The Ark of the Covenant

his place again. And when they arose early on the morrow morning, behold, Dagon was fallen upon his face to the ground before the ark of the Lord, and the head of Dagon, and both the palms of his hands were cut off upon the threshold. Only the stump of Dagon was left to him. Therefore, neither the priests of Dagon, nor any that come into Dagon's house tread on the

threshold of Dagon and Ashdod unto this day. But the hand of the Lord was heavy upon them of Ashdod, and he destroyed them and smote them with immrods, even Ashdod and the coast thereof. And when the men of Ashdad saw that it was so, they said, the ark of the God of Israel shall not abide with us, for his hand is sore upon us, and upon Dagon, our God. They sent therefore and gathered all the lords of the Philistines unto them, and said, what shall we

do with the Ark of the God of Israel. And they answered to let the ark of the God of Israel be carried about unto God. And they carried the Ark of the God of Israel about thither. And it was so that after they had carried it about, the hand of the Lord was against the city with a very great destruction. And he smote the men of the city,

both small and great. And they had immrods in their secret parts, emmiads in their secret parts, immrods in their secret parts, emirods in their secret parts, emads in their secret parts. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuffworks dot Com. Hey you welcome to Scuff to Blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And if you couldn't guess by that opening, obviously we're gonna be talking about the Ark of the

Covenant today. Robert. I think it was when I came back from Thanksgiving break that you were like, we're doing the Arc of the Covenant on the show, and I was like, what the heck are you talking about? Now? You know, I'm always up for an exploration of some kind of weird ancient artifactory something like that. So so we're we're good to go. But why did you want to talk about the arc on this show? Robert, Well, it's like nothing we've gone after before. Jah. I was like,

um no, that that the arc is. I guess it basically comes down to the arc has along fascinated me. I grew up watching Raiders of the Lost Arc, the Indiana Jones movie. I had it on VHS and I would sit there and watch said and solved in slow motion. Pretty much every special effect in the film I would watch in slow motion, from the melting of Nazis to just, uh, you know, more practical stuff as well. Uh and you like sit your parents down and your grandparents into a

frame by frame face melting analysis, that sort of thing. Yeah, it just it always fascinated me. And then if you're setting in church, and I grew up attending church, you you pick up the Bible and you flip around and you look at you read the interesting passages and certainly the passages about the Ark of the Covenant are some of the more fascinating. Uh, this's just there's just they just resonate with mystery and like what is this about?

And so I feel like throughout my life I have come back to it, and uh, in each time I've I've looked at it with new eyes, and more recently I've been thinking, uh, you know what, what are some scientific possible scientific explanations, even if they're a bit fringy in places regarding the arc, surely they exist, and lo and behold they do well. The way that the Arc

connects to a lot of scientific topics is very interesting. Generally, it tends to connect to them and kind of uh yeah, like you say, fringey often kind of like uh pseudo pseudo scientific kind of ways, but gives you a good mysterious jumping off point to talk about real science. So yeah,

we want to talk about the myth today. We want to talk about some weird fringe and pseudoscience believes people have had about the arc and how that connects to weird ideas about ancient technology to talk about real science and technology potential in the ancient world. And uh, I think it's gonna be a lot of fun. Now, I have to admit it. As much as I love the discussion module our Facebook group, it is associated with stuff

to build your mind. I actually checked in with the Movie Crushers this is the group associated with Chuck Bryant's Movie Crush podcast, because I was curious what it what it was, what it is like a two have never seen Raiders of the Level Lost Arc, and also what it is like to have seen Raiters of the Lost Arc but with some sort of underlying understand thing pre existing understanding of the Ark of the Covenant, because I can relate to to to neither of those like the

Ark of the Covenant as it's revealed, and Raiders of the Lost Art has pretty much always been there in my life. Essentially, Raiders is a book of the Bible in a way. Yeah really, I saw that, and then later on I learned how to read and came back into and learned what the Bible had to say about it. But you know, in Sunday School, we just never got the mrods. I don't know why they left the mrods out. I would have loved that when I was seven. Well we'll get we'll get to this, but I think one

of the issues, of course his translation. In some translations, they're referred to as tumors. I think that's where I encountered the first time, and I was like, whoa, back up, The Ark of the Covenant is giving the enemies of God tumors. Uh, And that's what that's one of This was post Raiders, but then I was But then I was like, oh, I'm really hooked now, Like this is this is even more you know, Eldric horror heaped upon

the mystery of the arc. It makes you want to imagine an alternate universe in which Raiders to the Lost Ark was not made by Spielberg and Lucas, but was made by David Cronenberg. And so when they open the arc, it's kind of like the tumor gun from Videodrome. Yeah, exactly.

I think that again, that's one of the things about about The Ark of the Covenant is is it's just so weird, and we're going to keep touching in on that weirdness, and we're also going to keep referring to Raiders of the Lost Arc throughout this episode because this episode, more than anything that we've covered before, because it's just

free license to talk about that movie at nausea. Yeah, there's a lot of fascinating stuff just in the original Arc mythology, but the the Indiana Jones treatment of the story partially merges it with something kind of like Pandora's Box, Like it becomes just a container of unknown and unutterable mystery where there isn't quite so much that feeling in the Bible stories, though it is a strange and sacred

object of profound power. Now, two of the big questions that are generally mold over concerning the Arc, uh, first of all, what was it? And then secondly, where is it now? Now we're mostly going to ruminate over the first question, because the second is one of those questions

that tends to lead to one of two places. Either the fact that it's simply lost to history, likely destroyed in some prior age or or hidden away and lost, assuming that there was such an object, and that's the other possibility is that it simply did not exist um Or it leads one to various speculative or even downright conspiracy theories involving you know, the Knights templars perhaps, Or there's the notion that it's it's currently hidden out of

sight in the chapel of the tablet in northern Epethiopia, which is possible, but there's no no proof or that it was taken to heaven, an answer that requires more of a speculative lead than the notion that the arc,

like so many treasures of history, simply failed to survive history. Now, one of the main things that we're going to be exploring in this look at the Arc is that the Arc of the Covenant is yet another one of these ancient stories, these objects of ancient myth, which there have been great efforts by modern writers to ground the myth and what we now know about science and technology, reimagining what the ancients believe to be magic as some kind

of lost powerful science or technology. And we've discussed before some of the risks of technologizing the myth. Uh, it's not necessarily always wrong, but it's an impulse that's not all. It's also not always justified. There's a sort of naive way of reading ancient texts that says, Okay, let's take what they say happened basically at face value, but posit a different explanation for it than they would have. And while this can be a fun exercise, I love doing it,

I personally enjoy it. We shoul always remember not to start feeling like this is a necessary and especially not like it's a parsimonious exercise, when in reality, ancient histories of all kinds, religious texts, myths, and so forth are likely to be full of narratives that are the result of creative imagination and things like exaggeration across time and retellings. In other words, there's no event that you ness really have to explain, because the events described in these ancient

stories often just didn't take place. Right. We can't treat a description of the arc in uh in the whole Testament as being the same as say, you know, fossil evidence or a or a crater, right right, We we just don't know. I mean, it might be based on something that actually happened, but we don't know. But if we take the route of saying, well, okay, if these stories are based on something people saw, are based on

something that actually happened. When we look at history that way, ancient history with a bit of science under the belt, there is this insatiable itch the retro sci fi hermonutic which I've been looking for a concise name for, and I think I just realized the perfect one for for this era of that which I'm gonna I'm gonna start calling bronze punk. So you've got Yeah, you've got steampunk for the Victorian era, You've got adam punk for the

atomic age. And I think we should have bronze punk as the name for this retroactive technologizing of the time period of classical civilizations in the ancient Near East, including the Hebrew Bible and its contemporary civilizations and texts. So with those important caveats, I think we should begin a bronze punk adventure into the ark Bronze Bronze punk does have a lot of of of opportunity here. It gives us a chance to bring back uh tal Us, the

Bronze automaton. Oh, that's a classic example we would tell us. I think they'd be bronze. I don't want to be too rigid about the time period that applies to either, because a lot of the stuff we're talking about here, I think would technically be bridging Bronze Age and Iron Age in the regions that are affected. But all that aside, Yeah, anything it doesn't need to stand in the way of

Talus battling the Ark of the Covenants. Let'm saying, well, before we get into all these supposed bronze punk explanations of what the arc might have been if it existed, and if some of the stories about it are based on things people saw, we we should just explore the myth, like what is the story of the arc and what do the text say about it? All? Right? Yeah, Well, we're talking here about the airon Hobart, the Arc of God, the Arc of Testimony, the Arc of the Covenant, just

a few names that were used to describe it. Here a gold plated wooden chest used by the ancient Hebrews to house the two stone tablets of Law given to Moses by God, and it was also said to contain a couple of other holy relics, such as Aaron's rod, a magical item used by Moses brother, as well as a pot of manna, the supernatural food stuff that fell

from the heavens to feed the Israelites in the desert. Now, in addition to being made of gold, to the other decorative element that is a signature of the art are the two cherubim that are depicted atop it. Now. I'm not quite sure why this has happened, but in modern English usage cherubs or cherubim that has come to mean naked baby angels like you would see on those cards or the creepy little statues people put on their dressers.

But cherubim are not naked cute baby angels, right, right, Even though, like if we describe something as bearing cherubic today we're describing so it's got like a baby with fat cheeks, or maybe an adult with a fat with fat cheeks and kind of a baby's face. But really it should be a horrifying adjective to to heap on something. It should mean that it is an object or personification

of just holy wrath. Right. Classical example would be Angel stationed outside the garden of Eden with a flaming sword to keep people out. That's right, I mean that that is a chair of the true chair of forget the Renaissance art here that they're kind of like God's supernatural heavies. But as with any sort of mythological creature, you do see a lot of variety in the way they're depicted, ranging indeed from the bestial to the more human oid depictions of the art tend to favor of a version

of winged humanoids. But we could, and perhaps we should do an entire episode on angels and religious traditions in the future, because there's so much fascinating material there. So we're talking about creatures that would have been for ast your second circle and the hierarchy of angels and their descriptions include or tend to include the form of a lion, the form of a man, the form of an eagle,

or any hybrid of these forms. I've actually seen it described that they sometimes are representative as having four faces, yes, and the four the four faces would include the lion to represent the beasts of the wild, the man to represent the world of humans, I think, an oxen face to represent the world of domesticated animals, and then an eagle face to represent the world of birds, which I

guess are somehow different than wild animals. Yeah, these depictions of of the chairs often look kind of like emblems, right, with like folds of multiple wings and haloed heads of these creatures and a human poking out now. According to Carol rose Um, folkloreis who I frequently sign on the show. In her book spirits, fairies, leprecns, and goblins, and Encyclopedia Hebrew religious writings state that images of Chibian guarded the Ark of the Covenant, as well as Solomon's temple and

their divine messengers attending spirits and disseminators of knowledge. Now it's possible, Rose points out the Cherubim are derived from the Assyrian Lamassu or se Dow, and these were the female and male, respectively, benevolent demons in ancient Assyria and Babylon.

They would have protected palaces and temples, and they were there often depicted as winged bulls or lions with human heads, and they mostly remained invisible and were assigned in the manner of guardian angels to protect an individual human from the evil uh tuku. There are some amazing carvings of these in the met in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I believe from the palace of the Assyrian king Ashurbanapul the second, or maybe not the palace, but I think commissioned by that king, and that they're fearsome and wonderful to behold, Yes they are, and to come back to Raiders of the Lost Arc. These are of course presumably the the the entities we see flying around after the Nazi open the Ark of the Covenant at the end of the film, the Cherubim, Yeah, yeah, because it first thought look like like women, you know, sort of beautiful

ghost women. And then of course the face changes and it becomes this kind of snarling, skeletal lion type face, and then of course it's death for all who view the ark. Now for a for an artifact that has come to be imbued with so much mystery retrospectively, the Bible actually does just straightforwardly explain how to build the arc. It's like minute specifications on what you're supposed to do

to make one. Yeah. And also it almost makes you wonder, like, what's the big deal about losing it, because clearly you have you have a strict set of instructions on how to build another one. Well, I mean I think they were just like magical beliefs about the sacredness of what it contains. Oh yes, certainly, but that but that ultimately is the thing, right, The art is a container, a

fancy container. Uh perhaps even a holy container if you're approaching with that worldview, but just a container for other otherwise holy relics. That is one thing that I think makes it very fascinating and kind of unique. And there are probably some other great artifacts like this, but fascinating in that it is uh this artifact with all this significance, but it is essentially just a vessel for other things.

It's a container, it's not a statue. Well, should we read the instructions from Exodus twenty five in case anyone wants to build along as we as we do the podcast. Let's build it all right, um, get your your cubit ruler ready, and they shall make an arc of shittim wood. Two cubits and a half shall be the length thereof, and a cubit and a half the breadth thereof, and

a cubit and a half the height thereof. And thou shalt overlay it with pure gold within and without shalt thou overlay it, and shalt make upon it a crown of gold round about. And thou shalt cast four rings of gold for it, and put them in the four corners thereof, And two rings shall be in the one side of it, and two rings in the other side of it. And thou shalt make staves of shittim wood and overlay them with gold. And thou shalt put the staves into the rings by the sides of the arc,

that the arc may be born with them. The staves shall be in the rings of the arc. They shall not be taken from it. Now I want to jump in here and said, they say that this is exactly the kind of description of the arc that is disappointing when you're a child, you've seen raiders and then you want to read about it in the Bible, and you just find this this kind of boring description of how to build one. Oh, there are better stories. We got

the m roads. We're gonna get to some more later. Well, this this description is about to get a lot more interesting, and certainly we'll tie into some stuff we're gonna discuss later. And thou shalt put into the arc the testimony which I shall give thee. And thou shalt make a mercy seat of pure gold. Two cubits and a half shall be the length thereof, and a cubit and a half the breath thereof. And thou shalt make two cherubims of gold of beaten work. Shalt thou make them in the

two ends of the mercy seat. And make one cherub on the one end and the other cherub on the other end, even of the mercy seat. Shall ye make the cherubims on the two ends thereof, So, in other words, make the two cherubs face each other on the ends of the mercy seat. Believe a space, because that space is important. Anyway continues, And the cherubims shall stretch forth their wings on high, covering the mercy seat with their wings, and their faces shall look one to another toward the

mercy seat. Shall the faces of the cherubims be, And thou shalt put the mercy seat above upon the arc, and in the arc thou shalt put the testimony that I shall give THEE, and there I will meet with THEE. And I will commune with THEE from above the mercy seat from between the two cherubims, which are upon the arc of the testimony of all things which I will

give THEE in commandment unto the children of Israel. Okay, So this thing is a container, as we've been saying, but it's also a chair, and it's a chair for God himself. Right, the ideas that that mercy seat is where God is going to manifest It sounds from the instructions like there is going to be a presence of the Lord there, and uh and Moses and perhaps you know, some other priests. Whoever is in charge, whoever is authorized

to do so, will actually commune with God. It is, in the words of Belloc, a radio for speaking to God. A transmitter. But it's really more like a video phone than than just a transmitter. Right, yeah, it's like FaceTime, you know. On that note, let's take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll discuss the story of the arc, because that too will be important as we get into some of these scientific ideas regarding the arc.

Than alright, we're back. Alright, So if the arc was actually built, about when do we think that would have happened. It would have been about three thousand years ago. Now we've seen the instructions in the Bible where they believed God had sent his people, uh, you know, the detailed plans on how to make the arc. But what do they do with it once they've got it. Well, after they've they've built it, they carried around with them and they use it as a central part of their religious observations.

I mean, it's essentially a mobile altar piece. Right, I mean it's it's a it's a temple that you can pick up and move. So think back again to that part about the mercy seat. This is the point from which God speaks to the children of Israel. And if Raiders is any indication, it's also from Wincey sends out

his smiting laser beams of Holy Nazi frying death. Now the wording here is interesting because it is the and I'm I'm possibly a butchering this of course, but the haw copperette well and coufer that's k k a p h a r means to cover, but kapareth means a

thing of wiping out or cleansing. So they carry it a bit before them when during the Exodus, and it was said to clear impediments and poisonous animals in their path, and it was even said to stop the flow of the river Jordan's so that they could cross into the Promised Land. But it was also conceived of as a kind of a magical weapon of war. Right, Yeah, they marched with it at the Siege of Jericho. Of course that you know, they were blowing those trumpets, but still

the arc was there. And as they're blowing those trumpets. Eventually the walls come tumbling down. But then in five seven and five BC, the Babylonian Empire conquered the Israelites, and the arc was supposedly taken from the temple in Jerusalem and from their advantishes from history. So if it did indeed exist, as as to some degree as the stories are told, this is where it stops. We don't know what happens after this, right, this is this is

where it becomes the lost. Now, as with any Bible artifact of any significance, I would bet that there are some people out there who claimed to have found it. Yes, and but but before we we touch on those, I do want to point out just a wonderful fragment of a quote here came to It came to us from National Geographic Society fellow Fred Hybert. He told the website Nationally Geographic that it's not really something that you can

go after. You can't really search for the arc because the arc exists at quote the crossroads between myth and reality. And I think that's that's essential to keep in mind for the entirety of this episode. In the next well, I would say, for example, I think the arc probably has a better chance of being in some way based on a real historical artifact than something like Noah's Ark. But people constantly go looking for Noah's Ark, and every

time they go looking they find it. You know, there's well, here's some wood on a mountain and turkey here it is, right, And likewise the arc is simply essentially just wood and gold, uh and is not is even less of a feat to build. Like we have the instructions you could, if you had the materials, you could build one today. So even if we were to uncover an ARC candidate, it's not really possible to tell though, if you have the Arc of the Covenant, I mean, there could probably be

multiple arcs out. They're saying that they're the arc, yeah, I mean there and there have been cases where they're where marchaeologists have found something that is like an arc, a box that has perhaps excited a few people here here and there, but ultimately, uh, you know, it doesn't

pan out. I mean, I suppose if you had a strong candidate, you could do carbon dating on the on the relic, perhaps the wood, especially if there are any women into the wood remaining, to at least know if it's old enough, yeah to know if it's it's old enough, but again it could just be another box from that

time period. That being said, some of the possible final resting places for the arc include has already already alluded to St. Mary of Zion Cathedral in Oxom, Ethiopia, under the care of the Ethiopian Orthodox, to a head O church, and more specifically, under the care of a single caretaker who alone gets to see the arc. Naturally, that means no one gets to verify what they actually we have

or don't have much less study it. Some claim that it was hidden beneath the First Temple in Jerusalem before the Babylonians destroyed it in five eighty six b C. But this can't be verified either, because that means it would be somewhere beneath the Dome of the Rock Shrine,

which of course is a holy site in his Lam. Now, there's another claim mentioned in that nat Geo article that I sided earlier, that it was buried beneath the hill, and not just any hill, but the very hill that would later be known as Galgatha, the place of the Skull, which is the place where it is said that Jesus was crucified right, and according to this story, when he's crucified, his blood like drains down into the hill and eventually to the arc itself buried beneath him and U. This

relates to a quote unquote find of amateur adventurer Ron Wyatt who lived nineteen thirty, who claimed to have found, among other things, Noah's Ark, the Ark of the Covenant, the Tower of Babel, the graves of Noah and his wife, as well as the blood of Christ itself. Needless to say, one should take his account with all the salt that Wyatt claimed to have also discovered at the ruins of Sodom. Uh. Yeah,

he was not a true archaeologist. Now, this guy is not unique and essentially being um, somebody who is an apologist for their religion who goes out I mean I mainly know of this within within Christian you know, like somebody who's basically a Christian apologist, a defender of the faith, who goes out seeking artifacts. That has always struck me as a kind of odd thing to want to do.

I guess I get it. On the level of these are people who are trying to prove that the Bible is literally true and everything, all the stories in it literally happened on Earth at a certain number of years ago. But it seems like kind of a profaning of the the orientation towards their myths. If they're going out and saying like, I'm going to find the bones of this person who's the you know in the stories that I believe, or I'm going to find the had left over from

the boat. Yeah, I mean, I guess you can approach it from a few different points of view. I mean, I always the way I always approach it is that that the you know, the deep mythology of a given faith need not be factual to have power and h and therefore there's no reason to go and try and find fragments of it or expect them to be there to be there. Uh, you could, I guess, approach it as someone who needs to find those items because that

again supports their religion. Perhaps the racist doubt if only I could find a piece of the arc, then I know it was real and I can silence these doubts. The other way of looking at it, of course, is someone who has no doubts whatsoever, and they're like, hey, the arc was obviously real. Um I gotta prove it to everybody else. Yeah, I need to prove it to everybody else, or I just I just want to find it. It's out there somewhere. Why has nobody found it. I'm

going to be the one to do it. And to your point, if you go into this read these regions, there is just so much history that especially somebody's just bumbling around and they don't really know what they're doing, They're going to find something that they can pass off,

they can believe in. I don't know. They end up being kind of like the Villains and all the Indiana Jones movies who want to possess some powerful, mysterious action artifact, but they want to possess it for some earthly purpose, like you know, then I can show everybody this thing

or something. It's sort of the moral of Raiders of the Lost Dark at the end that Indie, Indie loses his his sort of profane curiosity and he realizes I can just let this thing be sacred and not have to look inside and not have to want to own it and control it and show the world. Yeah. I think that's a's a solid read on Raiders of the Lost Dark. You know, well, while we're talking about Raiders.

So let's let's go ahead and uh and discuss a few of the details about it, because I'm I'm assuming most people have seen Raiders, but I know there are some individuals out there who just haven't seen the film yet. Uh, And I certainly encourage everyone to see it because it is a damn near perfect motion picture. Is there a better action adventure movie? I can't think of. I mean you could, you could say Star Wars, right, you could

point to other yeah, things of that nature. But but I mean, it's such a tentpole film in terms of like big summer action films. It is the film that so many other motion pictures have have tried to be. This, of course, is a film came out in one directed by Steven Spielberg, screenplay by Lawrence Kasden's story by George

Lucas and Philip Kaufman. Uh. Philip Kaufman, by the way, is uh is the person who reportedly brought up the idea of using the arc in the story, and he was He was also the grandson of German Jewish immigrants to the US. Spielberg's parental grandparents were Jewish Ukrainians. Uh so I one would assume that the that this played into the the use of the Arc in the film, but also some of these themes regarding the you know,

the struggle of the Jewish people against depression. Yeah. Well, one of the unspoken subtexts to the film, I think is that ultimately the Arc ends up fulfilling its destiny as the weapon that protects the Jewish people in the end. It's it's destroying Nazis, right, and it's recreating a tale that will touch on in a bit, the idea that the Arc is stolen by an enemy force and then uses its power against that enemy force. Yeah, it's sort of a retelling of the of the Amrods story almost. Yeah.

I should also point out that John Williams did the score for the film, and I'm usually I'm I'm kind of over John Williams scores for the most part. I don't know what you're talking about, dude, How can you not love John Williams. Well, the thing is in rewatching portions of this film for this episode, I I still I have to give him all the credit in the world because that that the scene when they finally opened the Arc and the Arc unleashes it's um, it's wrath

upon the Nazis. The music is perfect in that it just really adds to the sense of just holy mystery that is unfolding. There. Take any movie with the John Williams score and take the score out, replace it with something else. You wouldn't have half the movie. But what if it was Tangerine Dream, then I can only imagine it. It might be just a little better. Maybe, well, I love Tangerine Dream too, But you're wrong about this, no,

well maybe so. Now key scenes in the film for our purposes, because there's a lot of stuff in there that is of course added on and uh um, you know, historically inaccurate, certainly, But there are a few key scenes that that that match up with a lot of stuff we're talking about here today. There's a scene in which the arc burns the swastick off of the crate containing the arc. And then of course there's that fabulous scene at the end where the Nazis opened the arc, uh

and those Cherubim emerge. And then you also have the burning light of God finally emerging as well and just eradicating everybody that has their eyes open, and the idea of a fire that burns people emerging from the Arc is absolutely biblical and we will explore more of those stories later on. Now, a side question that I saw come up on the internet. Does Indie actually impact the

situation with the Arc and the Nazis at all? Because outside of saving Marian's life Marian the romantic interest, does he accomplish anything? No, And I think that's the genius of it. The movie ends with with Indie. It doesn't. It's an action movie that doesn't end with a fist fight.

There's no fight of any kind at the end. The the hero of the movie at the end is completely powerless and his victory at the end is assuming a posture of humility in the presence of the sacred Yeah, totally, because to remind everybody, at the end, he and Marian are tied up. The Nazis have the Arc and UH and Bellock is opening it in the full regalia, in fact, wearing some version of the vestiments that are described UH alongside the instructions for the for the construction of the Arc.

And then the arcis murders all of the bad guys and UH and Harrison Ford is left to pick up the pieces. Okay, we can't just fully turn this into

a movie crush episode. Now we've got a get back to, so we should probably get into exploring some of the weird scientific tangents people have gotten into on the subject of the Arc, and one of them that you can clearly look at is the idea of the immerrods and what happened with the Arc in the presence of the Philistines if you assume this story is based on any kind of historical memory or even an exaggerated version of something that people remembered, right, Yeah, because this is getting

to one of my favorite things about the Arc, the idea that it brings plague and or madness to those who should not possess it, that it is a dangerous artifact. So should we explore the idea of the Arc as a sort of bio weapon. Yeah, let's talk about the

Arc as plague bearer. I just want to remind everybody that previous passage that we read, and it was so that after they had carried it about, the hand of the Lord was against the city with a very great destruction, and he smoked the men of the city, both small and great, and they had immerrods in their secret parts. Now let's talk about those m rods. So those emorrods

are often interpreted as hemorrhoids. Okay, that would there seems to be a cognate issue there, and a lot seems to have been written about them over the years, in part because it seems like anytime you have a hemorrhoid paper, yes, and there are a lot of hemoroid papers out there, the doctor's writing them often like to throw in a

little bit of biblical flavor at the beginning. Yes, how many times has this story been cited in the International Journal of Hemorrhoid Research, Right, yeah, right at the very beginning of any paper, Because you're ultimately just going to talk about swollen veins and the lower part of the rectum and anus. But if you can make it a little magical right at the start, you can hook readers. Right, So for people who don't actually know, can you just

briefly explain what a hemorrhoid is? Yeah, it is swollen veins and the lower part of the rectum and anus. Okay, Yeah, that's all it is. Yeah, that basically, I mean, you can get more detailed in describing what causes them, and of course the treatments that are necessary. But it's been a problem for a long time. Obviously, it's something that may have been described here in the Bible. Uh and

just throughout human history people have had to deal with hemorrhoids. Now, if the story actually does mean that the Philistines got hemorrhoids, I know it's been translated in other ways, But if it did mean that, would the story be best interpreted as something that's supposed to be humorous? Is it like

a joke on the Philistines? You know this comes down, oh man, if you you kind of end up asking a big question about humor there, right, because I don't think hemorrhoids are ever humorous to the individual that has them. But clearly we have a lot of jokes about hemorrhoids. It's really funny when your enemies get one, I guess, I mean it's it's it's kind of an insulting curse from a powerful god figure. Right, It's not just like causing them to go blind or something. It's giving them

this this annoying health problem. And then there's this other apart to it as well. So the Philistines suffer these after they steal it and they locked it up in the temple of Dagon, and we see the statue of Dagon fall over multiple times. Um and the the arc of course not only mutilated there with their god's statue, it also caused these uh, these emrods, as well as a plague of rampaging mice. The emeralds again are also

sometimes referred to as tumors. So a lot of people have have looked at these examples and tried to figure out what could possibly be going on here, because if these these immrods be they hemorrhoids or some sort of a tumor, well, that's that's a symptom. That's something we can look look to that we can analyze via modern medicine, and then maybe we can look at some of these

other elements and try and piece something together as well. Now, just to be clear, once again, we mentioned this earlier, but we don't we don't have direct evidence that this story actually happened. We right, we don't know that this is based on something that people remember, but it could be it could be based on some kind of historical event, right, And likewise, a lot of a lot of work has been done looking at Okay, we had we had immerrods

and we have mice. What's the connection there, when in reality you could have two separate stories that end up being combined into a story that has imrods and mice. So, as I said, a number of people have written about this.

Two of the earlier ones where nineteenth century historians Gaston Maspero and Archibald Henry Says, who summarized the quote the Philistine soothsayer, being consulted at the end of seven months, ordered that the solemn sacrifices should be offered up and the arc restored to its rightful worshippers, accompanied by expiratory offerings of five gold mice and five gold tumors, one for each of the repentant cities. So they're not only saying, here, take your arc back because it is causing mice to

be everywhere and has given us some weird growths. They're saying, here it is back, but also here's here's some golden mice and some golden hemorrhoids or or tumors or something uh too, sort of as pay aiment or perhaps warning to her whoever gets the arc next. Now, I don't want to get too far ahead of things here, but I can't help but notice, if you've got mice and you've got tumors or lumps of some kind, I'm going

to start thinking about bubonic plague. That's right, because bubonic plague does result in bu bos, which are swellings of the lymph nodes. So that could sort of be classed as something like a tumor. You get a lump under your skin, right, And if you if you want to do a Google search, you can find images of these, uh, these swellings, and indeed they look kind of like like

lumpy tumor like growths. Frank R. Freeman, in a two thousand five Royal Society of Medicine article, highlighted some some other writings on the topic, including a two thousand argument by JP Griffin that it was in fact plague that

was afflicting the Philistines here. But then one W. M. S. Russell insisted that the tumors were amorroids due to dysenterry and that quote the rat carrier of the plague wasn't in the region at time of the described events, but that quote Since then, advances in archaeology have shifted the weight of evidence towards Griffin. Moreover, the emrods of the King James Bible appear in all modern translations as tumors. So if you're just trying, really trying to make it

work as hemorrhoids, you're probably out of luck. Right. It seems like like like tumors are more likely interpretation, and that leads a number of people to say, well, maybe it was it was debonic plague. Here's another quote from Freeman. Recent archaeological evidence has caused a rethinking of plague in

the ancient Near East. Fossilized remains of the plague flea have been found in large numbers in Amarana, Egypt, and since a Marna was occupied for only a few years, we can date this contact between human beings and plague fleas accurately to about fifty b C, which is before the events described in the Book of Samuel. Moreover, archaeological studies in the Nile Valley indicate that our Rattus was

introduced at this time, probably via ships from India. Evidence of bubonic plague has not been seen in Egyptian mummies, but all the vectors were in place. Okay, so this is saying based on some evidence we have there, the historical setting is is there like you could imagine that there could be bubonic plague at the right time, in the right place for this to be what is what is described in the story about the arc in the Philistines. That being said, I don't think anybody is arguing that

the arc was full of plague infested mice. This would just be a situation where the soothsayers made sort of a connection between plague mice and the illness, but instead of connecting those two things together, they just assumed they were both curses of the arc. Now, in a minute, I do want to come back and discuss the possibility

of bio warfare and germ warfare in the ancient world. Yes, and now before we get to that, I do I do want to also mentioned that one doctor Otto news Stator in nineteen forty considered that the swellings described here

might be possible. It might possibly be due to syphiletic infection, which is that the Philistines would have contracted syphilis from the Ark of the Covenant, or or again that an outbreak of syphilis lined up with the presence of the arc or was attributed to the presence of the arc in some fashion. Is there anything that syphilis doesn't explain.

But I mean, yeah, if we go back to to our earlier discussions of syphilis on this uh, this podcast, it it seems like you can pretty much describe just about everything if the only thing is you probably get into an argument about when syphilis would have impacted a given region. No, by that, I didn't mean that syphilis is a good explanation for everything. I just people have tried it on everything. It's like every powerful force in

human history. For sure, every historical event has a syphilis hypothesis, as will come up repeatedly in this episode. It's not necessary to invoke bronze punk bio warfare explanations to just a file legends of the Ark. But it is certainly, I think plausible that forms of biological warfare were practiced in the ancient world. That who knows that the ancient the ancient Hebrews, or or any of the other peoples of the time period could have figured out how to

do germ warfare and could have used it. And in fact, we have some pretty interesting evidence that it did actually happen, at least in one case, uh, in the second millennium BC. That's right, we're talking about the hit tights of Asia Minor going back to what BC around then, so I

think in the fourteenth century BC. So there was an epidemic at the time in the fourteenth century BC, known to historians as the hit Tite plague, that spread throughout the Middle East, And historical records of this pestilence appear in correspondence Stella to the Egyptian pharaoh akinat In from around thirteen thirty five BC, and they say that there's

a horrible play that spread throughout the land. It's affecting some Phoenician cities, and there was a fear that it was being spread by donkeys, which led to them barring people from infected cities from coming into other cities and

from preventing donkeys from being used in traveling caravans. And so there is a paper I wanted to talk about published in Medical Hypotheses in two thousand seven by a microbiologist named Zero E. G No trevis Sinato called the Hittite plague an epidemic of tularemia and the first record of biological warfare. And this is a really interesting hypothesis.

So Trevisano believes that the evidence indicates that the Hittite plague was in fact an epidemic of tularemia, which is a bacterial infection caused by the bacterium francis sella to lawrensis. Tularemia can spread between animals and humans, so it's potentially zoonotic infection UH and it can spread via several routes, including tick bites and by just direct contact or inhalation

of infected aerosols. It has different symptoms depending on the route of transmission, including high fever and ulcers and swelling of the lymph glands, and the pneumonic version of this infection leads to a cough, chest pain, difficulty breathing, and can definitely be deadly to Tularemia is actually often known to kill off large numbers of rabbits, which has led to it being commonly known as rabbit fever, and especially

without modern medical intervention, primarily antibiotics, it can be fatal to humans, so it is a deadly dangerous disease. Trevis Sinato says that after the outbreak of this plague hit the Phoenician city of Simura, the Hittites also known as the nest Shites, attacked the area and looted it, so you've got the city weakened by disease. The Hittites say, hey, some free stuff, so they run in. They attacked the city and they loot it, taking along livestock among the

many spoils of war. But soon after they returned, the Hittite raiders were hit within outbreak of disease that Trevis Sano Trevis Sinato also thinks was tularemia, and this would make sense because they brought the livestock. The animal hosts were arcs if you will, for the bacteria. Then while the Hittites were weakened with this epidemic, another people known

as the Arzawans attacked them. Then Trevis Sinato writes that their historical records that indicate strange incidents and when like wandering rams appeared in our Zawa, and the Arzawans of course wouldn't pass up free live stock, so they incorporated these rams into their flocks. But then they were hit with the disease, probably tularemia. And Trevis Sinato also mentioned the story that there was this Arzawan leader called Uasdis who was struck by a divine thunderbolt in the knee

disabling him. Quote a ruler infected with the plague and symptoms thereof being observed in the knees or in a region euphemistically and or puritanically described as the knees at the metaphor. Oh, this is the idea where like if an individual is wounded in the in the groin, they describe it as the knee instead, or like the foot, like often in the Bible. The use of the word foot is clearly a euphemism for the genitals. So here's

Trevis Sinato's hypothesis. It's that the Hittites, who had experience with this epidemic, deliberately planted disease carrying rams among their enemies in order to deliberately spread the rabbit fever the tularemia and weaken those enemies. And if that's true, it

seems like it worked. The Lands were unable to defeat the Hittites after the fever hit them, And we've got historical records that the Hittite king wished plague upon the lands, and that there was this Hittite scapegoat ritual in which a ram and a female attendant were sent out on the road spreading disease where they went, So we don't have direct evidence that the Hittites knew exactly what they were doing, you know, that they knew they were spreading disease,

or that they understood how the spread of disease was happening. So, while the evidence for this is very interesting, I would not say it's a proven case of germ warfare and that it doesn't seem like this has become accepted theory about what happened in this case. But it does seem

like a very promising hypothesis. But despite not having a germ theory of disease, I think it's certainly feasible that ancient people's could work out basic principles of epidemic transmission, such as that infected or maybe cursed animals would spread the disease to people they came in contact with, and using this basic knowledge, it's possible that ancient people's could

have deliberately spread diseases among their enemies. And it's clear that later armies with not much more scientific understanding than the ancient people's had did this. Yeah, indeed, I mean two of them. The most probably famous examples of this would be throwing dead things, be they animals or soldiers UH over the walls into a besieged city, or throwing that kind of stuff down a well to try and

destroy poison uh an enemy's drinking water. Yeah, so I just wanted to mention a few examples that are cited in a paper called the History of Biological Warfare by Friedrich Frishnecht, and this these would all be before the germ theory of disease, but he mentions that in eleven fifty five, Emperor Barbarossa poisons water wells with human bodies

in Italy. In thirteen forty six, the Mongols catapulted bodies of plague victims over the city walls of Kafa and the crime Crimean Peninsula, And in fourteen the Spanish mixed wine with blood of leprosy patients to sell to their

French enemies in Naples Cocktail. So while I would absolutely say that we do not need to resort to explanations like this to explain the origins of these stories, at the same time, I think it's fascinating and highly plausible that there could have been cases where ancient people's used biological or germ based why bends to hurt their enemies like you can imagine a vessel or a container as some kind of biological trojan horse, tricking enemies into taking

home some disease vector with them. What if you you get people to steal your ARC and it's actually a box full of rabbit corpses covered into laremia ticks. Yeah, I just I would have assumed they'd look inside it before they take it home. I mean that just seems like like this is common sense. Well, maybe you make a crafty one with like some hidden you know, containers on the compartment stuff on the hidden compartments, with grates for the ticks to get out. You can you can

get really creative with this. So there are no instructions about that, though in the biblical account it's true there are not. Again, but I'm not saying that this actually happened and explains the story. I don't think you need to go there. All right, we're gonna take one more break, and when we come back, we'll talk a little bit about radiation and uh, the idea of the arc being indeed a radio for talking to God. All right, we're back.

So I I mentioned earlier, you know, the influence of fiction on our considerations of the arc and I definitely remember being I guess this was like junior high reading Stephen King's The Stand and then also looking around in the Bible and thinking about the arc of the Covenant, because of course this this wonderful sequence throughout the later portions of Stephen King's The Stand And which what was

his name? Do you remember this character? Which character? The character is dragging the the atomic bomb across the trash trash can man? Yeah, Donald Merwin, Albert, that's good. Do you remember his whole name? Yeah? I just remember him just being like the melty bomb guy, because he's just he's just ravaged by radiation, sickness and mutation. He's just his skins basically dripping off his body as he drags this, uh,

this bomb into the final scene of the entire book. Well, based on a kind of atomic age monster movie understanding of how radioactivity works, you could certainly imagine somebody looking at the story of Oh the you know, they took this, this thing killed people and sometimes at one time point people took it and they got tumors. This must be radioactive. Maybe it's a plutonium bomb. Yeah, it sounds like something right out of a Fallout game or a plan of

the Apes movie. Right, yeah, Um, but of course we we can't really seriously consider any explanation that involves an ancient atomic weapon. No, there's just no explanation for why that would have occurred, right. I think the use of germ warfare among the ancients, even though they might not have had a germ theory of disease, I do think it's plausible given what they could have figured out just

based on experience. It is not plausible at all that they I mean not even close, that they came up with any kind of highly radioactive materials, right, Because, of course, the other side of the equation is, hey, we have

naturally occurring radioactive materials. Perhaps they just dug that stuff up and stuff the arc full of it, because I mean, certainly there are you have sites like Ramsar Iran that that have a lot of naturally occurring radioactive materials there, but they still don't produce anything near the high level doses required to cause radiation sickness. Yeah, digging uranium out of the ground, even it's not going to be anything

like that. The highly radioactive elements we would find in like nuclear reactor fuel or nuclear weapons exist only in extremely tiny trace amounts naturally, and to produce significant amounts of something like uranium two thirty five or plutonium two thirty nine, you have to subject naturally occurring rocks containing mostly more stable elements like uranium two thirty eight to

some kind of process. Right, You've gotta like bombard it with neutrons and a reactor, or you've got a centrifuge it to separate out the more dangerous you two thirty five. The greatest natural terrestrial source of human exposure to ionizing radiation seems to be radon gas. Radon is one of the radioactive decay products of uranium, along with other elements

like radium and thorium. And I just haven't found any evidence of a natural terrestrial radiation source strong enough to cause acute or noticeable radiation poisoning within a short span of time. Exposure to natural terrestrial radiation sources can be dangerous, for example rad on gas, but this is more because it tends to increase something like your risk of cancer

over long periods of time. For example, rate on gas is believed to be the number one cause of lung cancer among non smokers and the number two cause of lung cancer overall. So even the most potent natural radiation sources, they're not gonna do anything to you that you could detect I think without modern science. So I find it extremely unlikely that anybody in the ancient world could have an acutely lethal radiation source in a box. I think

we've got to rule that one out. Take that junior high Robert lamp I'm sorry, I'm not out he had it kind of now you made me feel like a jerk. No, no, no, this is this is this is not at all. I mean, this was something I was curious about when I was in junior high, and then later on you get to look into it and realize that, well, that didn't really

pan out. Now, I do want to mention something that I think we should come back and explore in a future episode, which is the idea of natural nuclear reactors. I don't believe any exists today, but there is evidence that billions of years ago, long ago, in Earth's history, when the when the elements in the Earth's crust were younger, there were some natural fission reactions that were sustained within rocks, in in rock formations within the Earth's crust, like it

h I know it. At least one side in Western Africa, there are these two billion year old natural fission reactors that we found all this evidence of that there was essentially a nuclear fission reactor happening naturally under Earth's crust, and that's led to even these really strange hypotheses, like all heternative hypotheses for the origin of the Moon, which say that it was the result of a natural fission reaction explosion in Earth's crust billions of years ago, which

that I know that is not a favorite hypothesis, but it has been put forward. I believe this was also the underlying science in the more recent American Godzilla film. Oh wait what Yeah, I believe so. Like the idea was that Godzilla is this ancient organism from back when you had naturally occurring high levels of radiation on Earth and the eight radiation, and that's their the whole reason for being gigantic radiations viewing monsters, what's the I don't

think they get into. The one I've seen recently is shin Godzilla, which is absolutely amazing, But they don't really explore the origin, do they know? I don't think they do. They're more they're hyper concerned with the present. How do we react to this, What do we have legal authority to do? Where to hold the meeting? Yeah, that sort of thing. So there's a with really fun movies in

their their their own right. So at this point, let's let's come back to again that that fabulous quote from belloc Are it's a transmit to a radio for speaking to God. As a little more Peter Lauri. But you know, any of the idea the more earthly indies says, you want to talk to God, we'll go see him together right now? Yeah, you know, it's it's a fun moment in the film. But the the idea is central to

the whole purpose of the arc. As we've discussed already, it's described as not only a place to how sacred relics, but as a focus of ritual, an altar of sorts, a mobile altar God manifests upon the Mercy Seat and speaks to the priests, instructing the priests of God's will. Okay, so if this is how they believed the arc to function in their worship, what are the ways you could

interpret this? Well, I think the most likely explanation of all would be that it just would simply serve as a focal point of devote in the same way that any altar or any statue or religious work of art does so, without the need for supernatural occurrences or ancient you know, technological devices or weird traps or what have you know, bells and whistles required. You know, I also can't help but compare it to the notion of a

focal point or a drift in yoga. And this is where you're you're not even looking necessarily at anything in particular. Maybe you're looking at a you know, a line on the wall or just a point in space, and you're focusing your attention on that and in doing so, hopefully

entering some sort of meditative state. Right. The goal is to to center consciousness, to crowd out other thoughts entering right, And I imagine a lot of our listeners out there you've had that experience, either by focusing on nothing, focusing on and say a clock on a wall or a wall socket, or perhaps some bit of religious art, uh, you know, an altarpiece across what have you in a various Hindu iconography as well, Like these conserves just a way to to focus our mind and also think about

perhaps what is illustrated in the work itself, and this is, you know, all ultimately very much a form of induction or a formally ritualized procedure whose function is the narrowing of consciousness by focusing attention. I also can't help but think that with a golden item like the like the arc. So you have the arc, it's covered in gold. You have it in a like a dark pavilion, and what kind of illumination do you have around you? Well, you

might have burning sacrifices, so they're indoors. You generally probably have firelight, but you could also have a sacrifice burning at the altar. That would be a sort of like a fire there. And I have to think also that there there would generally be smoke in this environment you do burning something in sensors, So you have you have you probably have smoke, You have some some firelight of

some sort. You have this gleamy golden artifact, not even getting into the cherubim that are on it, but it seems like that the light would play off of it in curious ways. The smoke would add to the mystique. It sounds like an environment that is generous to the creation of altered states of consciousness exactly again with no

drugs or or magical interpretations required. Yeah, exactly. Now. I know some of you out there that have listened to the show for a while are probably thinking at this point, well, what about the bicameral mind, right, because clearly, this whole time, Yeah, this whole time, we've been talking about a way of speaking to God, a way of hearing God's voice, right, so it it seems like it would naturally be a

part of all that. Well, first of all, let's just refresh about the bicameral mind and the idea of bicameral hallucinations in the origin of consciousness. In the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian James, the late Julian James argued that ancient humans heard hallucinated voices and that human consciousness as we know it today began roughly three thousand years ago as a cultural invention, which of course would kind of line up with the time frame that we're talking

about here with the arc. It's an unproven hypothesis and um, we've discussed some objections to it in the in past episodes, but it remains possible that at least some aspect of it is correct. In a way, it's a very safe kind of idea for James to have proposed, because there was in remains no real way of proving or disproving it right. You can't prove it because it's in history. But I do think it's subject to undermining by evidence.

I mean, like one of the things that I think would help undermine it is if you can just find more and more ancient examples of people demonstrating inner consciousness in ancient literature. I mean, like he he pointed to some examples of ancient literature and said, oh, they're remarkably devoid of the idea of an inner, inner voice or inner thoughts. So I think one pretty easy way of saying no, he was probably wrong is just to look at ancient texts that do show signs of of consciousness

an inner, inner monologue. And then also he was very open about the fact that he basically just looked at Western and classical examples, classical literature, classical architecture for evidence of the bicameral mind. He didn't really look at Eastern

examples because he did not speak the linkage. Now you mentioned and we've said this before that it's it's one of these ideas that is probably wrong but really interesting and could be correct in some ways, like some sub parts of the the hypothesis could have something to them.

I think that I've been convinced that James is probably wrong about his model of consciousness, where consciousness came from and all that very likely wrong there, but could very well be right about the idea that ancient religions involved much more visions and hallucinations than modern religions do. I think that that's entirely plausible. And there's a lot of about reading, at least about ancient religious practices that seems

to indicate that that maybe is true. Yeah, because there is there is lot of listening to the voices of the gods, seeking the voices of the gods, and then we still see it reflected in our in in hymns and prayers that are said every day, asking to hear some voice. Even though we do not hear the voice, the voice does not actually speak to us in our minds. Yeah, and so yeah, I think even if the main part of his hypothesis, the idea of you know, the development

of consciousness in these different stages. If that's completely wrong, he could have been on on the right track looking at all these ancient examples of the almost ubiquitous religious visions and hallucinations in ancient worship right now. M. James's ultimate argument was that modern consciousness was a learned development tied to metaphorical language, and that that this change wouldn't

occurred all at once. Then it would have been something that's spread, and it wouldn't have affected like everybody within like a given talent at once. It wouldn't be like everybody, Ope, you got the new consciousness. Shot, We're all good to go. You would have had a lot of confusion, a lot of of chaos. The voices of the gods they grow fainter, but then they can be reached again via various practices. Like essentially, it was becoming harder to hallucinate now. James

did mention the arcs specifically in his original book. He said quote poetry then was divine knowledge, and after the breakdown of the bicameral mind, poetry was the sound and tenor of authorization. Poetry commanded where prose could only ask it felt good. In the wanderings of the Hebrews, after the exodus from Egypt. It was the sacred shrine that was carried before the multitude and followed by the people.

But it was also the poetry of Moses that determined when they would start and when stop, where they would go and where stay. And this is of course referring to the fact that the Moses would speak to through the arc. It authorized his decision making. So James didn't really get into the arc all that much in the book or in other papers of his that I've seen.

It's possible and sain something because I haven't read everything that James wrote, but I did run across some, uh, some writings by Brian J McVeigh, a scholar of Asia specializing in Japan, and he also studied under Julian Jays as a graduate student, and he discussed this a bit in his paper Biblical Evidence of bicameral Mentality Vestiges of

super Religiosity in the Old Testament. He discussed how the art could have functioned as an object of hallucinatory focus or o h F, and a portable one at that for the ancient Hebrews as they wandered the desert and wandered out of the bicameral mindset. So this is his quote from the paper. He's describing what an o h F is quote hallucinatory aids, broadcast instructions, commandments, warnings, speaking idols, living statues, effigies treated as if alive, fed, paraded, taken

on journeys and into battles. These emitted holy power and authorized decision making, in some cases portable. Ohf we're used, an example being the Israelites Ark of the Covenant. Yeah,

that's interesting. I mean, again, as I said a minute ago, you you don't really have to accept the bicameral framework for for consciousness and the the origin of these hallucinations in order to think, well, maybe that they're they're just physical objects that aid the mind in having religious visions or religious experiences, much in the in the like in the example of induction, like we were talking about earlier with the object of focus in say Hindu or Buddhist meditation. Yeah, exactly.

The bi cameral explanation, as fascinating as it is, it's not completely necessary for understanding why individuals would carry around a sacred item, carried it into battle and uh and also use it in their rituals. Isn't it so interesting the way religions around the world, so many of them have what you call scene setting, all these all this paraphernalia, the like different clothing, different sights and smells, physical objects to hold or be in the presence of, to look at, smoke.

Uh you know, uh, washing of the body, like all these different things that are in order to get you into a different mind state than you are. The rest of your life. You're out walking around getting your groceries, going to work, doing your stuff. But when you enter a religious space, you have to go through a process and surround yourself with things that put you in a different state of mind. And this seems to be core to to not every version of religion around the world,

but a whole lot of them. Oh yeah. I mean, if it's not a particular icon a representation, because certainly there are religions that that frown upon that depicting individuals or deities, etcetera, there's still is often like a focus on our texture or space. Oh yeah, exactly. Like in Islam, you're generally not gonna have representative art, but you do have a lot of attention to the creation of a sacred feeling environment. Uh, you know, the interior architecture of

many mosques around the world. Is is beautiful and it puts you in a different mind state. All right, Well, hopefully we've put everybody in a different mind state today as we discussed the Ark of the Covenant. And hey, here's the fun part. We're not done. There's gonna be another episode on the Ark of the Covenant looking at a particular idea, the idea that, okay, what if the Ark of the Covenant was a machine. I'm gonna give

a spoiler. We don't think it was a machine, but there there that does lead us down some other interesting paths that that will be a lot of fun to explore. All right. In the meantime, you can check out all the episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's the mothership, that's we'll find them all. That's where we'll find links out to our social media accounts, including the discussion module pay that I mentioned earlier. Obviously, we'd love to hear from

everybody about the Ark of the Covenant. Um, your thoughts on it, crazy theories you've read about it, your thoughts on Raiders of the Lost Arc, all of it is fair game. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producers Alex Williams and Tarry Harrison. If you would like to get in touch with us directly, let us know feedback on this episode or any other to uh say hi, let us know where you listen from. To suggest a

topic for the future. You can always do that. Blow the mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com. The Grass has a tame back by a prot