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EZEKIEL'S CODE AND THE ARK OF THE COVENANT CODE EZEKIEL' AND THE COVENANT ARK THE Guided by keys in the Book of Ezekiel, a European expedition conducted a dig underneath Jerusalem in 1909-11 to find the hiding place of the sacred biblical artefact, the Ark of the Covenant. ould the real Indiana Jones have been Finnish? Early in the 20th century, a Finnish scholar and poet named Valter Henrik Juvelius (1865-1922) claimed to know where the Ark of the Covenant was hidden. Juvelius believed that certain ciphers in biblical passages—when read in their original Hebrew format—could reveal the secret hiding place of the greatest biblical treasure on record. He thus obtained a Hebrew Old Testament and tried to solve the problem...before going to the Holy Land and digging underneath the Temple Mount, the most holy site for three of the world's major religions. Juvelius qualified as a surveyor in 1887 and completed his academic studies, receiving the title Candidate of Philosophy the following year. For the next 20 years, he served as a surveyor at IImajoki and Lapua. In 1897, he published his first collection of poems, entitled Kuvia ja séivelid ("Images and Notes"). One of the poems he wrote, "Karjalan Kunnailla" ("O Hills of Karelia"), is still very well known in Finland. He also translated many Swedish and Finnish authors, as well as the works of foreign writers such as Goethe, Burns, Byron and Poe into Finnish. For the poetry books and translations, Juvelius used the pen name "Valter Juva". Nothing so far in the life of Juvelius indicated what direction his work and legacy would take. But a clue can be found in his doctoral dissertation, written in Swedish and presented in 1906 to the Imperial Alexander University of Finland (nowadays Helsinki University). The subject was Jewish chronology and his thesis was approved; he was now "Doctor Juvelius". Nevertheless, there was no direct connection between his subject matter and his ensuing quest for the Ark of the Covenant. Clearly, though, Juvelius was moving in this direction. He was a man of letters but also a man of ciphers, it seemed. Juvelius became convinced that the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel contained a secret code that described the location of the Ark of the Covenant and the route to it. This was decades before Eli Rips, as reported by Michael Drosnin, believed he had found a "Bible code", but decades after "Egyptologists" had "identified" a biblical chronology in the passageways of the Great Pyramid. The Book of Ezekiel is, in essence, prophetic but has been interpreted in various ways, from giving an accurate description of an extraterrestrial spaceship to referring to the fixed cross of the Zodiac, as cosmologist Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet believes the vision describes. For Juvelius, it concerned the Ark of the Covenant. The secret location of where the Ark was kept in safety, Juvelius believed, had only been known to Ezekiel and the high priests. Little is known about Ezekiel, but we do know that he was a priest in the temple at Jerusalem, was the son of a priest and had a wife prior to being carried off in the Jewish Exile of 597 BC at the age of twenty-six. He died before the captivity in Babylon ended. If the Ark was still present in Jerusalem in 597 BC (there is no hard evidence that it was...or wasn't), and if it had been secreted away ahead of the invading army, then the secret of where the priests had hidden the precious artefact was about to die with them. Hence, they needed to preserve that knowledge so that a future generation could retrieve the most precious of Jewish artefacts. This theory could explain how the Ark disappeared, as well as the Bible's consequent silence on this point—though it is equally possible historically that the Ark disappeared several centuries earlier. The central question, of course, is whether the Book of Ezekiel did contain a code—and if it did, it seems worthy of a new Dan Brown novel! Juvelius was convinced that he had cracked the Ezekiel code. Like so many who believe they have cracked a code, he drew maps and sketches, pointing to the exact place by Philip Coppens © 2006 PO Box 13722 North Berwick EH39 4WB United Kingdom Email: info@philipcoppens.com Website: http://www. philipcoppens.com PO Box 13722 North Berwick EH39 4WB United Kingdom Email: info@philipcoppens.com Website: http://www. philipcoppens.com NEXUS = 41 by Philip Coppens © 2006 OCTOBER — NOVEMBER 2006 www.nexusmagazine.com