Deutéronome 10:2

And I will write upon the tables the words which were upon the former ones, which thou didst break with thy entire strength; and thou shalt put them within the ark.

ושמתם בארון, “and place the Tablets in the ark.” The broken Tablets had been lying in that ark all the time, as we know from Sifrey on Behaalotcha, paragraph 82. This was the ark that the Israelites took with them when they went out to war as we know from Numbers 10,33. and which travelled three days march in front of them during the journeys in the desert. It was the ark made by Moses before he ascended Mount Sinai, not the Ark that Bezalel made for a furnishing of the Tabernacle. Originally, he had placed the broken Tablets in that ark as well as the second set of Tablets, as the commandment to construct a Tabernacle, etc. had not yet been given. We have read this in verse five of our chapter. Construction of the Tabernacle had begun only after Moses had descended from the Mountain for the third time and it was not completed or consecrated until the beginning of Nissan of the second year in the desert. At that time the Tablets were transferred to the golden ark covered by the golden lid with the cherubs that we read about in Exodus 25,16. This Ark was not taken out of the Tabernacle even during wars as we know from Samuel I 4,7 and 8: during the war around Shiloh, against the Philistines, when the two sons of Eli the High Priest took the golden ark with them to help them in the war and the Philistines captured it, [though it brought only harm to them wherever the placed it so that they sent it back after six months. Ed.] Our sages are on record as ruling that at any time when this ark and G–d’s Presence which it symbolised was not in the place assigned to it, the Israelites were not allowed to indulge in marital relations with their wives. During the incident between David and Uriah hachitti, in Samuel II 11,11, when David sent him home on furlough to his wife to engage in marital intercourse, the latter’s refusal to do so was considered an unjustifiable hardship he imposed upon himself, while ordinary soldiers when on leave did have marital relations. [The soldiers in David’s army had given their wives pro forma divorce decrees before going into battle so that their wives would be able to remarry if they died and their remains had not been identified. Ed.] When the Ark accompanied Joshua during the war of conquest of the Holy Land, this was at the direct command of the Lord. In both instances the reference was to the ark Moses had constructed and which contained the broken Tablets. When the Talmud in Baba Batra folio 14 speaks of the broken Tablets and the second set of Tablets that were kept in the Ark, the reference is clearly to the Ark made by Betzalel. But this refers to the Ark in Solomon’s Temple, after it had found a permanent resting place. In the Jerusalem Talmud we do find that there is a disagreement about whether during that period there were still two arks.