Biblical Mysteries

Reports of the imminent unveiling of the Ark of the Covenant are gaining widespread interest, the patriarch of the Orthodox Church of Ethiopia has claimed the Ark has been hidden in a church in his country for thousands of years."The patriarch of the Orthodox Church of Ethiopia says he will announce to the world Friday the unveiling of the Ark of the Covenant, perhaps the world"s most prized archaeological and spiritual artifact, which he says has been hidden away in a church in his country for millennia, according to the Italian news agency Adnkronos."

View: Full Article | Source: WorldNetDaily

A new genetic survey of people in Africa has suggested that the Kalahari desert in southwest Africa could be the origin of modern humans, the "Garden of Eden" where we first emerged some 200,000 years ago."Locations for the Garden of Eden have been offered many times before, but seldom in the somewhat inhospitable borderland where Angola and Namibia meet.

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View: Full Article | Source: Times of India

The decayed wooden object ­lying neglected on a shelf in a museum storeroom didn’t look like anything too exciting. But for Tudor Parfitt, Professor of Jewish Studies at London’s School of African and Oriental Studies, its discovery was the culmination of a search that had taken him more than 20 years.The professor was convinced that this object, which resembled a damaged, ancient African drum, was in fact the lost Ark of the Covenant. One of the most holy objects in ­existence, the Ark, thought to have dated back to around 1200 BC, is ­described in the Bible as a form of container that once held the tablets on which were inscribed God’s Ten Commandments. Yet sometime around 587 BC, after the Babylonians invaded Jerusalem, the Ark is thought to have vanished.But after decades of exhaustive ­research, Parfitt became convinced that the ordinary looking wooden object in the storeroom of the Musuem of Human Sciences in Harare, Zimbabwe, really was the ­remains of the lost Ark. Last year he published a book detailing his breakthrough and documentaries broadcast around the world heralded the find as one of the greatest archaeological discoveries since the Dead Sea scrolls. The world’s media soon dubbed the Welsh professor “the British Indiana Jones”. But now, almost a year later, Parfitt is worried. Since the publication of his book and the broadcast of the documentaries, the whereabouts of his intriguing discovery are once again unknown. Parfitt says he has been told by sources close to family members of the autocratic Zimbabwean president Robert ­Mugabe that the object is now in the possession of one of Mugabe’s relations, perhaps even Mugabe himself. “I first got suspicious when I started to hear that several people who had tried to see the Ark, many of them ­respectable academics, had been turned away and the museum was becoming very cagey about it,” he says. “Then a contact of mine who has connections to Mugabe’s extended family told me that people close to Mugabe have taken it. To view the rest of this article, please visit the source

Biblical scholars have long argued that the Dead Sea Scrolls were the work of an ascetic and celibate Jewish community known as the Essenes, which flourished in the 1st century A.D. in the scorching desert canyons near the Dead Sea. Now a prominent Israeli scholar, Rachel Elior, disputes that the Essenes ever existed at all - a claim that has shaken the bedrock of biblical scholarship.Elior, who teaches Jewish mysticism at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, claims that the Essenes were a fabrication by the 1st century A.D. Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus and that his faulty reporting was passed on as fact throughout the centuries. As Elior explains, theEssenes make no mention of themselves in the 900 scrolls found by a Bedouin shepherd in 1947 in the caves of Qumran, near the Dead Sea.

"Sixty years of research have been wasted trying to find the Essenes in the scrolls," Elior tells TIME. "But they didn't exist. This is legend on a legend."Elior contends that Josephus, a former Jewish priest who wrote his history while being held captive in Rome, "wanted to explain to the Romans that the Jews weren't all losers and traitors, that there were many exceptional Jews of religious devotion and heroism. You might say it was the first rebuttal to anti-Semitic literature." She adds, "He was probably inspired by the Spartans. For the Romans, the Spartans were the highest ideal of human behavior, and Josephus wanted to portray Jews who were like the Spartans in their ideals andhigh virtue." Early descriptions of the Essenes by Greek and Roman historians has them numbering in the thousands, living communally ("The first kibbutz," jokes Elior) and forsaking sex - which goes against the Judaic exhortation to "go forth and multiply." Says Elior: "It doesn't make sense that you have thousands of people living against the Jewish law and there's no mention of them in any of the Jewish texts and sources of that period." So who were the real authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls? Elior theorizes that the Essenes were really the renegade sons of Zadok, a priestly caste banished from the Temple of Jerusalem by intriguing Greek rulers in 2nd century B.C. When they left, they took the source of their wisdom - their scrolls - with them. "In Qumran, the remnants of a huge library were found,"Elior says, wi......