Below is an extract from Dr. Joel Baden’s book The Historical David: The Real Life of an Invented Hero. This extract was posted at BSA here.
Jerusalem had a cult before David, but it was not an Israelite cult because Jerusalem was not an Israelite city. As the very name of the city shows, Jerusalem “Foundation of Shalem” was devoted to an old Semitic deity, Shalem, a god of dusk or of the evening star. To make his capital an Israelite cultic center, therefore, David had to start afresh. But this was not as easy as, say, building a church or synagogue is today. Cultic sites had long histories and associations stretching back into the past that justified their sanctity. David’s new capital had none of this. He could hardly get away with making up a story explaining how Jerusalem, a well-known foreign city, was actually of great Israelite religious significance; there could be no founding legend like that of the Bethel cult. What he needed was something tangible, something everyone would recognize as marking God’s presence. And the ark was just a few kilometers away.
For all of its importance, we know remarkably little about the ark. Though it is described in some detail in the Bible, it is described in contradictory ways. In Exodus, it is depicted as a gold-plated box with a golden cover, mounted by golden cherubim (not pudgy babies, but fearsome winged lions). In Deuteronomy, by contrast, it is described as a plain wooden box without adornment. Its function is also differently conceived: in Exodus it is the physical seat of God, the center of God’s literal dwelling-place, the Tabernacle, and it is from atop the ark that God communicates with Moses. In Deuteronomy, it is merely the receptacle for the tablets of the Decalogue (the Ten Commandments), kept in the innermost sanctum of the temple. In yet a third passage, in Numbers, the ark is used as a palladium, a sort of military standard that went before the Israelites on their march through the wilderness.
In truth, the ark is most easily understood as the Israelite equivalent of an idol. That is, it is the physical representation of the deity—not the form of the deity, but its presence in the midst of the people. Like an idol in a non-Israelite temple, the ark stood in the innermost sanctum, the place where the deity was understood to dwell. Just as copies of ancient Near Eastern treaties were placed in the temples of the respective parties so that the gods could act as witnesses, the ark—at least in Deuteronomy—was the location of the most fundamental covenant between God and Israel. And just as non-Israelites took their idols out to battle with them to guarantee victory, so too the Israelites took the ark with them. Obviously, it was not really an idol—it was not worshipped as if it were God himself. But in its function it was the symbolic equivalent.
The ark belonged originally to the sanctuary at Shiloh, a major cultic site in the hills of Ephraim. It is likely that its presence there played a significant role in the importance of Shiloh’s sanctuary, investing it with special sanctity and probably making it a center for pilgrimages. In the book of Joshua, Shiloh is where the Israelites assembled to apportion the newly conquered promised land (18:1). It is to Shiloh that Elkanah and his wife Hannah went annually to offer sacrifices, where Hannah prayed for a son, and where Samuel spent his youth and received his call from God (1 Sam. 1:3). As the ark was a physical manifestation of God’s presence, it was natural for Shiloh to be a center for oracular inquiry, like an Israelite Delphi. Shiloh was not the only sanctuary in Israel, but it was a central cultic site and the only one to lay claim to the ark. For most purposes for the usual offerings and priestly inquiries a local sanctuary would suffice. Shiloh would have served as a sanctuary for exceptional occasions.
Among these occasions would have been those rare times when the Israelite tribes came together to defend themselves against external threat—like an attack by the Philistines. At such moments the priests of Shiloh would bear the ark into battle, as a sign that the God of the Israelites was fighting on their behalf. In the battle of Ebenezer, however, described in 1 Samuel 4, the ark was captured. Though it eventually found its way back into Israelite hands, it would never again reside at Shiloh. It was kept for about a generation in the Gibeonite town of Kiryath-jearim, just east of Jerusalem. And there it remained until David became king and found himself in possession of a capital with no religious significance.
