The ARK OF THE COVENANT continued...

This and other similar incidents led Ron to seal the passage. With the honeycomb of tunnels, it would be almost impossible for anyone to find the correct passage, and this one now looked - even up close - as if it was a natural stone wall. Ron had done all that he could do using that passageway, anyhow. It would be impossible to get any large object out of the chamber through that original passage. All his attempts to photograph anything in the chamber resulted in photos or slides that looked like a complete blur, so he concluded that he simply wasn't supposed to take any photographs. (He later understood why - at that time, he was much freer with sharing his information and this could have caused a lot of serious problems if some of the "unsavory characters" he came in contact with over the years had SEEN evidence that this solid gold object REALLY existed. Remember how Noah's wife's grave was plundered.) The next order of business would be to find the main entrance into the chamber - the passage through which the items were originally taken.

The Original Passage Used to Carry the Ark into the Cave

Before permanently sealing the passageway, Ron had gone into the chamber with the Ark and opened the original entrance to see if he could follow it to its point of origin. When he opened it, he discovered on the other side a very large tunnel which extended in both directions. He observed that the tunnel appeared to be a natural tunnel that had been enlarged as he saw chisel marks. But the bad news was that it was completely blocked with large stones in both directions. The problem now to be solved was determining the path taken by those who put the items in the chamber.

To resolve this question, Ron began by using simple reason. The items had been in the temple - that was their point of origin. They were now in this chamber, many feet below ground level. A great number of tunnels have been found under the temple mount and the city, but none that he knew of were heading in this direction. Was the entrance into the tunnel within the city or was it somewhere across the street in front of the northern wall? Ron had an idea as to where to begin his search.

"Zedekiah's Cave"

In the winter of 1854, Dr. Barclay, a physician and missionary, went for a walk in Jerusalem. He was walking to the site of the traditional "Jeremiah's Grotto" which is along the same Calvary escarpment. As he walked past the Damascus Gate, suddenly his dog, running ahead of him, vanished. As he searched for his dog who didn't respond as he usually did to his owner's whistles, he heard a muffled barking coming from the direction of the city wall. When he approached the wall, he noticed a deep hole and when he peered inside, he heard his dog's familiar bark. And this is how "Zedekiah's Cave" was discovered (or rediscovered).

This vast cavern is located underneath the Muslim section of the city, extending 750 feet into "Mt. Moriah", beginning at the trench or dry moat separating the northern and southern portion. It is 325 feet wide at the maximum point and the average height is almost 50 feet. It was clearly a stone quarry, but at what point it was in use, we really do not know. There are those who believe its stone was used in the first temple, and that may be true. But its existence was not a well known fact and most likely it was always kept completely sealed for fear of any enemies trying to tunnel into the city. So little is known for sure about the giant quarry, but one point everyone agreed on was the fact that there was no entrance into the city from the quarry.

Viewing the diagram of its layout, the dark areas are pillars of solid rock left in place to support the ceiling, like the pillars left in a coal mine. As the miners work their way back out of the mine after depleting it of all its coal, they remove these pillars of coal and the mine usually caves in. These were obviously left in place to prevent the cavern from collapsing since part of the northern city is above it. As Ron examined the quarry carefully, he noticed one thing that bothered him.

When Ron tackles a project, the first thing he does is determine the easiest way to accomplish the task that requires the least work and as he walked the giant quarry, something didn't make sense. He tried to put himself in the "shoes" of the ancient stonecutters as he surveyed this massive quarry.

Seeing how deep into the side of the mountain the quarry extended, he thought about how much work it would have been to bring all that stone out of the quarry, carry it through one of the northern gates and into the city. It would have been easier to quarry it out of the quarry across the street than to haul it out of that cavern. To Ron, the solution was obvious - to cut a hole through the ceiling of the quarry and simply haul the rocks up into the city. The more he thought it about, the more obvious it became to him - yet, no one had ever found an entrance into the quarry from the city. So Ron began to examine the rock pillars.

And sure enough, he found one that wasn't a stone pillar at all. It was a giant mound of earth and debris, piled up, he believed, to the ceiling and through the hole in the ceiling. On the surface it would look like normal ground. But unable to examine the section above ground, he didn't know if the rock had been cut in a manner that would allow the cut-out section to fit back over the hole like a "man-hole cover" or if it was only the piled up earth that filled the hole. But he was convinced that the hole is there.

Danny and Ronny were now young men with lives of their own. They both entered into specialized areas of construction work and had responsibilities which didn't allow them the luxury of taking off work to travel back and forth to the Middle East. With the passageway that led to the chamber that held the Ark now solidly blocked, Ron had to rely on others to help with the work. Just since the time I entered the picture (1988) I've seen the hazards of having to rely on people Ron didn't know too well. Sometimes, he had wonderful volunteers who were willing to follow instructions and abide by the rules. Other times, people who seemed like nice, trustworthy folks turned out to be a "cursing" instead of a blessing. The "Ark of the Covenant" seemed to attract its fair share of those who had "their own agenda."