Tom Crotser Has Found the Ark of the Covenant—Or Has He?

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Anyone assessing Tom Crotser’s claim that he has found the original Ark of the Covenant in all its gilded glory must surely exercise caution in light of Crotser’s additional claims to having previously located the Tower of Babel, Noah’s Ark, the City of Adam, and the great stone of Abel, where the son of Adam was killed.

On the other hand, when Crotser says that he actually took color photographs of the golden Ark of the Covenant, normal curiosity requires taking a look.

Tom Crotser lives in Winfield, Kansas, where he serves as director of an organization he calls the Institute for Restoring History International. He also runs a construction company and leads a group of 145 people who, according to Crotser, live in a community like that formed by the Essenes in the second century B.C.

Crotser was guided in his search for the Ark of the Covenant by the work of one Antonia Frederick Futterer, a Californian who had searched for the Ark of the Covenant in the 1920s.¹ A tradition preserved in the apocryphal book of 2 Maccabees 2:4–8 states that 067shortly before the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 587 B.C., the prophet Jeremiah hid the Ark of the Covenant in a cave on Mt. Nebo, the mountain east of the Jordan River from which Moses had viewed the promised land. Jeremiah blocked the entrance to the cave and prophesied that “the place shall remain unknown until God finally gathers his people together” (2 Maccabees 2:7).

Futterer explored Mt. Nebo and its neighboring peak, Mt. Pisgah, in the Nebo Range in search of the Ark of the Covenant. He did not claim to have found it, but he did claim to have found an inscription, on a wall blocking a passage, which he copied and took to Hebrew University to have deciphered. According to Crotser, the inscription read, “Herein lies the golden Ark of the Covenant.” No copy of the alleged inscription survives and no one knows who at Hebrew University was supposed to have read it.^a

A close associate of Futterer’s, Clinton Locy, fell heir to Futterer’s papers, so in the fall of 1981, Crotser went to see Locy. Locy, a retired minister now in his late 80s, lives in Kennewick, Washington. From Locy, Crotser obtained a sketch made by Futterer showing where Futterer had found the inscription on a passage blocked with a cement wall that Futterer could not penetrate.

Armed with Futterer’s sketch, Crotser and three associates proceeded to Mt. Nebo, Jordan, in October 1981. The Franciscans of Terra Santa own the summit; they guard the site’s Byzantine church and other ancient remains and have for decades conducted careful archaeological excavations there.

Crotser and his three associates spent four days in the area, sleeping in sleeping bags. On Mt. Pisgah, they found a depression, or crevice, which they believed to be the cave-opening identified in Futterer’s sketch. Without a permit to excavate, they removed a tin sheet covering the opening and proceeded into a passageway at 2:00 a.m. on October 31, 1981, the third night of their stay. The passage they explored exactly matched Futterer’s sketch, according to Crotser.

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The initial passageway, Crotser estimates, is about 600 feet long, 4 to 6 feet wide and about 7 feet high. It led through several room-like enlargements with numerous tomb openings on both sides containing two or three levels of tombs. In the course of their exploration, Crotser and his associates illegally broke through two walls. The walls were made of mud and rock mixed together, sort of like cement, as Crotser described it. It was obvious to Crotser that someone had been there not long before and had plugged up the wall upon leaving.

At the end of the passageway, Crotser encountered a third, more substantial wall. Working with a hand pick, he and his crew illegally cut an opening about 4 feet by 4 feet through a soft part of the wall. They saw no inscriptions. The opening they cut led into a rock-hewn chamber about 7 feet by 7 feet. According to Crotser’s estimate, this chamber lay precisely under the Byzantine church on the summit of the mountain and was connected to the church by a perpendicular shaft.

In this chamber, Crotser claims to have seen a gold-covered, rectangular box that he believes is the Ark of the Covenant. The box was closed and the explorers did not touch it. They did, however, measure it. It measured 62 inches long, 37 inches wide and 37 inches high.

In a corner of the chamber lay gauze-covered packages tied with leather thongs. Crotser took these to be the cherubim that once sat on the Ark, but he did not touch the packages.

Beside the box were poles passing through gold rings, matching the description of the Ark in Exodus 25.

With their flash-equipped cameras, Crotser’s group took color slides of what they had seen. Then they left and returned to this country, after unsuccessfully attempting to interest the Franciscans, the palace authorities in Amman, and an archaeology professor at the University of Jordan in their finds.

What the authorities in Jordan were not interested in, UPI in Kansas was. UPI reporter Darrell Day wrote a story at Crotser’s request. Datelined Winfield, Kansas, the story went out over the A-wire, the main news wire, to papers all over the country, which featured the story in the next day’s editions. Day proudly asserts, “The story got more of a play than anything I wrote in my life.”

Crotser refused to give his pictures to UPI, so UPI released the story without them. Crotser refused to release the pictures because, he says, God had told him to release the pictures only to London banker David Rothschild. Crotser claims that Rothschild is a direct descendant of Jesus and, says Crotser, although Rothschild is not necessarily saved, God will put it into his heart to rebuild the Temple. Crotser has written to Rothschild, but Rothschild will have nothing to do with him.

Although Crotser will not release his pictures, he will show them to selected visitors to his home in Winfield.

One such visitor was a prominent and highly respected archaeologist, Siegfried H. Horn. For 16 years, Horn led the Andrews University excavations at Tell Heshbon, a site 4 miles (6 km) northeast of Mt. Nebo. Horn is the author of 12 scholarly books and over 800 articles.

Horn was asked to go to Winfield by a group who knew of his scholarly reputation and standing, and who wanted a respected authority to examine Crotser’s claims. Horn, confident that Crotser had not found the Ark of the Covenant, nevertheless agreed to go not only because of the intense interest aroused by the UPI story but also because Horn felt that the best way to handle such claims was to examine the evidence and then to report what artifacts Crotser had erroneously identified as the Ark of the Covenant. Horn planned to be in Jordan in the summer of 1982 as a consultant on a new archaeological expedition scheduled to begin at Tell Jalul, just 10 miles (16 km) southeast of Mt. Nebo. He would talk to the Franciscans and the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, look at the objects Crotser had photographed, and report to the world what they really were.

The first step was to go to Winfield, Kansas. Horn was cordially received by Crotser who described his expedition in considerable detail. As a result, Horn believes he can locate the cave where Crotser saw the “gold box” the “gauze-covered packages” and “gold rings.”

Crotser also showed Horn his color slides. Unfortunately, they came out very badly. All but two showed absolutely nothing. Of the two that registered images, one is fuzzy but does depict a chamber with a yellow box in the center. The other slide is quite good, according to Horn, and gives a clear front view of the box.

Horn is a practiced draftsman and shortly after he left Crotser, he made a sketch from memory of the box as he observed it in the slide. The front of the box appeared to be covered with a sheet of bronze containing a pattern of small holes. Around the edges and down the middle are metal strips with a diamond pattern. Although 069Horn is not certain, the diamond- (and triangular-) shaped pattern may have been punched out of the strips. In any event, the strips are lighter yellow than the underlying metal sheet. The regularity of the patterns indicated to Horn that the metal was machine worked.

In the upper right corner of the face of the box was a nail with a modern looking head.

Horn concluded: “I do not know what the object is, but the pictures convinced me that it is not an ancient artifact but of modern fabrication with machine-produced decorative strips and an underlying metal sheet.”

The next step was for Horn to go to Mt. Nebo to identify correctly the object Crotser mistakenly took to be the Ark of the Covenant.

But Horn never went to Jordan.

The archaeological excavation at Tell Jalul on which he was to serve as consultant was abruptly canceled on June 5, 1982—not by the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, which had issued the excavation permit, but by the Prime Minister’s office. Unfortunately, Crotser’s false claim that he had found the Ark of the Covenant played a major part in the Jordanian decision to cancel the 1982 season of a major archaeological expedition, with the resultant disappointment to a staff of American archaeologists and scores of expectant volunteers, as well as a loss of approximately $35,000 in unrecoverable costs.

One of the major reasons for withdrawing the 1982 excavation permit for Tell Jalul was the illegal excavation, subsequently highly publicized, of a group of Americans—Tom Crotser and his associates—looking for the Ark of the Covenant. Several reliable sources, including a professor of archaeology at the University of Jordan, have confirmed that Crotser’s expedition was a key element in the Jordanian decision.

It is difficult for Americans to understand the Jordanian government’s decision. There seems to be little relationship between the crime and the punishment. It is well-known, however, that the Jordanians do not want any Biblical discoveries made in Jordan. This policy became even firmer in the summer of 1982 after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

The Jalul team of American archaeologists sought to obtain a permit to excavate Tell Jalul for the summer of 1983, but again they were unsuccessful. The dig may never materialize—a permanent casualty of Tom Crotser’s search for the Ark of the Covenant.

In the meantime, we still cannot report what it was Tom Crotser photographed at 2:00 a.m. on the night of October 31, 1981. As soon as we find out, we’ll let you know. But rest assured, it was not the Ark of the Covenant.

Anyone assessing Tom Crotser’s claim that he has found the original Ark of the Covenant in all its gilded glory must surely exercise caution in light of Crotser’s additional claims to having previously located the Tower of Babel, Noah’s Ark, the City of Adam, and the great stone of Abel, where the son of Adam was killed. On the other hand, when Crotser says that he actually took color photographs of the golden Ark of the Covenant, normal curiosity requires taking a look. Tom Crotser lives in Winfield, Kansas, where he serves as director of an organization he calls […]