Board of Governor’s Research Chair in Archaeological Theory and Reception. He co-directs archaeological excavations in Jordan and in Canada.
McGeough applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Readers of the Lost Ark: Imagining the Ark of the Covenant from Ancient Times to the Present, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Readers of the Lost Ark introduces the Parker Expedition, an expedition in which British explorers sought to recover the lost Ark of the Covenant from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The Ark of the Covenant is the chest that God instructs Moses to have built, and, according to the biblical account, had dangerous properties and powers. The Parker Expedition sought to find the Ark, and they had raised money for the expedition believing that its discovery could be quite profitable. Working surreptitiously in one of the most religiously and politically contested spaces in the world, the team’s excavations near and on the Temple Mount eventually set off a riot in Jerusalem from which they had to flee for their lives. Page 99 introduces the main characters involved in this expedition: Lt. Montague Parker, formerly a British soldier, and Valter Henrik Juvelius, a Finnish mystic who believed that he could decipher hidden messages in the Bible, especially those related to the Temple of Solomon. Juvelius’s decipherment was not a traditional translation but involved a reimagining of biblical history from that presented in the Old Testament. Juvelius, interacting with ancient Rabbinic accounts, offered a new version of history where King David hid the Ark of the Covenant in a secret location in Jerusalem, from which it was later removed by King Hezekiah. Parker and Juvelius thought that they could find this secret hiding spot.Learn more about Readers of the Lost Ark at the Oxford University Press website.
The Page 99 Test works really well for my book (and in fact the publisher and I had decided to make this chapter the free preview chapter well before I thought to check page 99). Most readers will know of the Ark of the Covenant from the Indiana Jones film (the name of which inspired the name of my book), in which the fictional archaeologist races the Nazis to discover this ancient biblical weapon before they do. Page 99 introduces this curious story about a real-life quest for the Ark, one rooted just as much in fantasy interpretations of the ancient relic as Indy’s story. For the Parker Expedition was not based in the scientific study of the Bible or the archaeology of Jerusalem; it invoked mystical thinking driven by impulses to find lost treasure. It was not a typical archaeological expedition; it was the attempt of untrained amateurs to use psychic techniques to decode supposed secret messages in the Bible in order to find lost treasure. This specific example well captures what my book is about, which is not so much what the Ark of the Covenant actually was (although I do address that) but more how the Ark has come to be meaningful for different communities in different contexts. Readers of the Lost Ark explores how the biblical accounts of the Ark are ambiguous enough to inspire all sorts of different interpretations of what the Ark was, what it was used for, and where it could be now.
--Marshal Zeringue
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