1 Kings 8:9 There was nothing in the ark save the two tables of stone, which Moses put there at Horeb, when the LORD made a covenant with the children of Israel, when they came out of the land of Egypt.

Heb. 9:4 Which had the golden censer, and the ark of the covenant overlaid round about with gold, wherein was the golden pot that had manna, and Aaron's rod that budded, and the tables of the covenant...

Solomon Tulbure finds contradiction in the Ark's contents, but he hasn't paid very close attention to the context of these verses. Kings and Chronicles refer to a time after Solomon. Hebrews refers to a time just after Israel left Egypt and when the Ark was first made. That's a span of almost 500 years! Do you think the manna and the rod were still fresh? No, they were organic materials and would have crumbled away long since.

(Some have noted that nothing in Exodus states that the rod or manna were put in the Ark. This is true; that they were there was an extrapolation of the rabbis and other Jewish writers based on Ex. 25:16, "And thou shalt put into the ark the testimony which I shall give thee." The gold jar tradition is testified to by Philo. One would have to assume that sometime in that 500 years, the jar was lost or removed, which does not seem unlikely given the loss of thousands of other artifacts through time!)

And now, yes, a burp from the Ebon website. ("Can't find us? It's his fault!") Ebon reiterates his claim that the OT limits the contents of the ark to the stone tablets of the Decalogue, and that this contradicts the statement in Hebrews regarding additional contents for the ark of the covenant. As noted, the span of time implicit between the two accounts supplies all the explanation that is required. Ebon snipes that the rod of Aaron would no more have rotted than the wooden portions of the ark itself, but it’s one thing to repair the tabernacle or the ark, and another thing to replace the rod of Aaron with a fresh substitute. The gold jar, admittedly, would not have rotted as would its contents. The jar's value as a relic would be severely (totally?) reduced by the absence of supernatural contents. It is reasonable to suppose that the jar was set to a different purpose after the manna had been reduced to dust, or that the jar was taken in mischief.

Ebon goes on to intimate that the special status of the ark would have prevented any rearrangement of its contents. Ebon very conveniently neglects dealing with periods in Israel's history (as in Judges) where Israel was occupied by invaders if not possessed by apostate leadership! In the grand hyper-literal tradition of the Skeptic, the lack of mention of the ark falling into enemy hands or of certain contents being removed/destroyed means that it never happened. At Ebon's behest, we are to assume that the Levites were able to keep the ark completely safe and secure throughout the aforementioned 500 years (even as the fact that we have no idea where it is NOW speaks against this). Ebon attempts to secure this conclusion by asserting that any non-Levite/non-Kohathite who improperly handled or looked on the ark would be instantly struck down by God. IOW, Ebon layers his failure to understand like a automobile afficionado layers on overcoat. Even assuming that the prohibitions associated with the death penalty were absolute rather than at God's discretion, what would prevent heathens from seizing the poles and tipping the ark's contents out? The fact that the ancients were stupid, no doubt (another pillar of the Skeptical critical method).