Biblical ‘Ark of the Covenant’ Stars in New Discovery Channel Documentary
Series will feature Texas-based archaeology expert Dr. Scott Stripling on his digs at the Ark’s last known location.
By Yakir Benzion, United With Israel
The Discovery Channel is making a new six-episode TV series about the lost Ark of the Covenant, but crews will start filming in Katy, Texas and not in the Holy Land, the Houston Chronicle reported.
The cameras will be rolling at The Bible Seminary in Katy, where seasoned archaeologist Dr. Scott Stripling will discuss his extensive digs in Israel, primarily at Shilo in central Samaria.
“Shiloh was Israel’s capital before Jerusalem, and that’s where the Tabernacle was for over three centuries,” said Stripling, who is the seminary’s provost and professor of Biblical Archaeology and Church History.
“I’ll be in all six of the episodes as a content expert where I discuss the itinerary that the Israelites took when they left Egypt, how and when the Ark and the Tabernacle were constructed, and the route that the Ark takes,” he said.
Stripling has been involved in extensive archaeological digs in Israel both at Shilo and in the Old City of Jerusalem.
The TV series will focus on the mystery of what happened to the Ark of the Covenant that held the Ten Commandments that accompanied the Israelites from Mount Sinai through their wanderings in the wilderness and eventually to the Promised Land.
The fate of the box, which according to the Bible was covered with gold and ornate carvings, has been a mystery in Judeo-Christian culture for over 2,000 years.
The Discovery Channel chose Stripling because the veteran archaeologist is one of the world’s leading experts on the subject.
The Ark of the Covenant disappeared during the Babylonian conquest of the Jews 2,600 years ago and its fate, a mystery, has been the subject of many movie plots.
Last year, Stripling’s team of diggers uncovered a stone horn, which appears to be one of the four corners of the ancient altar that is described in the Book of Kings.
Stripling is a much more serious version of movie character Indiana Jones, who in the film Raiders of the Lost Ark spent his career searching for the lost Ark of the Covenant.
Although he lives in Richmond, Texas, Stripling has spent a lot of time over the past few decades supervising digs in Israel, where he says the findings have reinforced his belief in the Bible.
“Archaeology doesn’t set out to prove or disprove the Bible. What we want to do is to illuminate the biblical text, the background of the text, so to set it in a real world culture to what we call verisimilitude,” he explained.
“It means consistency between what we read in the text and what we find on the ground.”
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