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The most important objects in the Hebrew Bible are a wooden box, styled in English'the ark'or'the ark of the covenant', and two statues of winged creatures,'the cherubim', that surmount it. Raanan Eichler attempts to understand these objects using the full gamut of data and tools available to the modern scholar. The study features an abundance of visual comparative material, much of it in colour, with a particularly close examination of the finds from the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. The author proposes solutions to a number of unsolved puzzles, such as the question of what cherubim looked like, and offers a new explanation of the nature of the ark and the cherubim, rejecting the prevailing scholarly view of them as having constituted an'empty throne'and footstool for the God of Israel. Rather, he argues, they constituted an empty frame, a unique cultic focus that surpassed all known systems in the ancient Near East in the extent of the efforts it represented to prevent an anthropomorphic conception of the deity in a cultic context.

Although much has been written about the Ark of the Covenant, few authors engage the wealth of information available that pertains to Egyptian material culture. The Ark of the Covenant in Its Egyptian Con­text: An Illustrated Journey is the first book to explore the complex history of sacred ritual furniture in Egypt that predated the ark by hundreds of years.Within Egyptian culture, over four hundred examples of ritual furni­ture exist that shed light on the design and appearance of the ark. These examples form patterns that provide context for the Israelites'understanding of the ark at the time of its construction. That under­standing would have been obvious to the Israelites of the time, but has since become obscured over the millennia. This groundbreaking book is the first to connect the Ark of the Covenant with the archaeol­ogy and chronology of ancient Egypt, and it does so in an accessible way with straightforward text and dozens of full-color photographs and graphics.