Image Source: The Life of Adventure.
One thing on which Jews, Christians and Muslims might agree is a prophecy that the Ark of the Covenant will be discovered just before a great conflict and the end of times, or the end of the world.
The disappearance of the Ark is one of the world's great mysteries. After the destruction of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, the Ark is no longer present and accounted for in the biblical narrative:
Most accounts assume the Ark was not destroyed at this point but was hidden, either in tunnels beneath the ruined Temple, or after transportation out of Jerusalem. Wiki: "The place shall remain unknown until God gathers his people together again and shows his mercy, and then the Lord will disclose these things, and the glory of the Lord and the cloud shall appear, as they were shown in the case of Moses, and as Solomon asked that the place be specially consecrated. 2 Maccabees 2:4-8"; and "Revelation 11:19 says the prophet saw God's temple in heaven opened, 'and the ark of his covenant was seen within his temple'"; and finally, "A Shia sect of Muslims believe that ... [the Ark] will be found by Mahdi near the end of times from Lake Tiberias [the Sea of Galilee]."In 586 BC, the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and Solomon's Temple. There is no record of what became of the Ark in the Books of Kings and Chronicles. But the Greek 3rd Book of Ezra (1 Esdras) suggests that Babylonians: "...took all the holy vessels of the Lord, both great and small, and the ark of God, and the king's treasures, and carried them away into Babylon." (1 Esdras 1:54)
These and related scriptural passages inspire the superstitious - or the literal-minded - to scan archaeologists' latest news bulletins concerning possible Ark discovery. Some believe the Ark has been in Ethiopia all along. Others believe that the Ark will be found or has been already been found at some point around the turn of the Millennium (see here (1999 - Jerusalem); here (2008 - Zimbabwe); here (2011 - Greece); and here (2012 - Canada)). The Ark gets around!
But perhaps religious enthusiasts or archaeologists are not the people who will 'find' the 'Ark.'
Fortean researcher Graham Hancock - among other popular commentators on ancient and classical history - examines how the Israelites used the Ark as a weapon. Hancock assumes that religious language and symbolism regarding the divine word encased within, the clouds, flames and lightning emanating from the Ark, and the plagues and tumours the Ark inflicted on the Philistines, conceal this object's true nature as an early technological device. Given the descriptions of the Ark's deadly effects, Hancock believes that the Ark may originally have contained radioactive material, and "that the Ark's power source and/or emanations might have been nuclear, electrical, or chemical in nature." You can see similar theories that the Ark was a sophisticated Leyden Jar, here and here. These theorists presume that humankind's knowledge of electricity extended far earlier than previously believed. A parallel debate revolves around the controversial Baghdad battery.
But - 'finding' a nuclear event at the Sea of Galilee? Such imaginings belong to the surreal realm of biblical tales mapped onto pseudoscientific suppositions. Not surprisingly, linking the two does not offer auspicious symbolic associations.
See all my posts on Nuclear topics.
All the more reason not to go skinny-dipping in the Sea of Galilee, y'all.
ReplyDeleteI've never been one to readily believe reports of biblical archeology. (Anybody out there find the skeletons of Goliath's family? Or was he the only one in the world who was ever that tall? A biblical mutant proving evolutionary theory?) Even so, if the Ark of the Covenant contained radioactive material then it would have a half-life and has been diminishing in potency for about, what, 3000 years? That would explain why it has been so difficult to find. Even if someone got their hands on the real deal it wouldn't behave as it did in scripture and would conclude either that it was a fraud or else that it was genuine but that the stories about it were fraudulent.
Yeah I heard that skinny-dipping story. Maybe the royal family should send Prince Harry to take some down time in Israel. I agree that pseudo-scientifically interpreting the bible is sort of hopeless. But I thought it was an interesting set of symbolic associations, which chime with some troubling undercurrents in the news.
DeleteGosh, Anon, I'm not sure what this has to do with symbolic chatter about the threat of nuclear war, but thank you for the trip down misogyny lane. Incidentally, I am a non-American woman. I don't know if your spam was left by mistake, but it was such unusual spam I let it go.
ReplyDeleteWe live in difficult times. Many of my blog posts point out that values and roles are changing and this can cause some of the problems you are talking about; this trend also inspires distress and confusion, because there is no baseline, no set of common norms. A lot of people (men and women) are following Crowley's maxim 'do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law' these days.
I would also suggest that 60s feminism made the troubling mistake of attacking men and belittling and undermining their public and private roles. Equality between the sexes might have been achieved in a different way; and equality was never truly achieved. I would suggest that this antagonistic approach inspired crises for Gen X men and women. Notably, third wave feminism, espoused by Gen Xers like Rebecca Walker, seek male-female reconciliation and do not take the same hostile stance toward males. Rebecca had a very public, nasty fight with her famous feminist Boomer mother about this issue.
This is why I sometimes refer here to the blog, /The Art of Manliness/, which discusses all the lore that once went into making a man, a lost tradition that remains interesting and valuable (http://artofmanliness.com/). That blog surely shows that pre-feminist or post-feminist, men's primary lessons have not changed. I wish a similar blog existed for women.
I also have a post 'What Women Want' and related posts on sex and love and changing Millennial values.
http://historiesofthingstocome.blogspot.com/2011/12/love-in-new-millennium-8-what-women.html
http://historiesofthingstocome.blogspot.com/search/label/Ars%20Amatoria
I hope you find them interesting, and I do hope the world gives you a respite from ugly people. I can assure you, that not all women, American or otherwise, are as you have found them!
Did you know 60% of people make statistics up off the top of their heads?
ReplyDeleteAnd of them, 90% don't understand how little effort it takes these days to find actual statistics.
Geez, Senator Kyl sounds awfully nervous about the upcoming convention.
Actually, this recent post was on my mind a few hours ago when I heard that the upcoming Republican convention here in the U.S. is scheduled to be in the path of the appropriately biblical Hurricane Isaac when it hits Florida. I have to wonder if any of them will grasp the significance of an organization that squandered so much of the last two years trying to advance often-redundant, occasionally incoherent anti-abortion legislation having their self-celebration impacted and possibly endangered by an (according to the insurance companies that contribute to them) "act of God" named after the child God ordered Abraham to sacrifice.
I take the irony in it, pblfsda; but I'd be hard pressed to equate that bizarre biblical tale on sacrifice with the abortion debate (clever as the analogy is). The politicization of abortion as a women's rights issue helped me to wash my hands of politics. I don't believe it is a political issue.
ReplyDeleteIt started as many of these things do (to clarify, it finds parallels with as-yet less politicized issues, such as human cloning or cyborgs' rights, which approach the realm of medical possibility, but have not yet entered political discourses). It started with a confusion between 'can' and 'should.' Just because we 'can' do something with scientific/medical or technological know-how, does not mean there are 'shoulds' to go with that ability. Abortion is an example of how we bewitch ourselves with scientific advancements and call those advancements 'progress.' Properly done, scientific inquiry operates according to valid principles of logic, method, tests and proofs. But automatically projecting political agendas or moral values onto that process is troubling; the assumption that scientific inquiry must be progressive because it expands our abilities to do things or to function in new ways, or ask new questions - is only partly acceptable. Scientific discoveries *can be, but are not automatically* a good thing. I think we should push the boundaries with science, but also think Lovecraft had a point about warning us against pushing boundaries too far.
As a result, Meta-meta-meta-abortion, the thing endlessly discussed and rediscussed, is imo one of those counter-intuitive moral inversions which make the Millennial world a sadder, nastier place. As for the practice of abortion, I agree with Philip K. Dick's story about it, which won him lots of critics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pre-persons