantasy of vengeance against the 20th-century’s most overt symbol of anti-Semitism, the Nazis. Set in 1936, the film follows Indiana Jones (arguably the most famous cinematic archaeologist) on his quest to find the Ark of the Covenant before the Nazis do. It is an action-packed film, filled with numerous exciting stunt sequences, but despite the frenetic pace of most of the film, the climax builds slowly once Indiana Jones and his partner Marion are captured and find themselves held in a secret military base on an island near Crete. All seems hopeless for the heroes, who have lost the Ark to the Nazis. It is nighttime, and the Ark is carried up a set of rock hewn stairs and set before the lead villains, including a French archaeologist named Belloq who had been hired by the Nazis to find the Ark. Belloq is now dressed (disconcertingly for the German commander with him) as an Israelite priest, with a tunic, breastplate, and turban as described in Exodus 28: 4ff.
Belloq dressed as an Israelite priest before the Ark. Screen Capture from Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981, © Paramount Pictures).
Belloq, ghost, and Ark of the Covenant from Hasbro’s Indiana Jones Adventure Heroes, released in 2008. Photo by Kevin McGeough.
With the Ark now in front of him, Belloq recites the B’rikh Shmei, an Aramaic prayer typically recited when a Torah Ark (an ornamental chamber that houses the Torah, typically the holiest place in a synagogue) is opened, perhaps further troubling his Nazi companions. Once Belloq is finished praying (omitting the blessing for the Jewish people), two Nazi soldiers lift the lid off the Ark of the Covenant. It makes a metallic clanging sound (a sound effect actually created by a technician lifting the lid of a toilet tank), and, as the lead villains look inside, it is finally revealed what is inside this Ark that seems so valuable: just sand. The villains respond with outrage, disgust, and laughter, while Indy seems relieved.
Yet it soon turns out that the Ark contains more than just sand. As the characters in the film hear a shrieking sound arise overtop the score, and as electrical devices around them start to burst and explode, Indy, probably remembering what happened to Lot’s wife in Genesis 19:26 when she looked back at God’s destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, warns his companion: “Marion. Don’t look at it. Shut your eyes.” The heroes close their eyes, but the audience watches as spectral figures emerge from the Ark, at first beautiful and angelic, then suddenly transforming into horrifying skeletal beings who slay all who look at them. The Nazis are all killed in a variety of exaggerated styles, bodies exploding, faces melting. Then, as suddenly as it began, it is over; the lid falls back onto the Ark, and its monstrous power is contained again.
The Ark, opened. Screen Capture from Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981, © Paramount Pictures).
The fact that the Bible suggests the Ark of the Covenant had weapon-like properties helps audiences suspend their disbelief at what might otherwise be an implausible ending. The Indiana Jones films, like much archaeologically inspired fiction, treat ancient artifacts like dangerous weapons, and the premise of this film is that the Ark will be a dangerous armament in the hands of the Nazis. The threatening nature of ancient artifacts is a long-standing fictional trope, evident in much older Gothic literature. Horror in this literature often stems from the anachronism of something from an older time, like a ghost or cursed amulet, haunting or harming those in the present. In this kind of storytelling, the past becomes dangerous when it intrudes into contemporary times. With archaeological fiction, anxieties about anachronism manifest in both directions, with the intrusion of the present day into the past being just as dangerous. In movies, it can be dangerous to enter an ancient tomb or temple, where archaeologists might encounter an awakened mummy or accidentally read aloud an Aramaic curse.
Anxieties over anachronism lie at the heart of much pseudoarchaeological thinking as well. Pseudoarchaeology is a kind of fantastical thinking about the past that might claim to be scientific but in fact contradicts established facts about history and does not use methods expected of scholarly approaches. This is the stuff of ancient aliens, Atlantis, and pyramid power. One strand of pseudoarchaeology involves fantasies that ancient objects (like the Antikythera Mechanism, sought by Indy in his most recent film) bear advanced technologies that would have been unknown to the ancient societies from which they originated. Indiana Jones’s take on the Ark is much like the pseudoarchaeological treatments of the Ark of the Covenant. Since the 1970s, the Ark has been reimagined as a variety of different types of technologies. The Book of Exodus preserves specific instructions for how the Ark was to have been built (Exodus 25:10-22), and so modern day readers have imagined these biblical verses as an Israelite version of a contemporary instruction manual for an electrical device. That specific materials are called for in constructing the Ark suggest to these readers that the Ark had some kind of power source. Sometimes the Ark is likened to an electrical generator, perhaps with radioactive properties, hence the Biblical prohibitions against touching the Ark. At other times it is treated as some kind of radio transmitter, here inspired by its biblical role as a medium through which the Israelites can communicate with God.
Modern day gothic and pseudoarchaeological interpretations of the Ark did not emerge in a vacuum. While these are two common ways in which antiquity is reimagined in contemporary popular culture, these readings of the Ark of the Covenant are part of a much longer history of interpretation, a history that is as old as the Bible itself. For ancient readers of the Bible, the detailed description of the Ark was puzzling. These readers assumed that there had to be a reason why God, speaking to Moses, would describe the Ark and its construction with such precision and why those instructions would then be preserved in scripture for later readers. For example, Philo of Alexandria (ca. 1st century CE) read these instructions through a Platonic lens, understanding that beneath the physical description of the Ark’s construction lay metaphorical truths about the structure of the universe (Philo, Questions on Exodus 2.53-63). The Ark is similarly treated as metaphorical by medieval Christian theologians. The Venerable Bede (672/673 – 735 CE), an Anglo-Saxon monk, wrote that the dimensions given for the Ark were literally accurate but allegorically meaningful, encoding messages about God’s relationship to humanity (Bede, On the Tabernacle, 1.13-17).
Photograph of Valter Juvelius with an anonymous member of the Parker Expedition, c. 1911, taken by Savignac Antoine Raphael (1893-1951). Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Ancient authors were also, at times, concerned with what happened to the Ark of the Covenant after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. The Hebrew Bible is mostly mute on this point, but the apocrypha and later Rabbinic writings preserve conflicting accounts of where it might reside now. Some suggest that it was carried away and hidden somewhere on Mount Nebo, the location where Moses was said to have viewed the Holy Land before dying. Others suggest that it is still buried somewhere on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. These ancient stories about the final resting place of the Ark continue to inspire Ark hunters, whose quests for the Ark have more often caused political turmoil instead of archaeological results. The Parker Expedition (1909-1911), led by the British Lieutenant Montague Parker and the Finnish psychic Valter Juvelius resulted in riots in the streets of Jersualem, once it became known that the crew was excavating within the Dome of the Rock, the third most holy site in Islam. Riots similarly broke out in 1981 when it was revealed that Rabbi Getz, who was the rabbi in charge of the Western Wall, was similarly digging too close to the Dome of the Rock.
The Chapel of the Tablet at the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Axum, Ethiopia, the current location of the Ark of the Covenant according to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Photo by JensiS65, CC By-SA 3.0
Illustration of the Queen of Sheba from the manuscript “Bellifortis” by Conrad Kyeser, ca. 1402-05. Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen, 2 Cod. Ms. Philos. 63, Cim., fol. 122r.
Ethiopian traditions hold that the Ark was taken to Africa to be cared for by the son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. According to this tradition, preserved in the Ethiopian document known as the Kebra Nagast, King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba had an affair when she visited Jersualem. Their son became the king of Ethiopia, and the divinely chosen Davidic line of kings came to rule Ethiopia, not Israel. For Ethiopian Christians, the Ark is presently located in a church in Aksum in Ethiopia, and is guarded by one individual, appointed to this responsibility for life. The Ethiopian Ark, and the traditions surrounding it, are central to Christianity in the country.
Painting of Menelik I bringing the Ark to Ethiopia, on display in the Ethnological Museum in Addis Ababa. Photo by gill_penney, CC By-SA 2.0
In Readers of the Lost Ark, I explore these receptions of the Ark and others, analyzing the Ark as it is featured in the Bible and potential analogues from surrounding Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures. Most of the book, however, is an exploration of different “Arks”, from artistic depictions in ancient synagogues, to modern day children’s toys and the souvenirs you can buy in Jerusalem tourist shops. The book is not so much a history of the Ark but a history of the reception of the Ark and an exploration of the different kinds of interpretive approaches inspired by the Bible. This is perhaps the true power of the Ark. It is an ancient, biblical artifact that is easy for people to visualize. Yet, because its function is ambiguous, there is much interpretive room for readers to imagine an Ark that is personal to them and meaningful in contexts well beyond ancient Iron Age religion.
Kevin McGeough is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Lethbridge. His book, Readers of the Lost Ark: Imagining the Ark of the Covenant from Ancient Times to the Present, was recently published by Oxford University Press.
How to cite this article:
McGeough, K. 2025. “Imagining the Ark of the Covenant: From Exodus to Indiana Jones”, The Ancient Near East Today 13.10. Accessed at: https://anetoday.org/imagining-the-ark/.
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