Puzzled by a passage in the Old Testament implying that the Ark of the Covenant-the most sacred item in monotheistic Judaism-was not only touched by forbidden human hands but that some of its contents had been removed, academician Gene Jinsiong Cho set out to learn the fate of those missing articles. Based on compelling evidence from linguistics, genetics, archaeology, and anthropology, Cho proposes that the sacred regalia of the ancient Hebrews were carried by itinerant tribes through centuries of migration across Central Asia and finally to the Japanese archipelago-where the articles (or their replicas) are preserved to this day within the great shrines of Japan.