'We follow the same dietary laws as Judaism, as set out in Leviticus,' meaning that his followers keep kosher, even though they are Christians. 'We've had 1,000 years of Judaism, followed by 2,000 years of Christianity, and that's why our religion is rooted in the Old Testament,' he told me. Gripping a golden staff, wearing a golden icon depicting the Madonna cradling an infant Jesus, and seated on what looked like a golden throne, he oozed power and patronage. Paulos holds a PhD in theology from Princeton University, and before he was installed as patriarch, in 1992, he was a parish priest in Manhattan. This lineage remained so important to them that it was written into Selassie's two imperial constitutions, in 19.īefore leaving Addis Ababa for Aksum, I went to the offices of His Holiness Abuna Paulos, patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which has some 40 million adherents worldwide, to ask about Ethiopia's claim to have the ark of the covenant. But the Ethiopian faithful say the chronicles were copied from a fourth-century Coptic manuscript that was, in turn, based on a far earlier account. It was written, they say, to validate the claim by Menelik's descendants that their right to rule was God-given, based on an unbroken succession from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Many historians-including Richard Pankhurst, a British-born scholar who has lived in Ethiopia for almost 50 years-date the Kebra Negast manuscript to the 14th century A.D. When Menelik learned of the theft, he reasoned that since the ark's frightful powers hadn't destroyed his retinue, it must be God's will that it remain with him. Later Menelik went to visit his father, and on his return journey was accompanied by the firstborn sons of some Israelite nobles-who, unbeknown to Menelik, stole the ark and carried it with them to Ethiopia. The story is told in the Kebra Negast (Glory of the Kings), Ethiopia's chronicle of its royal line: the Queen of Sheba, one of its first rulers, traveled to Jerusalem to partake of King Solomon's wisdom on her way home, she bore Solomon's son, Menelik. He was the last emperor of Ethiopia-and, he claimed, the 225th monarch, descended from Menelik, the ruler believed responsible for Ethiopia's possession of the ark of the covenant in the tenth century B.C.

The most prominent of their victims was Emperor Haile Selassie, whose death, under circumstances that remain contested, was announced in 1975. In a campaign that Derg officials named the Red Terror, they slaughtered their political enemies-estimates range from several thousand to more than a million people. The North Koreans built this one as a gift for the Derg, the Marxist regime that ruled Ethiopia from 1974 to 1991 (the country is now governed by an elected parliament and prime minister). One of the first things that caught my eye in Addis Ababa, the country's capital, was an enormous concrete pillar topped by a giant red star-the sort of monument to communism still visible in Pyongyang. It arrived nearly 3,000 years ago, they say, and has been guarded by a succession of virgin monks who, once anointed, are forbidden to set foot outside the chapel grounds until they die. Much of Jewish tradition holds that it disappeared before or while the Babylonians sacked the temple in Jerusalem in 586 B.C.īut through the centuries, Ethiopian Christians have claimed that the ark rests in a chapel in the small town of Aksum, in their country's northern highlands. It was venerated there during Solomon's reign (c. 'Biblical and other archaic sources speak of the Ark blazing with fire and light.stopping rivers, blasting whole armies.' (Steven Spielberg's 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark provides a special-effects approximation.) According to the First Book of Kings, King Solomon built the First Temple in Jerusalem to house the ark. Thus the ark “was worshipped by the Israelites as the embodiment of God Himself,” writes Graham Hancock in The Sign and the Seal. And into this chest Moses placed stone tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments, as given to him on Mount Sinai. And so the Israelites built an ark, or chest, gilding it inside and out.

'They shall make an ark of acacia wood,' God commanded Moses in the Book of Exodus, after delivering the Israelites from slavery in Egypt.

Royal order of ethiopian hebrews