Blue Cord

As I was finishing writing a commentary piece today, I noticed a rather odd thing about Microsoft Word. With Word 2003, Microsoft introduced Smart Tags, a technology that automatically recognizes words and addresses and can interact with other Microsoft products to automatically enter text or perform other tasks. Today, however, I found that it had recognized “Christ Jesus” and tagged it as a personal name.

When I clicked on the icon above the name, the options made me snicker. As you can see from the screen shot below, I found I could schedule a meeting with Jesus or add Him to my contact list. Disturbingly, I also discovered I had the option to stop recognizing Christ Jesus. One wonders whether this might wreak havoc with my eternal salvation.

An article in this week’s Time entitled “A Lead on the Ark of the Covenant” reports that Tudor Parfitt claims to have found the ark of the covenant (or at least its replacement). Now as any good scholar knows, the ark was found back during World War II by Dr. Henry Jones, Jr., and now resides in a warehouse somewhere in Washington, DC. But according to Parfitt, the ark is actually in Zimbabwe.

As with any decent story related to the Bible, Time exhibites a good deal of ignorance concerning scholarship. In the second paragraph, they include this summary of scholarship:

Scholars debate [the ark of the covenant’s] current locale (if any): under the Sphinx? Beneath Jerusalem’s Temple Mount (or, to Muslims, the Noble Sanctuary)? In France? Near London’s Temple tube station?

No serious scholar I know has ever put forth any of these theories. It is only amateurs and treasure hunters with more imagination than evidence who support such ideas. Yet Parfitt cannot be classed with such dilettantes. In the 1980s, he isolated a link between the priestly lineage of the Jews and a tribe called the Lemba in Africa. The Lemba claimed to be a lost tribe of Israel, and genetic evidence suggests that there just may be a connection.

Parfitt claims that the ark of the covenant is somehow connected to a drum-like object called the ngoma lungundu that the Lemba have. The article lists a number of similarities between the ngoma and the ark, including the facts that both are holy, both are carried on poles, and both emit fire against God’s enemies.¹ The main problem, however, is that the article he found does not match biblical descriptions of the ark.

What he has found is a drum. It was a drum that was sometimes used to carry sacred object, but still a musical instrument. And this is a far cry from the ark. The ark is never mentioned as having any musical qualities.² He also notes that this drum was used as a type of cannon. But the ark of the covenant is never depicted as a weapon. It goes before the people in battle, but as a way of invoking God as the divine warrior. The ark is the throne of God, so taking it into battle means that God goes into battle with you as it clearly states in 1 Samuel 4:1-4. And in the only two battles in which the ark is mentioned — Joshua 6 and 1 Samuel 4 — the ark is not physically taken into the battle. At Jericho, the priests carry it around the city, while in the battle at Ebenezer the ark is in the Israelite camp.

In addition, the ngoma found by Parfitt is carbon-dated to 1350 CE. And Lemba ledged asserts that 400 years ago the ngoma destroyed itself and had to be rebuilt. Yet Parfitt persists. He states:

There can be little doubt that what I found is the last thing on earth in direct descent from the Ark of Moses.

He is right — there can be little doubt. What there can be is huge amounts of doubt. It takes assumption after assumption and leap after leap to arrive at the conclusion Parfitt reaches. The artifact he describes has only superficial connections with the ark of the covenant. Perhaps the Lemba are a branch of the tribe of Levi, and perhaps they built their own type of ark after fleeing from Jerusalem in 587 BCE. But the ngoma has so few similarities to the ark of the covenant that it is untenable to think that this tribe possessed the ark of the covenant at any point in their history.

A quick search of the Internet shows that ngoma drums are common in southern Africa. According to the Mukondeni Art Gallery in South Africa:

This drum, when beaten with a human hand, caused enemy armies to fall dead at the sound of its mighty voice. At present all royal houses, as well as the homes of the more junior chiefs still possess one or more Ngoma drums.

The Mukondeni Art Gallery even has a picture of a ngoma lugundu on their site. While the article in Time seems to suggest that Parfitt has discovered a one-of-a-kind artifact, ngoma are in fact rather common. The reason that the Lemba have such a drum is that they are a part of southern African culture. The similarities to the ark of the covenant can be explained more easily by positing a sociological coincidence than by assuming a historical connection with the ark found in the Bible.

Parfitt has a forthcoming book on this subject entitled The Lost Ark of the Covenant: Solving the 2,500 Year Mystery of the Fabled Biblical Ark. It will be available this coming Tuesday (February 26th). The History Channel will be also airing a special based in part on Parfitt’s work. The show, called The Quest for the Lost Ark, first airs on March 2.

1. It should be noted that nowhere in the Bible does it claim that the ark shot out fire in battle. That part of the story comes from oral tradition. [back]
2. Parfitt notes that David danced before the ark and the ark is frequently associated with trumpets, but neither of those are evidence that the ark itself is a musical instrument. [back]

It is almost time for another Biblical Studies Blog Carnival. The next blog carnival will be hosted here on Blue Cord. We are approaching the end of the month, so that means it is time to start submitting your favorite blog posts from February to be included in the carnival. Please submit your nominations for the posts you found to be most engaging, most entertaining, most informative, or most __________ (insert your own adjective here). We try to include the widest variety of topics possible, so feel free to include anything you want — within the following guidelines:

• Academic: Posts must represent an academic approach to the discipline of biblical studies rather than, for instance, a devotional approach. This does not mean that posts have to be written by an academic, PhD, or professor — amateurs are more than welcome! Nor does it mean that posts must take a historical critical approach — methodological variety is also encouraged.
• Biblical Studies: Blogs must be broadly focused on discipline of biblical studies and cognate disciplines, including Ancient Near East, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Christian Origins/New Testament, Intertestamental/Second Temple literature (e.g., LXX, Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo, Josephus, etc.), Patristics, Biblical Criticisms and Hermeneutics, Biblical Studies and popular culture, among other things.

The blog carnival is also the place to draw attention to new blogs. If you are aware of any new biblioblogs that have been started during the month of February, be sure to let us know.

You may submit nominations for the blog carnival by mailing them to me at kwilson@bluecord.org. In your e-mail, please include the following information:

• The title and permalink URL of the blog post you wish to nominate and the author’s name or pseudonym.
• A short (two or three sentence) summary of the blog post.
• The title and URL of the blog on which it appears (please note if it is a group blog).
• Include “Biblical Studies Carnival XXVII” in the subject line of your e-mail.
• Your own name and e-mail address.

While the carnival tries to include as many submissions as possible, it is not always possible to accept all nominations. The carnival is intended to highlight the best posts from the previous month, and judgment calls sometimes have to be made on whether a particular post is suitable for the carnival. We do try to include at least one post from each blog that it submitted.

For more information, please see the Biblical Studies Blog Carnival page.

In the wake of the news out of Seabury-Western on Thursday, I thought I would point people to two short articles in this week’s The Christian Century (Feb. 26, 2008 issue).

Nick Carter, the dean of Andover Newton Theological Seminary gives an interview in which he discusses the “Constraints & Opportunities” facing seminaries. Although it takes up only a page and a half, he gives a good overview of some of the problems that have led to the current crisis in some seminaries. He gives some statistics that I didn’t know:

• Half of all M.Div. students attend twelve seminaries. Unfortunately, he doesn’t list those twelve. Out of those twelve, only three are traditional mainline seminaries.
• 53% of seminaries have fewer than 150 full-time students.
• Experts (who?) say that as many as twenty seminaries could go out of business in the next five to seven years.

He raises the question of whether we have too many seminaries, although he doesn’t attempt an answer.

The second article is a report on Harvard’s revamped M.Div. program. Harvard Divinity School retooled its M.Div. three years ago, and the first batch of graduates under the new program graduate this semester. One interesting fact is the HDS now requires all M.Div. students to have three semesters in one of the biblical languages. That is not three semesters spread between Hebrew and Greek but three in Hebrew or three in Greek (I am sure this will make John Hobbins quite happy!). I have suggested before that one year of a biblical language is not enough to make one competent in a biblical language, but three semesters is certainly getting closer (see my post on “Seminary Training in Biblical Studies”). Their M.Div. now features a focus on “ministry studies,” although the article does not define what that includes. One thing I didn’t know was that M.T.S. students make up two-thirds of the student body at HDS while M.Div. students only account for one-third.

James Getz at Kethubim has decided to post something on the Nevi’im. In a post entitled “Musings on Sacral Kingship in Ancient Israel”, he discusses James C. Moyer’s 1969 Brandeis dissertation, “The Concept of Ritual Purity among the Hittites.” James (Getz, not Moyer) points out a passage in which James (Moyer, not Getz) draws attention to the idea that the king in ancient Israel may have been inviolable due to his anointing. Both of the Jameses (Jamesayim?) have good things to say, and I encourage people to head over to Kethubim to read the post.

I wanted to add a couple of things that may support what they both have to say. It may be the case that David refused to attack Saul because he was God’s anointed. But we do have other cases in which kings were assassinated by others who had been anointed. The most obvious example is Jehu who was anointed with the specific instructions to strike down Joram, who presumably had also been anointed when he became king.

I also wonder about Solomon and Adonijah. Although the text does not explicitly say so, it is hard to imagine that Adonijah had not been anointed as king by Abiathar (1 Kings 1:5-10). Yet he is scared that Solomon, who has also been anointed (1 Kings 1:34), will kill him (1 Kings 1:49-53). Solomon does not do so at the time, although he later has Adonijah killed for requesting Abishag as his wife (1 Kings 2:25). It is interesting in this case that Solomon sent someone else to do it. If kings were inviolable except to others who were anointed, then apparently one anointed person could send a non-anointed person to kill another anointed person.