You are all wrong. The iphone accidentally got wet so God put it in a container of sand to dry it out.
Of course, Indiana Jones is completely irrelevant to the conclusion of Raiders of the Lost Ark:
My assumption was that Belloq expected this to be a supernatural device but under human control. Like Dorothy’s ruby slippers or Aladdin’s lamp. He therefore dressed in the priestly garments and muttered the incantations – liie Dorothy clickng her heelsxor Aladdin rubbing the lamp. When he opened the ark, he didnt find what he expected (whole or broken tablets) and was taken aback.
Why there would be sand is unclear, except that things were not as expected.
It might as well be sand. The iconography is Cecil B. DeMille at his finest. Two tablets, one hunk of stone really, with dual arched tops?
Really? We need Mythbusters in here. I’ve carved stone. It’s heavy. You know. Like…stones are.
Forget the fancy arches along the top. Look at the rough dimensions of the Ten Commandments in the film of the same name.
Each of those would weigh in at what- 30 pounds? Your average adult male, climbing down a mountain with 60 pounds of cut stone? Bullshit.
I think that Moses went up there, wrote out a moral code that he felt strongly enough to write out and propose to his flock as the word of the Lord ( with or without the help of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob ). And came down with a piece of lambskin with some ink on it.
The rest is Hollywood.
As for the OP, I always felt that the sand was there because God did not want anyone Not Worthy™ to touch the tablets. God replaced them with sand. ( No stone would have "turned to sand " after 5,000 years. It’s fucking stone. ) I suspect that if Indy had opened up the Ark, why there’d have been two tablets in place. Nary a scratch on 'em.
Of course I’ve heard that before, Wendell. But I’ve fanwanked it that he - and Marion - were necessary because there needed to be someone to witness the power of God as the Ark did it’s thing. God’s always been big on making sure someone was left to tell the tale when he got into the miracle business.
Oh, and my take on the clip posted above is that Good Lord Karen Allen has beautiful eyes.
Always? Ever notice that you never hear from the shipwrecked sailors who were carried further out to sea by dolphins? Same deal here.
But back to the sand in the ark: Was it even full of sand? Belloq opens it, expecting to find a great treasure. Instead, he finds its contents to be something that has no value whatsoever to him. What if he literally really did look upon the intact tablets, but because of his hubris and greed, was unable to see them as anything other than something worthless?
WHO?
Where do you think sand comes from?
So it was the real ark but the tablets had been stored so poorly that they crumbled into sand. The fact that the tablets were just sand is what angered Belloq and the Nazis, even though the ark is real iand still had the power of God in it. But the destroyed tablets mattered most to Belloq and Hitler.
Kind of anti-climatic.
No, the U.S. Army stenciled the English wording on the new box and packed it off with no further divine burning that we see. At 1:25 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSJLGAtFyL4
Did you mean, “not being Hebrew”?
What language is that? It doesn’t look like Hebrew. Some variety of Egyptian?
What does it say? Is it meaningfully translatable?
Why not? We have another Ph.D. archaeologist who finds a cave full of ancient, incredibly well-engineered, fully functional booby traps, and completely ignores them in favor of stealing a golden statue - which, aside from still being sacred to the tribe, as witnessed by their genuflection when Bellocq holds it up, completely compromises the context and thus the archaeological importance of the artifact.
Archaeology Ph.Ds must have come in Cracker Jack boxes in those days.
Fortune and glory, kid. Fortune and glory.
Something about Commies are bad, Gays are thieves and marijuana will turn you to murder.
Those are Phoenician letters, or variants. (Most of them look to be mirror images, though maybe that’s because the photo has been flipped horizontally…?) Phoenician’s a lost language, so it’s unlikely that the text on the tablets spells anything meaningful in Phoenician. Possibly it’s a transliterated message in English or some other language known to the filmmakers.
Seeing as Phoenician and Hebrew were basically the same language, and that Phoenician letters were the basis for all Western alphabets, what else would the tablets be written in?
Indiana Cohen and the Lost Ark of the Covenant
Touché.
Comic Sans?
Well, to be fair, it had just been in a fire. Nothing supernatural there.