There’s no consensus, but many scholars would consider that there was an historical ark, probably belonging to a “portable shrine”, as found elsewhere in ancient West Asia (but I don’t have a systematic survey of their positions, see: https://brill.com/display/book/9789047401582/B9789047401582_s012.xml).
A common hypothesis is that it was looted or destroyed during the Babylonian invasion; It’s the type of “account” frequently found in introductory material on the topic, in my experience. According to the ‘ark’ article in the Anchor Bible Dictionary: “all traditions point to the exilic period for the diseappearance of the ark” —see ‘Dic 07’:
- The article provides a good general introduction too; but keep in mind that the ABD is a resource from the 1990′, and for obvious timeline reasons won’t reflect more recent developments in the field.
- But there are other proposals too:
- the ark being destroyed by Hezekiah as part of his religious reforms, explaining why it disappears without much explanation from the textual record (see Cargill here). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lS9zd-2fok
Note that the reality of Hezekiah’s reforms (at least major aspects of them) is questioned, notably because some sites purportedly desecrated and destroyed under his reign appear to have been decommissioned before his time: see this short article for a summary and, for a more detailed argument, Lisbeth S. Fried’s The High Places (Bāmôt) and the Reforms of Hezekiah and Josiah: An Archaeological Investigation (open reading here).
https://www.thetorah.com/article/hezekiahs-reform-the-archeological-evidence
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3087515
- the ark being a literary creation without historical referent (and different descriptions depending of the text at hand), created by the Deuteronomist Historian(s) and ‘elaborated upon’ by Priestly authors/redactors.
See McCormick’s Palace and Temple: A Study of Architectural and Verbal Icons:
