i never heard that b4 – where is this from? i had learned that King Josiah (Yoshiahu) had hidden the Ark from a foreboding sense of an imminent destruction. Josiah lived about 100 years b4 the actual destruction of the temple…

“Also, had it still been around at the time of the Roman conquest, why wasn’t it part of Titus’ loot?”

No – the Holy of Holies was empty during the entire existence of the 2nd temple (450 years) therefore there was nothing for Titus to take. The Ark disappeared b4 the destruction of the 1st temple.

Carol, I left that bit out as it’s part of legend / folklore. If there actually were a church that hosted the Ark, I don’t have the slightest doubt it would get verified. So, folklore leaves room for speculation and exciting “what ifs”, but I’d be surprised to hear that the Ark had survived in any such public place during centuries of predominantly non-Jewish and non-Christian environments, civil wars etc. Though if the Ark were to be retrieved from some geniza or another, it would be interesting to know what would happen to it. Would archaeologists be permitted to access it? And in general, how does this story fare with the Babylonian conquest and the reported destruction of the Ark by Nebuchadenezzar? How do all the other legendary locations of the Ark fit into the story? Why would the Temple Priests give up on their holiest object to let it disappear to Ethiopia? Also, had it still been around at the time of the Roman conquest, why wasn’t it part of Titus’ loot? And then again, can we take the biblical description of the (original) Ark at face value? Slaves / Low-pay labourers were not likely to possess quantities of gold large enough to cover a box as the one described. As one of my exegesis professors once said, “People tend to imagine the Golden Calf as an enormous statue, but consider where those people had presumably just come from and how much gold they could actually have, and you’ll see that the Golden Calf cannot have been much more than a tiny figurine.” Also add the facilities they had at hand in the middle of the desert to actually produce such objects of cult, and it becomes clear that those reports are rather legendary than historically accurate (our concepts of accuracy are stronly shaped by a post-Enlightment Western society; this greatly clashes with Oriental narrative tradition where the validity of a point is emphasized by a story).