The Ark of the Covenant in Ireland?!?
- ptcrawford
- May 10
- 5 min read
The fate of the Ark of the Covenant, that gold covered wooden chest that held the Tablets of Law upon which God delivered the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai, is one of the great mysteries of the ancient world. Kept in the Holy of Holies of Solomon's Temple, the Ark seems to disappear from the Biblical record in connection with the Babylonian capture of Jerusalem in 587BC - either taken away to Babylon by the forces of Nebuchadnezzar II…
“And they took all the holy vessels of the Lord, both great and small, with the vessels of the ark of God, and the king's treasures, and carried them away into Babylon”
1 Esdras 1:54
…or it was hidden away, either by Josiah or Jeremiah, to prevent the Babylonians taking and never returning it, to remain hidden “until the time that God should gather his people again together, and receive them unto mercy” (2 Maccabees 2:4-8). That hiding place was either in a cave on Mount Nebo or has been lost to time, to the pint that the Ark never resided in the Second Temple, even with the Holy of Holies set aside for its presence.
This is not to say there were not other traditions that claim that the Ark ended up elsewhere. Samaritan tradition had the Ark kept in the Mount Gerizim sanctuary, while the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church claims that the Ark came south via the Nile river to what is now Ethiopia and is currently kept in the Chapel of the Tablet in the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Axum. Another tradition sees the Ark taken to Arabia and then to Africa, where it was hidden in a cave in Zimbabwe, later rediscovered and housed in the Museum of Human Science in Harare.
There was a Latin tradition that the Ark was transferred to Rome, presumably upon the emperor Titus’ capture of Jerusalem and destruction of the Second Temple in AD70, to later be housed the Basilica of St John’s Lateran, where it survived the sacks of Rome by the Goths and Vandals in 410 and 455 respectively (unlike the Menorah which did arrive in Rome in AD70, only to be removed to Carthage by the Vandals) and the sieges involved in the Romano-Gothic Wars of the sixth century, only to be destroyed by one of the fires that ravaged St. John’s in the 14th century (1307 and 1361).
However, perhaps the oddest claimed burial site of the Ark of the Covenant is in Ireland, specifically in the Hill of Tara in Co. Meath, the traditional inauguration site and seat of the High Kings of Ireland. The reputed connection between Ancient Israel and Ireland is the legendary princess, Tea Tephi (‘Tephi’ itself means ‘beautiful’ in Hebrew). She is claimed as either being a daughter of a pharaoh or one of the surviving daughters of Zedekiah, the last king of Judah.
Given the rumoured history of the Ark of the Covenant involving some time spent in Egypt (depicted most famously, with much poetic licence in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark), either Egyptian or Judahite heritage could connect Tea Tephi to the Ark. Furthermore, all of Zedekiah’s sons died during the Babylonian Captivity, but Jeremiah 43:6 states that he did have daughters, all unnamed, who survived, which provides a possible Biblical connection to make.
There is a Tea in alleged bardic traditions and Irish manuscripts, possibly giving her name to Tara itself, but much of the material on her, particularly the Book of Tephi, is considered pseudo-historical or even forgery.
In the various Irish folklore chronicles and poetry, there are claims that Tea arrived in Ireland, accompanied by a scribe called Simon Brug (claimed by some as being Baruch, the scribe of the prophet Jeremiah), around the time of the sack of Jerusalem. Upon arriving on the island, Tea met and married the then High King of Ireland, Eochaidh II (also known as Erimon/Heremon), who was himself claimed by some to be the son of Milesius, king of Braganza in Spain.
Tea and Simon Brug are also recorded bringing ‘a great chest and a stone wrapped on a banner’. The latter was claimed to be the Stone of Destiny, the stone that Jacob had used as a pillow at Bethel (Genesis 28:10-22) and which became the Stone of Scone upon which Scottish and then British monarchs were ceremonial crowned.
This was not the only claimed link between the British royal family and the arrival of Tea Tephi in Ireland. Through any marriage to Eochaidh, Tea Tephi would have introduced the blood of the Line of David into the line of the High Kings, a line which through the kings of Argyll and Scotland ‘connected’ to the British royal family.
As you can imagine, such line drawing, particularly one that claims to go back to Adam, contains a lot of guesses and invention. And this is not the only chronological issues faced in this story. There are significant discrepancies in dating of Tea’s appearance in the Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland and the claimed connection to the fall of Judah in 597BC. The former is claimed as corresponding to either 1700BC or 1287BC – a considerable detachment from the early 6th century BC. This was such an issue that there was an attempt to make another blood connection between the High Kings of Ireland and the Line of David.
Those intrigued by the possible connection between the kings of Judah and the monarchs of Britain were further encouraged, to the point of fervour, by the associated claim that Tea Tephi and Simon Brug also brought ‘a great chest’ with them to Ireland. Did this Judahite-Irish High Queen not only bring the Stone of Destiny with her, but also the Ark of the Covenant? Could it have been sent west with a daughter of Zedekiah to escape Babylonian Captivity and then buried in the hill that bore that daughter’s name and was the site of the inauguration of her High King husband?
Such was the fervour whipped up by such ‘pseudo-history/genealogy’ that the British-Israel Association of London sought to dig into one of Ireland’s more sacred sites to find out if the Ark was actually there. They carried out a series of excavations between 1899 and 1902 on the Hill of Tara with the specific aim of finding the Ark of the Covenant.
Despite the excavation having the permission of the landowner, there were complaints against these excavations from the likes of W.B. Yeats and Arthur Griffith, founder of Sinn Fein, while Maud Gonne organised a protest at Tara with hundreds of children over the destruction of this site of great cultural importance to Ireland. That all the complaints were coming from staunch nationalists in the face of a British excavation seeking to prove a connection between the British royal family and Biblical times, through an Irish High king, is surely more than a coincidence...
Despite their fervour and the damage they did to the hill, unsurprisingly, no evidence of the Ark of the Covenant was found during the British-Israel digs at the turn of the 20th century. And when a less-invasive, more modern survey of the Hill of Tara was carried out by archaeologist Conor Newman between 1992 and 1995, again, no evidence of the Ark was found.
The identification of Tea Tephi as a Judahite princess was dropped in the late 20th / early 21st centuries by the British-Israelite groups who initially championed it, although the claim of Judahite blood in the British royal line via the Irish High Kings was retained.
Bibliography
Carew, M. Tara and the Ark of the Covenant. Dublin (2003)
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