The Ark That Wasn’t There

058

“Found!” proclaimed Lawrence Blaser, referring to the actual cave where David accidentally happened upon King Saul near the spring at Ein Gedi on the shores of the Dead Sea. David could have killed King Saul, but instead he simply cut off the hem of his robe to make the point (1 Samuel 24).

Blaser’s search began in 1958 after he read the works of Ellen G. White, a 19th-century prophet of the Seventh Day Adventist church. In Volume 4 of her Spiritual Gifts, Blaser, a home builder from Englewood, Colorado, read that shortly before the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 587 B.C., the Ark of the Covenant containing the tablets Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai had been removed from the Temple and hidden in a cave. “That sacred Ark is yet hid. It has never been disturbed since it was secreted,” Blaser read.

The Talmud (a written compendium of Jewish oral law and teachings completed by about the fifth century A.D.) preserves a tradition that the Ark was hidden prior to the Babylonian destruction of Solomon’s Temple. Little else about the Ark was written in ancient times, however. The Ark’s fate is not recorded in the Bible. The second book of Maccabees, in the Apocrypha, tells us that it was hidden on Mt. Nebo where Moses first viewed the Holy Land.

Blaser, however, rejected Mt. Nebo as the Ark’s location. Mt. Nebo was too far from Jerusalem, on the other side of the Jordan, beyond the borders of Judah. Besides, the book of Maccabees was not reliable, Blaser contended.

In order to locate the cave in which the Ark had been hidden, Blaser used, by his own account, his “imagination.” Where would the priests have chosen to hide the Ark? By “logic, reason, and circumstances,” Blaser was led unerringly to David’s cave near the shores of the Dead Sea at Ein Gedi. Here was a desolate area, within the boundaries of Judah and about 40 miles from Jerusalem. David was a national hero. “Why not hide the precious Ark in David’s cave?” Blaser asked rhetorically.

So Blaser began his search for David’s cave and its precious treasure. Of one thing, he was sure: The cave at Ein Gedi that is pointed out to tourists as David’s cave was not the correct site. It did not match the Biblical description. According to 1 Samuel 24, the cave was near the Rocks of the Wild Goats. After surveying the Ein Gedi area, Blaser located what he believed to be the Rocks of the Wild Goats. Here the ibex still congregate at a spring.

Blaser could find no cave, however. With an unshakable conviction that the entrance had been cleverly hidden, Blaser enlisted the aid of two employees of the United States Bureau of Mines, Frank Ruskey and Richard Burdick. Ruskey was a geophysical engineer and Burdick an engineering geology technician. Together they had more than 40 years experience in locating underground geological anomalies. At the government’s Mining Research Center in Denver, they were developing methods to locate and map abandoned underground mines.

In November, 1977, Ruskey and Burdick took leaves of absence from their jobs to go to Israel with Blaser to see whether there were any underground caves in the area Blaser had identified as the Rocks of the Wild Goats. They conducted a sophisticated geophysical investigation of the area, using “electrical resistivity methods supplemented with seismic refraction and seismic velocity measurements.”

Their results were nothing short of astounding. Within 50 feet of the black rock cap on the top of the hill Blaser had identified as the Rocks of the Wild Goats, Ruskey and Burdick’s 13 resistivity lines located a huge Y-shaped cave within. One of the branches of the Y was about 210 feet long; the other, 150 feet. Ruskey and Burdick’s scientific instruments also located the entrance to the cave at the bottom of the Y. The entrance, however, had “apparently been man-blocked and obscured.”

At the bottom of the Y, Ruskey and Burdick observed “an unusual vertical rock face” with a six-foot horizontal settling crack in it or, as they called it, a “partial opening.” “This partial opening,” they concluded, “could have been created by shrinkage or compaction of a man-made wall.” The natural filled openings nearby featured smoothly rounded blockages, but the wall-face they identified as the cave opening was “nearly vertical.” The supposed manmade wall was covered with a layer of travertine. Travertine 059is a soft limestone conglomerate that forms in a wet environment. (Stalactites and stalagmites are travertine).

Ruskey and Burdick also found remnants of rock walls that had served, they said, either as trail supports or agricultural terraces. On top of the cliff was another rock wall in an area that was “basically inaccessible for agricultural purposes.” In addition, the cap rock on the cliff edge had “apparently been removed.” Ruskey and Burdick interpreted this evidence as follows: The cap rock had been removed to channel spring water over the presumed opening to the cave. The rock wall on top of the cliff was in fact not an agricultural terrace wall but a diversionary wall to channel additional water over the cave opening. “The intent was to stimulate the growth of vegetation and travertine to cover a man-made cave blockage below the cliff!”

Ruskey and Burdick’s seismic experiments apparently confirmed that a man-made wall lay under the nearly vertical travertine surface. Their seismograph measured the travel time of seismic energy created by hammer blows on a steel plate as it traveled within the earth and returned. The seismic waves travel much faster through undisturbed solid limestone than they do through blocks of stone, no matter how well fitted together. In their test, the seismic waves traveled twice as fast through known solid rock areas than through the area that appeared to be man-blocked. The results, said Ruskey and Burdick, “were rather striking.”

Blaser was ecstatic. He was certain he had found David’s cave. Moreover, he was “sure” that it contained not only the Ark of the Covenant and the Ten Commandments “written by God’s own hand on tablets of stone,” but also Aaron’s rod, a gold vessel containing manna, original 060scrolls written by Moses and various other artifacts.

Blaser set about assembling a reputable archaeological team to whom the Israel Department of Antiquities would grant a permit to excavate. Dr. Edward Lugenbeal, then acting director of the Geoscience Research Institute at Andrews University, Berrien Springs, Michigan, was enlisted as director. Even more critical was the fact that James F. Strange, Dean of the College of Arts and Letters at the University of South Florida, agreed to serve as field director, ceramicist and architect for the project. Strange is a highly respected archaeologist with many years experience and is well-known to the Israeli authorities. Like most scholars, Strange believes that any search for the original Ark of the Covenant is doomed to failure, but he is equally convinced that every cave in this area—which has already given the world the Dead Sea Scrolls and other ancient manuscripts—should be meticulously explored using the best scientific methods available. A third member of the team was Joseph Schuldenrein, a geologist from the University of Chicago.

Based on a scientific proposal containing no mention of the possibility of finding the Ark of the Covenant, the Israel Department of Antiquities granted an excavation permit.

The team assembled at the site on September 7, 1979, and began work the next morning.

The first day was a bad one. The agricultural terraces that Ruskey and Burdick thought they had found turned out to be, to the trained archaeological eye, purely natural features. Similarly, the wall that supposedly guided the water over the cave opening was also a natural feature.

When Schuldenrein examined the remains of the cap rock that supposedly had been removed to channel the water over the cave opening, he found that the cap rock had been “simply rounded and worn down by the progressive erosion of spring waters.”

Worse yet, when the team removed a patch of travertine with chisels, hammers and picks, they discovered that beneath it was not a man-made wall but hard rock—“a shiny 061brown patinated dolomitic limestone, identical in composition to the overhang cap rock.” Two other patches of travertine several meters square and about 20 cm deep were chipped off, with the same results.

But what of Ruskey and Burdick’s seismic readings that indicated a wall (or a non-solid seal) under the travertine? Fortunately, Ruskey accompanied the 1979 excavation team and was able to conduct additional seismic tests. With the removal of more travertine, it became evident that Ruskey and Burdick had been misled by an extensive network of radiating fissures in the natural bedrock where the original readings had been taken. “When tests were made several centimeters away from these fissures, the readings increased dramatically and conformed to those recorded for solid limestone.” The fissures in the bedrock had been created, according to the team’s geologist, by salt weathering from Dead Sea salt that settled in the rock pores, crystallized and created greater tensile strength than the rock could bear, thus causing the fissures that Ruskey and Burdick misinterpreted to be a man-made, entrance-blocking wall.

The horizontal crack that Ruskey and Burdick had interpreted as a settling of the man-made wall was really a hunk of the cliff that had broken and dropped down several centimeters. The crack had then enlarged over the centuries from water wash.

So the “artificial wall” was in fact simply a natural bedrock seal. The underground caverns were there all right, created by underground water activity that eroded the soluble limestone. But the seal was bedrock and no man or animal had ever been inside.

“Needless to say,” writes Strange, “this was a disappointment. We had thought that the identification of the opening by a trained geophysical engineer looked correct in the report, but it did not hold up, even to visual inspection, to the trained archaeological eye.”

By 8:30 the morning of the second day, there was nothing to do but pack up and go home. The expedition was over.

Strange concluded, “We wasted a lot of money and certainly some valuable time, but there may still be caves that need opening out there around Ein Gedi. There is no reason to think that the Ark of the Covenant is there, but many other interesting things are likely to be found.”

Larry Blaser is also disappointed. He admits that what he thought was the opening to the cave is in fact not the opening. But he thinks there may be an opening elsewhere that he hasn’t found and that the cave may very well be David’s cave. Although he speaks with less conviction now, he still believes this cave is the best site in the Middle East for hiding the Ark of the Covenant. However, he has no specific plans to pursue his quest further.

“Found!” proclaimed Lawrence Blaser, referring to the actual cave where David accidentally happened upon King Saul near the spring at Ein Gedi on the shores of the Dead Sea. David could have killed King Saul, but instead he simply cut off the hem of his robe to make the point (1 Samuel 24). Blaser’s search began in 1958 after he read the works of Ellen G. White, a 19th-century prophet of the Seventh Day Adventist church. In Volume 4 of her Spiritual Gifts, Blaser, a home builder from Englewood, Colorado, read that shortly before the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem […]