Monday, April 06, 2009

Parfitt's Story Gets Weirder: The Holy Ark and Mugabe

One never knows how strange a story you'll read.

A year ago, I dealt with Tudor Parfitt, Professor of Jewish Studies at London’s School of African and Oriental Studies and now, he's in this:-

Has Mugabe Stolen the Lost Ark?

The decayed wooden object ­lying neglected on a shelf in a museum storeroom didn’t look like anything too exciting...The professor was convinced that this object, which resembled a damaged, ancient African drum, was in fact the lost Ark of the Covenant...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...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.

...Parfitt was struck by the similarities between the Lemba’s description of the ngoma and the Bible’s description of the Ark of the Covenant. Both were carried on poles and not allowed to touch the ground, both were brought into battle as a way of guaranteeing victory and both were guarded by a priest class, whose male descendants would inherit the guarding role. In the case of the Ark these men were the Levites; those guarding the ngoma were called the Buba...research from the cutting edge of science brought Parfitt a step closer to his goal. A study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics discovered the men of the Lemba tribe really did show evidence in their DNA that they had descended from Jewish tribes who had subsequently married into African families. What’s more, DNA analysis has discovered genetic markers unique to Jewish priests, proving that they really had descended from a common ancestor, believed to be Levi.

When Parfitt’s colleagues carried out DNA tests on the Buba, the Lemba priests, they discovered the same frequency of the unique genetic markers as in Jewish priests.

...Now the object is missing, further analysis is impossible.

“At first the authorities in Zimbabwe had been relatively uninterested in what we were doing but as they began to appreciate what we had found the threats started,” says Parfitt. “Members of my team who had been allowed to film the ngoma were told that if they tried to return they would come to harm or be thrown in jail.”

Parfitt also says that sources who have told him of the Mugabe family’s interest in the Ark have stressed that their lives could be in danger for even discussing its present whereabouts. These aren’t empty threats. Mugabe’s thugs have killed and tortured countless people. At least half of Zimbabwe’s population is in danger of starvation and cholera is killing one in 20 citizens.

If Parfitt’s suspicions are correct and Mugabe really does have possession of the sacred Ark of the Covenant, it could hardly be in more evil hands.


Jewish tradition has the ark hidden somewhere below the surface of the Temple Mount.

4 comments:

Thor said...

Lets have a discussion about something that really matters, eh?
Should immigrants from the rest of the world be allowed to push out people who have lived in Israel (I'm using that name as a courtesy for you) for many generations just because an old book said some thousand years ago that this was the promised land for a particular following of the world of god?
Is that just?

YMedad said...

a) we didn't "push' out people. there was then at the time, mid-1880s, more than enough room and that is a proven fact - today, 150 years later, we have over 7,000,000 persons in Israel and 1,500,000 in Judea and Samaria and a bit more in gaza? They didn't have to get so violent.

b) Jews are not immigrants. I call them revenants, persons coming back to their ancestral home after a long absence. Jews retrun to Zion.

c) not just because an old book says so. later books. Christian books. the Quaran (Sura 17). etc.

g said...

"we didn't "push' out people"

Then who is occupying the refugee camps and why is there refugee problem that is one of the questions negotiated as part of the Palestine question settlement?

They didn't have to get so violent.

Citing Dr. Hanan Ashrawi in J. Carter's "Peace not Apartheid"

"So far, they have succeeded in holding the peace process hostage to this mentality on the one hand. And on the other hand they have provoked tremendous violence by acts of incitement like shelling, bombing, house demolition, uprooting trees, destroying crops, assassinating political leaders, placing all Palestinians under closure in a state of total immobility- a prison. And then they wonder why some Palestinians are acting violently. And then they want to have the right to exercise violence against the captive population. Then they like to make non-violence on the part of the Palestinians a precondition for the Palestinians to qualify for talks, let alone for statehood. "
(P.154)

muebles en madrid said...

This won't succeed as a matter of fact, that's exactly what I consider.