Why was Indiana Jones upset at the end of Raiders?

Isn't the point of research and study to figure that out?

 

How do you research that?

It'd be something likea priest from the middle ages asked to analyze a computer. He has no knowledge of the science involved in a computer so where would he start?

The government official who made the decision to lock that away knew the knowledge about it would get buried under government documents until a few decades later everybody who might have known it even existed is dead and no one bothered to check an old dusty warehouse.

 

I know what a nuclear bomb is capable of well enough to know that I definitely don't have the level of knowledge or competence needed to be poking at one.

I feel the same way about scientists poking at the Ark.

 

Observation, measurements, taking readings. I believe the core foundations of science require all that.

With due respect, how do you think humanity came to under stand a nuclear bomb? The idea that they should just "leave well enough alone" is nonsensical to me when people are going "We don't know what it's capable of. Definitely don't study it!"

 

^Maybe we'd be better off as a civilization today if we hadn't studied it.

 

Studying the physics of nuclear energy has brought considerable benefits, in improving our understanding of the universe, developing lifesaving medical technologies, and putting us on the road to clean energy (if we ever crack fusion, which appears to be finally getting closer to reality). Knowledge is always worth pursuing. It's just a question of whether you use it constructively or destructively.

 

It is--a point hammered home by Belloq's ritual. Jones questioned the government agents about the "top men" researching the Ark--his argument suggests he believes the government will approach studying the Ark in some clinical (probably secularized point of view) as if it were some random mechanical device instead of understanding that it required only one kind of approach (with enough awareness of the Ark's history to refrain from repeating Belloq's ceremony).

Remember, he says to Marion, "They don't know what they've got there", so he's pretty much convinced himself that the government (again, not approaching the Ark in the way it was meant to be accessed--if the government agents' earlier disdain for religion and/or religious objects was any indicator) might end up causing some sort of catastrophe.

 

So it's 35 inches x 20 x 10, emits no radiation of any kind ( heat, cold, nuclear etc). It's an ancient box with some carvings for decoration or religious significance.

Yet it killed dozens of Nazis when they opened it. How?

What i was trying to say is you can't study something that is clearly supernatural because we don't have the scientific basis for it. As i said in my example how would a person from the Middle Ages analyze a computer? He might open it, screws are not that hard to figure out but then they're looking at microchips, hard drives, cables etc - nothing that remotely exists in their age for comparison. They might be able to remove some of the components that are just slotted in but what would they do with them?

In universe i fully believe that an intelligent government official realized the social significance of it and its potential for hysteria and social unrest and decided it would be worth the risk. On top of it the military power potential would be too extreme and he decided for the good of the US and the world to bury it under government bureaucracy and leave it be.

 

You're telling me no observation can be done of any kind?

Send it to Israel then. It's theirs after all.

 

I think that's giving the government too much credit. Or maybe too little credit. After all, there's no proof the Ark actually did anything -- just Indy and Marion's anecdotal account. All the government really knows is that Hitler wanted it and that some people believe or allege it has supernatural power, with no objective evidence. So that was probably enough to justify taking it into government custody just in case, but not enough to prompt any urgency in dealing with it one way or the other.

In the screenplay, the description establishes that the crates in the "TOP SECRET" warehouse are just sitting there gathering dust -- and there are thousands of them. The point is that there's nothing special about the Ark, that the government has done this with countless other top secret things, just stowed them away for later study and forgotten about them. It's a deliberate ironic contrast with the government man's earlier insistence that "top men" are already studying the Ark. He was just brushing off Indy's concern, telling him what he wanted to hear, when in reality the Ark was just one more piece of bureaucratic detritus waiting its turn in an ever-growing queue.

After all, that kind of delay happens in any bureaucracy, due to limited time and staff power. DNA evidence kits can sit around for months or years before crime labs analyze them. Screenplays can sit on studio shelves for years before they're read. The bigger the bureaucracy, the bigger the inertia. That was the point of the giant warehouse -- it was the government's slush pile. It was where everything they didn't have time to get around to ended up. There was nothing unique about how they treated the Ark.

 

Wasn't it fortunate that the ark ended up unexamined and stored away in that humongous warehouse? Wouldn't poking around the ark have incurred the wrath of the almighty?

To thoroughly study the ark would have required opening up the thing. And wouldn't those scientists, or "top men", who open and study it, get the same fire and brimstone treatment that the nazis got? Or does the fireworks only happens if the ark is opened by gentiles? God works in mysterious ways.

 

Well, according to 1 Samuel 4-6, when the Philistines stole the ark, God afflicted them with tumors and plagues and kept knocking down their statue of Dagon while they weren't looking (apparently), so they sent it to Beth-Shemesh, whose people appear to have been Jewish, but they still got killed when they looked in the Ark (either 70 of them or 50,070 depending on the translation), so I'm guessing nobody's supposed to look inside it.

 

"Tumors and plagues" makes me feel that my comparison to a nuclear bomb was even more on point than I intended.

 

Israel has an excellent research organizations and department of antiquities. Let them study it, since it is as a cultural treasure for them.

The Philistines apparently remembered something bad happening with the Ark.

 

What's there to observe? You open it and you die if you look at it. Seems to me a pretty short study and after the first scientist dies and maybe the second those doing the study will probably come to the conclusion that the ark is probably best left alone.

And yeah - the US would give something that powerful to a foreign state? No chance, even though they're allies. "If i can't have it no one can" would be the best to describe this - we're not talking about the first Thora or the remains of the stone tablets with the 10 Commandments that Moses supposedly smashed to bits, this is a religious WMD.

 

That's the point of the ending, though -- that the government doesn't really appreciate the power of what it has and just sticks it on the shelf, so the world is kept safe by bureaucratic neglect. Or at least, it's safe for now, but we're left with a sense of the latent danger waiting to erupt.

Although we know the Sankara Stones have real power too, along with the Holy Grail etc., so we can take it as implicit that Indy's world is full of supernatural artifacts with devastating power. Heck, that was the whole deal in Raiders (and in real life, to an extent), that Hitler wanted to find and collect such artifacts so the Nazis could use their power for world conquest. So we can presume there are a lot more potential "WMDs" than the Ark alone. Maybe what Indy did during WWII and the Cold War was to find such artifacts and keep them out of Nazi or Soviet hands.

 

Um, where the power comes from, the impact upon the atmosphere, what energy is emitted. What is there to observe? Um, a whole lot.

If death is the argument then space travel is best left alone too.

If Israel became aware that the United States was holding a national treasure, something closely tied to Jewish identity, then it would be a political nightmare to be withheld. And, as @Christopher notes, the US might not know about the power, which means leaving it in a warehouse is actually insulting to the cultural history of Israel.

 

Which is hardly unusual in the history of archaeology. There are still countless artifacts and documents in British, American, and even Japanese museums or private collections that the countries of origin are urging to have returned, like the Elgin marbles in the Briitsh Museum or the Dunhuang manuscripts scattered across multiple countries.

Although Indy wouldn't have seen it that way. His whole deal was going to other countries and finding lost artifacts to bring home to an American museum. By today's standards, he was a culture thief. Although he would've seen it as securing the artifacts for posterity before they were stolen by less reputable thieves like Belloq, or by amateur robbers who would damage the archaeological sites in search of treasure.

 

True enough.

 

The modern state of Israel would be founded in 1948, twelve years after the events of "Raiders." I think by that time, the existence of the artifact would have been quietly 'forgotten' since it was buried under all that bureaucracy.

Kor