Contract with God aka The Moses Expedition

61

QUESTION: Professor Forrester, there’s something I’m very curious about, and it’s the supposed supernatural occurrences that have been associated with the Ark of the Covenant.

ANSWER: We’re back to that.

Q: Professor, there is a series of unexplained phenomena cited in the Bible, like that light-

A: It’s not ‘that light’. It’s the Shekinah, God’s presence. You must speak respectfully. And yes, Jews believed that there was a luminescence that appeared between the cherubim from time to time, a clear sign that God was within.

Q: Or the Israelite who fell dead after touching the Ark. Do you really believe God’s power resides in the relic?

A: Ms Otero, you have to understand that 3,500 years ago, human beings had a different conception of the world and an entirely different way of relating to it. If Aristotle, who is closer to us by more than a thousand years, saw the Heavens as a bunch of concentric spheres, imagine what the Jews thought about the Ark.

Q: I’m afraid you’ve lost me, Professor.

A: It’s merely a question of scientific method. In other words, a rational explanation – or rather, the absence of such a thing. The Jews couldn’t explain how a golden chest could appear to shine with its own independent light, so they limited themselves to giving a name and a religious explanation for a phenomenon that was beyond Antiquity’s comprehension.

Q: And what is the explanation, Professor?

A: Have you heard of the Baghdad Battery? No, of course not. It’s not something you’d hear about on TV.

Q: Professor…

A: The Baghdad Battery is a series of artefacts found in a museum in the city in 1938. It was composed of clay vessels, inside of which were copper cylinders, held in place by asphalt, each containing an iron rod. In other words, the whole thing was a primitive but effective electrochemical instrument that was used to coat different objects in copper through electrolysis.

Q: That’s not so surprising. In 1938 that technology was almost ninety years old.

A: Ms Otero, if you’d let me continue, you wouldn’t sound like such an idiot. The researchers who analysed the Baghdad Battery discovered that it originated in ancient Sumer, and managed to date it back to 2500 BC. That is a thousand years before the Ark of the Covenant and forty-three centuries before Faraday, the man who supposedly invented electricity.

Q: And the Ark was similar?

A: The Ark was an electrical condenser. The design was very intelligent, allowing the accumulation of static electricity: two gold plates separated by an insulating layer of wood, but joined by the two golden cherubim that acted like positive and negative terminals.

Q: But if it was a condenser, how did it store electricity?

A: The answer is fairly prosaic. The objects in the Tabernacle and the Temple were made of leather, linen and goat hair, three of five materials that can generate the greatest amount of static electricity. Under the right conditions, the Ark could release about two thousand volts. It makes sense that the only ones who could touch it were the ‘chosen few’. You can bet the chosen few had very thick gloves.

Q: So you insist that the Ark didn’t come from God?

A: Ms Otero, nothing could be further from my intention. What I’m saying is that God asked Moses to keep the commandments in a safe place so they could be venerated for centuries to come and be the central aspect of the Jewish faith. And that human beings have invented artificial ways of keeping the legend of the Ark alive.

Q: What about other disasters, like the collapse of the walls of Jericho, the storms of sand and fire that wiped out whole cities?

A: Invented stories and myths.

Q: So you reject the idea that the Ark can bring disasters in its wake?

A: Absolutely.