Back to the original question: Why was it filled with sand? It was buried in sand for thousands of years. The ark is not hermetically sealed. Sand sifted its way in and filled it up. The tablets are in there, under the sand.
Why does nobody connect the beginning to the end, Indy replaced the statue with a bag of sand, while the ark was in Indy’s possession he must have swapped out the tablets with sand. The ark was still the original ark and bound to god but the tablets were safe, watch Indys expression after they opened it, he knows what they found. The tablets were made of rock and unless it’s exposed to the elements for a long long time they do not turn to dust like organic things. So what did he do with the tablets? I have no idea.
Back in the '90s, there was an RPG called Dark Matter. Very X-Files, ancient aliens conspiracy stuff. One of the ideas it floated was that the Ark of the Covenant was actually the engine off a crashed space ship. The Isrealites would march it up to the city they were besieging, remove the shielding, and bathe the city in radiation, until everyone inside was dead from “the wrath of God.”
The thing is, Nayrb01, the Nazi’s didn’t have 16 months to figure out how the Ark works.
Indy would have checked the dates.
Cool!
:rolleyes:
We have a young-teen book based on the movie, with photographs and text. It makes it clear that the back of the amulet (which Indy had but the Nazis didn’t) says explicitly not to look when the ark is opened. Presumably that was filmed but cut from the final version. So that’s how Indy knows not to look, and why he wouldn’t have taken the tablets out of the Ark.
EDIT: Ah, I see I quoted back in Post #64. (I don’t have the book any longer, my son has it.) Here’s the quote again:
From Raiders of The Lost Ark: The Storybook Based on the Movie (Random House, NY, 1981, Storybook adaptation by Les Martin): the guy who’s translating the front side of the headpiece says,
And I thought Indiana had just read the Bible.
More recently, the Ark didn’t seem to do fuck-all in 67 A.D. when the Romans sacked Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple, and spirited away the Ark to an unknown fate.
OT: All right, I gotta know – were you using the “rolleyes” smiley in the traditional sense, to express disdainful sarcasm? Or were you using it as a somewhat smirky happy face, with zero trace of irony, because that’s what it looks like nowadays? Because I suspect it’s the latter… :dubious:
the Ark didn’t do much against the Romans, because it had been lost some 500 years earlier. Back in 587 BCE is when the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple, and spirited away the Ark to an unknown fate. There is no mention of the Ark in biblical literature after the Babylonian Exile, and it is presumed to have been lost then.
See: What happened to the Ark of the Covenant? - The Straight Dope
Who was it who pointed out that that had Indy not interfered, the Ark would have been loaded onto that plane and flown directly to Berlin, where they might have done the ceremony in front of Hitler and all of the Nazi elite?
Although that just pushes buddha_david’s point back a way: the Ark didn’t do much to prevent the Babylonians from a military victory.
(The Bible suggests that God was mad at the Jews at the time, because they weren’t following his word scrupulously enough. The Ark’s power was cut off at the source. I can wave my machine gun around all I want, but when the Squad is out of ammunition, it isn’t all that impressive…)
Had Indy not interfered, he wouldn’t have led Toht and his creepy cronies to Marion’s bar in Nepal, or led them to the Well of Souls where the Ark was stored. They’d still be fumbling around in the desert when the British figured out that the German army was conducting a giant dig in the effectively British-controlled Kingdom of Egypt. Aside from killing about a platoon’s worth of German army soldiers and uncovering a hidden submarine base in the Med, Indy and the Ark basically had no influence on the war whatsoever. Indeed, it is entirely plausible that Professor Henry “Indiana” Jones is a complete milquetoast who, after a heavy meal and a bad date with his mentor’s daughter, Mary Ann Robinwood, went home, drank a fifth of rye, and dreamed the entire story, which he then pitched to up and coming Mercury Theater producer Orson Welles, who said, “The story is dreadful, but I like that ending in the warehouse.”
Stranger
I wonder how many “Top Men” they went through before they decided to just crate the damn thing up and “lose” it in the warehouse.
“Gentlemen, we are men of science! Surely you don’t believe all that superstitious woo about this artifact killing anyone who touches it.”
“But we have Doctor Jones’s report. It states clearly that–”
“Doctor Jones is an archaeologist. He doesn’t have the expertise or the scientific rigor necessary to make that judgment. His report is nothing but woo, and I will hear no more about it. Help me with the lid, Simmons.”
Cue face melty goodness.
Was “woo” a common term back in 1936?
Woo who?
Apparently we’re all forgetting that Raiders took place in 1936, three years before the war began.
You have upstaged the pretentious stranger on a train!
Dude! You win the thread, and discredit him, far more than I did on the location of Gemini retro rockets.
I salute you, Sir!
Zero, I assume. If they really were assigning “Top Men” to study it, Indy himself would have been one of them. That’s why Indy asks, and why they don’t answer specifically. But they never wanted to study it; they just wanted it hidden away.
Except that Belloq always intended to take the ark to that island first. He’s the one who pointed out that you don’t want to be the officer who delivers an empty ark to the Fuhrer. In fact, since he had a ‘Jewish Ceremony’ planned, it seems clear that he knew opening it was dangerous, but thought he had a workaround.
Indy was probably completely irrelevent to the events in the movie. Had he stayed home, events would likely have played out exactly the same, except the U.S. Authorities might not have captured the ark.
I always wondered if the G-men even believed what Indy told them. it might be that they don’t believe the “power of God” stuff at all. Just put it in a warehouse for lack of any other reason.
Makes them look really stupid. Criminally so.
I also wonder if the other crates in the warehouse are also “Ark-like” items, or just old airplane parts and surplus typewriters. I guess it depends on the answer to the first question.