"Moses as High Priest and Sorcerer? A Response to Graham Hancock's Egyptian Explanation for the Ark of the Covenant" - by Michael S. Heiser
22 Pages.

Until Paramount released the motion picture Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, scant interest was directed toward the fate of the ark of the covenant. Scholarly study of the Ark focused primarily on the ark narratives in II Samuel and the object's place in the Israelite cult.

Little has changed in the last decade among Old Testament scholars, most of whom scoff at the idea that the ark could have survived Nebuchadnezzar's invasion of Jerusalem, much less be an attainable prize for modern archaeology. In the popular arena, however, the discussion of what may have happened to the ark has recently been enlivened by British journalist Graham Hancock's book The Sign and the Seal: The Quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant (Crown, 1992). Hancock's book is approaching bestseller status, and his views on the ark of the covenant have been featured on several television specials, most notably National Geographic's Explorer series.

The purpose of this paper is not to comment on the viability of Hancock's answer as to the fate of the ark of the covenant. Rather, I intend to focus on several of the assertions Hancock makes on the way to his final solution. My particular contention is that Hancock's explanation of the character of the ark, his portrait of the prophet Moses, and his hypothesis for the origin of the ark are the product of misdirected research steered by manipulation of the biblical data, fallacious linguistical evidence, and consistently faulty logic.