There’s a woman in Numbers 12 who almost never gets a sermon. Moses married her. She was Cushite—Ethiopian. Miriam and Aaron complained about it. God struck Miriam with leprosy for the protest. The text is clear: “Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Cushite woman whom he had married, for he had married a Cushite woman” (Numbers 12:1). The judgment is severe. And Western scholarship accepts it without controversy. Moses, the lawgiver, the prophet who spoke with God face to face, married an Ethiopian woman. No one disputes this. No one calls it legend. It’s Scripture, so it stands.

But mention that Solomon had a son with the Queen of Sheba, and suddenly the same scholars who accept Moses’s Ethiopian bride will tell you there’s no evidence. They’ll say Sheba was probably Yemen, not Ethiopia. They’ll dismiss the Ethiopian historical record as “legend” compiled too late to be trusted. They’ll demand archaeological proof they’ve never pursued. And if you press them on the inconsistency, they’ll move the goalposts until you’re arguing about things the text never said.

This isn’t biblical scholarship. This is gatekeeping. And the gate they’re guarding is the one that leads to the Ark.

Western biblical interpretation operates with a double standard so glaring you’d think it was intentional. Because it is. They accept what doesn’t threaten the structure and reject what dismantles it. Moses’s Cushite wife is a footnote. Solomon’s Cushite son is a load-bearing claim. Acknowledge one, and nothing changes. Acknowledge the other, and the entire eschatological map has to be redrawn. So they accept the footnote and dismiss the claim. Not because the evidence is weaker. Because the implications are stronger.

Start with what they accept. Numbers 12:1 says Moses married a Cushite woman. Cush is the biblical term for the region south of Egypt, what we now call Ethiopia and Sudan. Some scholars suggest this was Zipporah, Moses’s Midianite wife, described here by her broader ethnic identity. Others argue this was a second marriage, another woman entirely. Either way, the text identifies her as Cushite. And the divine response to criticism of this marriage was immediate and brutal. Miriam got leprosy. Aaron begged for mercy: “Oh, my lord, do not punish us because we have done foolishly and have sinned” (Numbers 12:11). God defended the union. The message was unmistakable: Moses’s choice was not just permissible—it was protected.

So Israelite leadership, at the very foundation of the Covenant, integrated with Ethiopia. The man who received the Law, who built the Tabernacle, who led the people out of bondage, married a Cushite woman. This establishes precedent. It demonstrates that Ethiopian connection to the Covenant didn’t begin in Acts 8 with the eunuch. It began with Moses. At the root.

But here’s where the double standard reveals itself. That same scholarship, which accepts Moses’s Ethiopian marriage without hesitation, will tell you the Queen of Sheba was not Ethiopian. They’ll say she came from Yemen or southern Arabia, not from Cush. Never mind that Genesis 10:7 explicitly places Sheba in Cushite lineage: “The sons of Cush: Seba, Havilah, Sabtah, Raamah, and Sabteca. The sons of Raamah: Sheba and Dedan.” Never mind that Psalm 72, in prophesying about Solomon’s reign, declares: “May the kings of Tarshish and of the coastlands render him tribute; may the kings of Sheba and Seba bring gifts!” (Psalm 72:10)—pairing Sheba with Seba, both Cushite territories. Never mind that ancient Sabean civilization extended across both sides of the Red Sea, making the Arabia-versus-Ethiopia distinction largely artificial. They need Sheba to be non-Ethiopian because if she was Ethiopian, then what happened next cannot be dismissed.

Ethiopian tradition, maintained with meticulous continuity for over two millennia, says the Queen of Sheba, whom they call Makeda, traveled to Jerusalem, encountered Solomon’s wisdom, entered into union with him, and bore a son named Menelik. That son, upon reaching adulthood, traveled to Jerusalem, was recognized by Solomon, received instruction in the faith, and returned to Ethiopia. And when he returned, he brought the Ark of the Covenant with him. Not stolen. Not lost. Relocated. Carried south by the son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, installed in Aksum, and guarded there ever since by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.

The Kebra Nagast—the Glory of Kings—chronicles this account in exhaustive detail. It’s not a vague legend whispered around campfires. It’s a historical text, compiled in the thirteenth or fourteenth century but claiming much earlier oral and written sources, that functions as Ethiopia’s national epic and theological foundation. And Western scholarship dismisses it as mythology. Why? Because accepting it requires accepting that the Ark never came back to Jerusalem. That the Second Temple was built without it. That Covenant continuity relocated to Africa. That prophecies about Zion’s restoration must now account for the Ark’s presence in Ethiopia, not its absence from Jerusalem.

If you accept the Kebra Nagast’s core claim—that Menelik carried the Ark to Ethiopia—then you must accept that every prophecy teacher who tells you to “watch Jerusalem” for the Ark’s return is watching the wrong city. You must accept that when the psalmist declares, “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God” (Psalm 68:31), that’s not poetry, it’s coordinates. You must accept that God’s preservation strategy involved moving the Ark out of a city destined for destruction and into a nation that would guard it for millennia. You must accept that modern Israel, rebuilt without the Ark, cannot be the terminus of Covenant prophecy because the most sacred object of that Covenant has never been there.

That’s why they reject it. Not because the claim is weak, but because the claim is catastrophic to Western eschatology.

And the tell is the double standard. They accept Moses married a Cushite woman, but they won’t accept Solomon had a son with a Cushite queen. They accept Ethiopia was integrated into Israelite leadership at the foundation of the Law, but they reject Ethiopia’s role in preserving that Law’s most sacred artifact. They accept extra-biblical Jewish traditions about the Ark being hidden before Babylon’s invasion, but they dismiss Ethiopian tradition about the Ark being relocated before that same invasion. They cite Josephus, Eusebius, and Rabbinic sources compiled centuries after the events they describe, but they say the Kebra Nagast is “too late” to be trusted. The standard shifts depending on whether the source supports or threatens Western theological geography.

This is the mechanism of erasure. You don’t have to burn books or ban teaching. You just apply different evidentiary standards to different sources. You accept the claims that keep your system intact and dismiss the claims that dismantle it. You call one “Scripture” and the other “legend,” even when both rest on the same type of historical transmission. You demand archaeological proof for the claim you want to reject, but you don’t demand it for the claim you’ve already accepted. And when someone points out the inconsistency, you move the conversation to technicalities, debating whether Sheba was geographically in Yemen or Ethiopia, as if ancient borders were drawn with the precision of modern maps, as if Sabean civilization didn’t span the region, as if the biblical text’s connection of Sheba to Cush can be dismissed by a geographic technicality.

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Western scholarship is right and the Queen of Sheba came from the Arabian side of the Red Sea rather than the African side. Does that eliminate her connection to Cush? No. Genesis 10:7 places Sheba within the genealogical line of Cush. The biblical text connects them. You can’t use geography to sever what Scripture links genealogically. And even if you could, it wouldn’t eliminate the larger claim, that Solomon and Sheba’s union produced a son who connected Israelite kingship to Cushite lineage. That connection is what matters prophetically. That connection is what Western scholarship cannot afford to acknowledge.

Because if Solomon, the wisest king, the builder of the Temple, the one who installed the Ark in the Holy of Holies, had a son with a Cushite queen, then Covenant royalty runs through African bloodlines. If that son returned to Ethiopia and carried the Ark with him, then Covenant continuity doesn’t just include Africa, it centers there. And if the Ethiopian Orthodox Church has guarded that Ark for over two thousand years while Western Christianity cycled through schisms, reforms, and apostasies, then the Remnant isn’t in the West. The Remnant is in the place the West trained you not to look.

This is why Moses’s marriage matters. Not just as historical trivia, but as prophetic precedent. If God defended Moses’s union with a Cushite woman so fiercely that He struck Miriam with leprosy for questioning it, then Cushite integration into Covenant leadership was not incidental, it was intentional. If the lawgiver married an Ethiopian, and the king had a son with an Ethiopian queen, then Ethiopian participation in Covenant history is not peripheral. It’s structural. And if that participation included the preservation of the Ark when Jerusalem fell, then Ethiopia’s role is not just historical, it’s eschatological.

But you’ll never hear that at a prophecy conference. You’ll never see Ethiopia circled on a prophecy chart. Because the people drawing those charts are operating inside an empire that needed you focused on their geography, their conflicts, their interests. They needed Solomon’s Ethiopian son dismissed so you wouldn’t ask where his descendants are now. They needed the Ark classified as “lost” so you wouldn’t ask why Ethiopia claims to have it. They needed Moses’s Cushite wife acknowledged but minimized so the pattern wouldn’t become visible. And they needed you trained to call Ethiopian historical records “legend” while treating their own traditions as authoritative so you’d never investigate the claims for yourself.

The double standard isn’t an accident. It’s a defense mechanism. Because the moment you accept that Solomon had a son with the Queen of Sheba, and that son carried the Ark to Ethiopia, the entire Western prophetic framework collapses. Israel stops being the center. Jerusalem stops being the destination. The West stops being the protagonist. And a continent that’s been erased from your eschatology becomes the place where God has been moving all along.

Consider how the prophet Zephaniah speaks of this: “From beyond the rivers of Cush my worshipers, the daughter of my dispersed ones, shall bring my offering” (Zephaniah 3:10). Not from Jerusalem. From beyond the rivers of Cush. End-times worship originating from Africa, not returning to the Middle East. Or how Isaiah dedicates an entire chapter to a mysterious nation: “Ah, land of whirring wings that is beyond the rivers of Cush, which sends ambassadors by the sea, in vessels of papyrus on the waters!” (Isaiah 18:1-2). A land beyond Cush acting as divine messenger. Ethiopia isn’t absent from prophecy, it’s been ignored by prophecy teachers who needed you watching somewhere else.

So they let Moses marry her. Because that story is contained. It doesn’t spread. It doesn’t threaten. But they won’t let Solomon keep his son. Because that story has consequences. And those consequences lead to a question they can’t afford you asking: If the Ark is in Ethiopia, and it’s been there since before Babylon, and the church there has never stopped guarding it, then what does that mean for who the Remnant is and where prophecy is unfolding?

The scholars who dismissed this knew the answer. That’s why they dismissed it.

You want to know if the Queen of Sheba was Ethiopian? Here’s a better question: Why are the same people who accept Moses married a Cushite woman so desperate to prove Solomon didn’t have a son with one?

Follow that desperation. It doesn’t lead to a scholarly debate. It leads to a chapel in Aksum. And inside that chapel is the truth they’ve spent centuries trying to bury.

ADDITIONAL RESEARCH VECTORS:

• Acts 8:26-40: Ethiopian eunuch’s conversion as first Gentile reception of gospel, establishing African priority in Covenant expansion

• Psalm 87:4: “Rahab and Babylon I mention among those who know me; behold, Philistia and Tyre, with Cush—’This one was born there’” — prophetic inclusion of Cush among those born in Zion

• Amos 9:7: “Are you not like the Cushites to me, O people of Israel?” — God’s declared equal concern for Cushite nations

• 2 Chronicles 14:9-15: Zerah the Cushite’s massive army (1 million men) demonstrating Ethiopian military capacity in biblical period

• Jeremiah 38:7-13: Ebed-melech the Cushite rescues Jeremiah from cistern, receives divine promise of protection (Jeremiah 39:15-18)

For those investigating the Ark’s current location, note that the Ethiopian Orthodox Church maintains continuous claim of possession in Aksum, guarded by a single designated guardian who never leaves the chapel. No outside verification permitted. This is not “lost and found” narrative but “relocated and preserved” claim. Western scholarship’s inability to examine does not constitute evidence of absence.

• Cush in Scripture: The Hebrew term “Kush” (כּוּשׁ) consistently refers to the region south of Egypt, encompassing modern-day Sudan and Ethiopia. See Genesis 2:13 (Gihon river compasses Cush), 2 Kings 19:9 (Tirhakah king of Cush), Esther 1:1 (Persian empire from India to Cush). For comprehensive treatment, see The Africans Who Wrote the Bible by Nana Banchie Darkwah and Africa and Africans in the Old Testament by John Mbiti.

• Sheba’s Cushite Lineage: Genesis 10:7 places Sheba as descendant of Cush through Raamah. This genealogical connection is reinforced in 1 Chronicles 1:9. Psalm 72:10 pairs Sheba with Seba (another son of Cush per Genesis 10:7) in tribute to Solomon. For analysis of Sabean civilization spanning both African and Arabian coasts of the Red Sea, see The Queen of Sheba and Her Only Son Menyelek translated by Sir E.A. Wallis Budge.

• The Kebra Nagast: Translated as “The Glory of Kings,” this Ethiopian national epic claims to document the Queen of Sheba’s (Makeda’s) visit to Solomon, the birth of Menelik I, and the Ark’s relocation to Aksum. While compiled in 13th-14th century Ge’ez, it claims basis in earlier Coptic and Arabic sources. Critical translation: The Queen of Sheba and Her Only Son Menyelek by E.A. Wallis Budge (1922). For historical context, see The Sign and the Seal by Graham Hancock (investigative), though approach with discernment regarding author’s broader claims.

• Isaiah 18 and Prophetic Africa: Isaiah 18 describes a nation “beyond the rivers of Cush” with specific geographic and cultural markers (tall, smooth-skinned people; land divided by rivers; fearsome nation). Traditional interpretation identifies this as Ethiopia/Nubia. The chapter describes this nation as divinely commissioned messenger. Zephaniah 3:10 similarly locates end-times worshipers “from beyond the rivers of Cush.” For exegetical analysis connecting these prophecies to Ethiopian Christian history, see From Babylon to Timbuktu by Rudolph Windsor and academic treatment in The Bible in Africa edited by Gerald West and Musa Dube

There’s a woman in Numbers 12 who almost never gets a sermon. Moses married her. She was Cushite—Ethiopian. Miriam and Aaron complained about it. God struck Miriam with leprosy for the protest. The text is clear: “Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Cushite woman whom he had married, for he had married a Cushite woman” (Numbers 12:1). The judgment is severe. And Western scholarship accepts it without controversy. Moses, the lawgiver, the prophet who spoke with God face to face, married an Ethiopian woman. No one disputes this. No one calls it legend. It’s Scripture, so it stands.

But mention that Solomon had a son with the Queen of Sheba, and suddenly the same scholars who accept Moses’s Ethiopian bride will tell you there’s no evidence. They’ll say Sheba was probably Yemen, not Ethiopia. They’ll dismiss the Ethiopian historical record as “legend” compiled too late to be trusted. They’ll demand archaeological proof they’ve never pursued. And if you press them on the inconsistency, they’ll move the goalposts until you’re arguing about things the text never said.

This isn’t biblical scholarship. This is gatekeeping. And the gate they’re guarding is the one that leads to the Ark.

Western biblical interpretation operates with a double standard so glaring you’d think it was intentional. Because it is. They accept what doesn’t threaten the structure and reject what dismantles it. Moses’s Cushite wife is a footnote. Solomon’s Cushite son is a load-bearing claim. Acknowledge one, and nothing changes. Acknowledge the other, and the entire eschatological map has to be redrawn. So they accept the footnote and dismiss the claim. Not because the evidence is weaker. Because the implications are stronger.

Start with what they accept. Numbers 12:1 says Moses married a Cushite woman. Cush is the biblical term for the region south of Egypt, what we now call Ethiopia and Sudan. Some scholars suggest this was Zipporah, Moses’s Midianite wife, described here by her broader ethnic identity. Others argue this was a second marriage, another woman entirely. Either way, the text identifies her as Cushite. And the divine response to criticism of this marriage was immediate and brutal. Miriam got leprosy. Aaron begged for mercy: “Oh, my lord, do not punish us because we have done foolishly and have sinned” (Numbers 12:11). God defended the union. The message was unmistakable: Moses’s choice was not just permissible—it was protected.

So Israelite leadership, at the very foundation of the Covenant, integrated with Ethiopia. The man who received the Law, who built the Tabernacle, who led the people out of bondage, married a Cushite woman. This establishes precedent. It demonstrates that Ethiopian connection to the Covenant didn’t begin in Acts 8 with the eunuch. It began with Moses. At the root.

But here’s where the double standard reveals itself. That same scholarship, which accepts Moses’s Ethiopian marriage without hesitation, will tell you the Queen of Sheba was not Ethiopian. They’ll say she came from Yemen or southern Arabia, not from Cush. Never mind that Genesis 10:7 explicitly places Sheba in Cushite lineage: “The sons of Cush: Seba, Havilah, Sabtah, Raamah, and Sabteca. The sons of Raamah: Sheba and Dedan.” Never mind that Psalm 72, in prophesying about Solomon’s reign, declares: “May the kings of Tarshish and of the coastlands render him tribute; may the kings of Sheba and Seba bring gifts!” (Psalm 72:10)—pairing Sheba with Seba, both Cushite territories. Never mind that ancient Sabean civilization extended across both sides of the Red Sea, making the Arabia-versus-Ethiopia distinction largely artificial. They need Sheba to be non-Ethiopian because if she was Ethiopian, then what happened next cannot be dismissed.

Ethiopian tradition, maintained with meticulous continuity for over two millennia, says the Queen of Sheba, whom they call Makeda, traveled to Jerusalem, encountered Solomon’s wisdom, entered into union with him, and bore a son named Menelik. That son, upon reaching adulthood, traveled to Jerusalem, was recognized by Solomon, received instruction in the faith, and returned to Ethiopia. And when he returned, he brought the Ark of the Covenant with him. Not stolen. Not lost. Relocated. Carried south by the son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, installed in Aksum, and guarded there ever since by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.

The Kebra Nagast—the Glory of Kings—chronicles this account in exhaustive detail. It’s not a vague legend whispered around campfires. It’s a historical text, compiled in the thirteenth or fourteenth century but claiming much earlier oral and written sources, that functions as Ethiopia’s national epic and theological foundation. And Western scholarship dismisses it as mythology. Why? Because accepting it requires accepting that the Ark never came back to Jerusalem. That the Second Temple was built without it. That Covenant continuity relocated to Africa. That prophecies about Zion’s restoration must now account for the Ark’s presence in Ethiopia, not its absence from Jerusalem.

If you accept the Kebra Nagast’s core claim—that Menelik carried the Ark to Ethiopia—then you must accept that every prophecy teacher who tells you to “watch Jerusalem” for the Ark’s return is watching the wrong city. You must accept that when the psalmist declares, “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God” (Psalm 68:31), that’s not poetry, it’s coordinates. You must accept that God’s preservation strategy involved moving the Ark out of a city destined for destruction and into a nation that would guard it for millennia. You must accept that modern Israel, rebuilt without the Ark, cannot be the terminus of Covenant prophecy because the most sacred object of that Covenant has never been there.

That’s why they reject it. Not because the claim is weak, but because the claim is catastrophic to Western eschatology.

And the tell is the double standard. They accept Moses married a Cushite woman, but they won’t accept Solomon had a son with a Cushite queen. They accept Ethiopia was integrated into Israelite leadership at the foundation of the Law, but they reject Ethiopia’s role in preserving that Law’s most sacred artifact. They accept extra-biblical Jewish traditions about the Ark being hidden before Babylon’s invasion, but they dismiss Ethiopian tradition about the Ark being relocated before that same invasion. They cite Josephus, Eusebius, and Rabbinic sources compiled centuries after the events they describe, but they say the Kebra Nagast is “too late” to be trusted. The standard shifts depending on whether the source supports or threatens Western theological geography.

This is the mechanism of erasure. You don’t have to burn books or ban teaching. You just apply different evidentiary standards to different sources. You accept the claims that keep your system intact and dismiss the claims that dismantle it. You call one “Scripture” and the other “legend,” even when both rest on the same type of historical transmission. You demand archaeological proof for the claim you want to reject, but you don’t demand it for the claim you’ve already accepted. And when someone points out the inconsistency, you move the conversation to technicalities, debating whether Sheba was geographically in Yemen or Ethiopia, as if ancient borders were drawn with the precision of modern maps, as if Sabean civilization didn’t span the region, as if the biblical text’s connection of Sheba to Cush can be dismissed by a geographic technicality.

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Western scholarship is right and the Queen of Sheba came from the Arabian side of the Red Sea rather than the African side. Does that eliminate her connection to Cush? No. Genesis 10:7 places Sheba within the genealogical line of Cush. The biblical text connects them. You can’t use geography to sever what Scripture links genealogically. And even if you could, it wouldn’t eliminate the larger claim, that Solomon and Sheba’s union produced a son who connected Israelite kingship to Cushite lineage. That connection is what matters prophetically. That connection is what Western scholarship cannot afford to acknowledge.

Because if Solomon, the wisest king, the builder of the Temple, the one who installed the Ark in the Holy of Holies, had a son with a Cushite queen, then Covenant royalty runs through African bloodlines. If that son returned to Ethiopia and carried the Ark with him, then Covenant continuity doesn’t just include Africa, it centers there. And if the Ethiopian Orthodox Church has guarded that Ark for over two thousand years while Western Christianity cycled through schisms, reforms, and apostasies, then the Remnant isn’t in the West. The Remnant is in the place the West trained you not to look.

This is why Moses’s marriage matters. Not just as historical trivia, but as prophetic precedent. If God defended Moses’s union with a Cushite woman so fiercely that He struck Miriam with leprosy for questioning it, then Cushite integration into Covenant leadership was not incidental, it was intentional. If the lawgiver married an Ethiopian, and the king had a son with an Ethiopian queen, then Ethiopian participation in Covenant history is not peripheral. It’s structural. And if that participation included the preservation of the Ark when Jerusalem fell, then Ethiopia’s role is not just historical, it’s eschatological.

But you’ll never hear that at a prophecy conference. You’ll never see Ethiopia circled on a prophecy chart. Because the people drawing those charts are operating inside an empire that needed you focused on their geography, their conflicts, their interests. They needed Solomon’s Ethiopian son dismissed so you wouldn’t ask where his descendants are now. They needed the Ark classified as “lost” so you wouldn’t ask why Ethiopia claims to have it. They needed Moses’s Cushite wife acknowledged but minimized so the pattern wouldn’t become visible. And they needed you trained to call Ethiopian historical records “legend” while treating their own traditions as authoritative so you’d never investigate the claims for yourself.

The double standard isn’t an accident. It’s a defense mechanism. Because the moment you accept that Solomon had a son with the Queen of Sheba, and that son carried the Ark to Ethiopia, the entire Western prophetic framework collapses. Israel stops being the center. Jerusalem stops being the destination. The West stops being the protagonist. And a continent that’s been erased from your eschatology becomes the place where God has been moving all along.

Consider how the prophet Zephaniah speaks of this: “From beyond the rivers of Cush my worshipers, the daughter of my dispersed ones, shall bring my offering” (Zephaniah 3:10). Not from Jerusalem. From beyond the rivers of Cush. End-times worship originating from Africa, not returning to the Middle East. Or how Isaiah dedicates an entire chapter to a mysterious nation: “Ah, land of whirring wings that is beyond the rivers of Cush, which sends ambassadors by the sea, in vessels of papyrus on the waters!” (Isaiah 18:1-2). A land beyond Cush acting as divine messenger. Ethiopia isn’t absent from prophecy, it’s been ignored by prophecy teachers who needed you watching somewhere else.

So they let Moses marry her. Because that story is contained. It doesn’t spread. It doesn’t threaten. But they won’t let Solomon keep his son. Because that story has consequences. And those consequences lead to a question they can’t afford you asking: If the Ark is in Ethiopia, and it’s been there since before Babylon, and the church there has never stopped guarding it, then what does that mean for who the Remnant is and where prophecy is unfolding?

The scholars who dismissed this knew the answer. That’s why they dismissed it.

You want to know if the Queen of Sheba was Ethiopian? Here’s a better question: Why are the same people who accept Moses married a Cushite woman so desperate to prove Solomon didn’t have a son with one?

Follow that desperation. It doesn’t lead to a scholarly debate. It leads to a chapel in Aksum. And inside that chapel is the truth they’ve spent centuries trying to bury.

ADDITIONAL RESEARCH VECTORS:

• Acts 8:26-40: Ethiopian eunuch’s conversion as first Gentile reception of gospel, establishing African priority in Covenant expansion

• Psalm 87:4: “Rahab and Babylon I mention among those who know me; behold, Philistia and Tyre, with Cush—’This one was born there’” — prophetic inclusion of Cush among those born in Zion

• Amos 9:7: “Are you not like the Cushites to me, O people of Israel?” — God’s declared equal concern for Cushite nations

• 2 Chronicles 14:9-15: Zerah the Cushite’s massive army (1 million men) demonstrating Ethiopian military capacity in biblical period

• Jeremiah 38:7-13: Ebed-melech the Cushite rescues Jeremiah from cistern, receives divine promise of protection (Jeremiah 39:15-18)

For those investigating the Ark’s current location, note that the Ethiopian Orthodox Church maintains continuous claim of possession in Aksum, guarded by a single designated guardian who never leaves the chapel. No outside verification permitted. This is not “lost and found” narrative but “relocated and preserved” claim. Western scholarship’s inability to examine does not constitute evidence of absence.

• Cush in Scripture: The Hebrew term “Kush” (כּוּשׁ) consistently refers to the region south of Egypt, encompassing modern-day Sudan and Ethiopia. See Genesis 2:13 (Gihon river compasses Cush), 2 Kings 19:9 (Tirhakah king of Cush), Esther 1:1 (Persian empire from India to Cush). For comprehensive treatment, see The Africans Who Wrote the Bible by Nana Banchie Darkwah and Africa and Africans in the Old Testament by John Mbiti.

• Sheba’s Cushite Lineage: Genesis 10:7 places Sheba as descendant of Cush through Raamah. This genealogical connection is reinforced in 1 Chronicles 1:9. Psalm 72:10 pairs Sheba with Seba (another son of Cush per Genesis 10:7) in tribute to Solomon. For analysis of Sabean civilization spanning both African and Arabian coasts of the Red Sea, see The Queen of Sheba and Her Only Son Menyelek translated by Sir E.A. Wallis Budge.

• The Kebra Nagast: Translated as “The Glory of Kings,” this Ethiopian national epic claims to document the Queen of Sheba’s (Makeda’s) visit to Solomon, the birth of Menelik I, and the Ark’s relocation to Aksum. While compiled in 13th-14th century Ge’ez, it claims basis in earlier Coptic and Arabic sources. Critical translation: The Queen of Sheba and Her Only Son Menyelek by E.A. Wallis Budge (1922). For historical context, see The Sign and the Seal by Graham Hancock (investigative), though approach with discernment regarding author’s broader claims.

• Isaiah 18 and Prophetic Africa: Isaiah 18 describes a nation “beyond the rivers of Cush” with specific geographic and cultural markers (tall, smooth-skinned people; land divided by rivers; fearsome nation). Traditional interpretation identifies this as Ethiopia/Nubia. The chapter describes this nation as divinely commissioned messenger. Zephaniah 3:10 similarly locates end-times worshipers “from beyond the rivers of Cush.” For exegetical analysis connecting these prophecies to Ethiopian Christian history, see From Babylon to Timbuktu by Rudolph Windsor and academic treatment in The Bible in Africa edited by Gerald West and Musa Dube