Walking the Bible Read online

  BRUCE FEILER

  Dedication

  FOR MY SISTER

  May your descendants

  be as numerous as the stars

  Epigraph

  Now the Lord said to Abram,

  “Go forth from your native land

  and from your father’s house to the

  land that I will show you.”

  GENESIS 12:1

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  AND GOD SAID

  Go Forth

  Book I

  GOD OF OUR FATHERS

  1. In the Land of Canaan

  2. Take Now Thy Son

  3. A Pillow of Stones

  Book II

  A COAT OF MANY COLORS

  1. On the Banks of the Nile

  2. And They Made Their Lives Bitter

  3. A Wall of Water

  Book III

  THE GREAT AND TERRIBLE WILDERNESS

  1. A Land of Fiery Snakes and Scorpions

  2. On Holy Ground

  3. The God-Trodden Mountain

  Book IV

  THE LAND THAT DEVOURS ITS PEOPLE

  1. Wandering

  2. And the Earth Opened Its Mouth

  3. The Land of Milk and Honey

  Book V

  TOWARD THE PROMISED LAND

  1. The Wars of the Lord

  2. Half as Old as Time

  3. Sunrise in the Palm of the Lord

  A Study and Reading Group Guide to Walking the Bible

  And the People Believed

  Take These Words

  Index

  About the Author

  Back Ad

  Praise for WALKING THE BIBLE

  Also by Bruce Feiler

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Go Forth

  The call to prayer sounded just after 3 P.M. It came from a minaret, echoed off the storefronts, and stopped me, briefly, in the middle of the street. All around, people halted their hurrying and turned their attention, momentarily, to God. A few old men pulled cloaks around their shoulders and slipped into the back of a shop. Two boys rushed across the road and disappeared behind a stone wall. A woman picked up her basket of radishes and tiptoed out of sight. Part of me felt odd to be starting a journey into the roots of the Bible in a place so spiritually removed from my own. But continuing toward the center of town, I realized my unease might be a reminder of a truth tucked away in the early verses of Genesis: Abraham was not originally the man he became. He was not an Israelite, he was not a Jew. He was not even a believer in God—at least initially. He was a traveler, called by some voice not entirely clear that said: Go, head to this land, walk along this route, and trust what you will find.

  Within minutes, the afternoon prayers were complete and people returned to the streets. Dogubayazit, in extreme eastern Turkey, was thuddingly bleak, with two asphalt roads intersecting in a neglected town of thirty thousand. Just outside of town, hundreds of empty oil tankers were parked in a double-file line waiting to cross the border into Iran. The trucks, the town, as well as most of the surrounding countryside, were completely overshadowed by a looming triangular peak with a pristine cap of snow.

  Mount Ararat is a perfect volcanic pyramid 16,984 feet high, with a junior volcano, Little Ararat, attached to its hip. The highest peak in the Middle East (and the second highest in Europe), Big Ararat is holy to everyone around it. The Turks call it Agri Dagi, the Mountain of Pain. The Kurds call it the Mountain of Fire. Armenians also worship the mountain, which was in their homeland until a brutal war in 1915. I later met an Armenian in Jerusalem who took me into his home, where he had at least 150 representations of the mountain, including rugs, cups, coats of arms, bottles of cognac, and stained-glass windows. Mount Ararat is the first thing he thinks of every morning, he said, and the first thing his children drew when they were young.

  I had come for a different reason. Genesis, chapter 8, says that Noah’s ark, after seven months on the floodwaters, came to rest on “the mountains of Ararat.” Mount Ararat is the first place mentioned in the Bible that can be located with any degree of certainty, and it seemed like a fitting place to begin my effort to reacquaint myself with the biblical stories by retracing the first five books through the desert. The topography of this part of Turkey, which includes the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates, permeates the early chapters of Genesis. Chaos, Creation, Eden, and Eve are all drawn from the fertile union of Mesopotamia, “the land between the rivers” and the birthplace of the Bible.

  In recent years, however, this region has been one of the most volatile—and bloody—in the Middle East. Over forty thousand people have died in a largely overlooked war in which indigenous Kurds have tried to gain autonomy from Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. In every travel book I read about the region the author was at least briefly detained. The Rough Guide I brought actually superimposed a blank area over the region, saying it was too unsafe for its correspondent. “In our opinion, travel is emphatically not recommended.” In some cases, it said, security forces respond to the rebellion by “placing local towns under formal curfew or even shooting up the main streets at random.”

  Though Dogubayazit was calm today, the underlying tension was still apparent. Approaching the center of town, I had barely made it past a string of cheap jewelry stores when a man approached me, eagerly.

  “Hello,” he said, in English. We shook hands. “You just drove into town in that brown car, didn’t you? You’re staying in the hotel, in room 104.”

  The secret police are working overtime, I thought.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “Um, I’m here to find out about Noah’s ark,” I said.

  “Noah’s ark!” he repeated. “Well, if you want to learn about the ark you have to go to the green building at the end of this street. Go inside and up the stairs until you get to a dark room. Inside there’s another set of stairs. Go up those and you’ll find another dark room. In there you’ll find the man who knows everything about Noah’s ark.”

  At first I thought he was joking, or laying a trap. I thanked him and continued strolling. I had heard enough horror stories—and seen enough tanks on the road into town—to ignore directions like these. I walked around for a few minutes, bought some plums in the market, and was heading back to the hotel when I stopped myself: Why exactly had I come here anyway?

  Inside the green building I found the sagging staircase and proceeded to the second floor. The room was dark and smelled of discarded cigarettes. I hesitated for a minute, took a step forward, then reconsidered. I was just turning back when I heard a noise from above, then steps. Seconds later a figure appeared. It was a man in his early forties, lean, with black hair and an enormous bushy mustache that cascaded over his lips. His eyes were concealed by the gloom. He appraised me for a second, before saying, in perfect Oxonian English, “May I help you?”

  “I was told you know about Noah’s ark,” I said.

  He considered my answer. “But you were supposed to go up the second set of stairs.” I agreed.

  “Maybe you don’t really want to know.”

  He retreated as quietly as he had appeared and left me standing in the dark. This time I didn’t hesitate.

  Upstairs, the man was just settling onto a low chair covered with carpets. He gestured for me to sit next to him. Between us was a table covered with books and a handful of photographs. He poured me a glass of tea and we exchanged niceties. He was a native of Dogubayazit, a Kurd. Ten years ago he had served time in prison for his role as an insurgent. He refused to talk about the war and when I asked his name, he gestured toward his mustache: “Everyone calls me Para
chute.” He was wearing a blue and white horizontal-striped T-shirt that, along with his dark hair, made him look like a Venetian gondolier. After a while I asked if it was possible to climb the mountain.

  “It is forbidden,” he said. “Since 1991, nobody has been to the top.”

  “Is there anything to see?”

  “If you believe something, you can see. If you don’t believe, you cannot see.”

  “What do you believe?”

  “We believe. When we are children, we hear things. They tell us that this is Noah’s countryside. Even today, when something happens, the people say that it’s the luck of Noah.”

  “Do you have the luck of Noah?” I asked.

  “We know that something is there. We find something there.”

  “I’m confused. You’re saying that you know something that everybody else does not know?”

  “Yes.” His eyes were big, with deep bags under them. He didn’t move at all when he spoke. “I know it’s there. I find something there.”

  “What is it that you found?”

  “Ah.”

  “You won’t tell me.”

  “Hmm.”

  “When will we hear?”

  “One day you’ll hear.”

  “And you’ll be famous around the world?”

  He crossed his arms in front of his chest in a sly, self-satisfied way.

  As Parachute well knew, almost since the Bible first appeared, stories of sightings of Noah’s ark have been a staple of Near Eastern lore, making it, in effect, the world’s first UFO. Josephus, the first-century historian, wrote of legends that the ark landed “on a mountain in Armenia.” In 678 C.E., Saint Jacob, after asking God to show him the ark, fell asleep on the mountain and awoke to find a piece of wood in his arms. By the nineteenth century the sightings grew more elaborate. In 1887, two Persian princes wrote that they saw the ark while on top of the mountain, which is covered in snow year-round. “The bow and stern were clearly in view, but the center was buried in snow. The wood was peculiar, dark reddish in color, almost iron-colored in fact, and seemed very thick. I am very positive that we saw the real ark, though it is over 4,000 years old.”

  In 1916, two Russian pilots claimed they saw the ark from the air, and the following year Czar Nicholas II sent two expeditions with over 150 personnel to photograph it. Because of the Bolshevik revolution, the photographs never reached him, though his daughter Anastasia is said to have worn a cross made of ark wood. Most photographs of the ark have similarly disappeared, including dozens allegedly taken by pilots during World War II and more taken by the CIA using U-2 spy planes in the 1950s. Even Air Force One is said to have spied the ark. During a flight to Tehran on December 31, 1977, while Jimmy Carter was traveling to a New Year’s party given by the shah, passengers on board claimed they saw “a large dark boat.” Said UPI photographer Ronald Bennett, who was on the plane:“It’s my opinion that the president probably had Air Force One routed over Mt. Ararat and most likely saw the ark too.”

  Since that time, technology has only heightened interest. Dozens of books have explored the subject, and more than fifty websites track the ongoing chase. In 1988, a stockbroker from San Diego flew a helicopter along the east slope taking photographs. The following year a pilot from Chicago aired footage of an “arklike object” on CNN. Charles Willis, who was once Charles Manson’s psychiatrist, ran four expeditions, and astronaut James Irwin, who once took a Turkish flag to the moon in an attempt to butter up the Ankara government, made five. None has found the prize. As my companion and guide, the Israeli archaeologist Avner Goren, had warned, “Archaeologists won’t even take into consideration that there are any remains. This story, like Creation, is crystallized from many traditions.” But that won’t stop the pursuit. When I asked Avner if any of the recent expeditions interested him, he said, “As a scientist, no. But as an adventurer, yes.”

  Which is exactly what Parachute was banking on. With prodding he explained that during a trip up the north side of the mountain in 1990, with a colleague from England, he found a piece of black wood one hundred feet long. It was located at twelve thousand feet.

  “But it could be a hundred years old,” I said.

  “We tested it.”

  “And how old is it?”

  “When we find out everything, you’ll know.”

  “But why wait? How much money would it take for you to bring me to it?”

  He thought for a moment. “It’s not the money. It belongs to us. We found the ark. If you give me a million dollars I won’t bring you to it. If you wanted the pictures I wouldn’t give them to you.”

  “You have pictures?”

  “Yes.”

  At this point I decided to go back to the hotel and get Avner, who had been napping. Avner had been to the top of the mountain in 1982 on a climbing expedition (no ark sightings, but lots of pure, clean snow). For the rest of the afternoon the three of us sat in Parachute’s den. I asked Parachute what explained the ark’s appeal.

  “The ark is not so interesting to people,” he said, “but Noah has meaning, like Mohammed or Jesus.”

  “You’re suggesting that Noah is as important as Jesus?”

  “If we can prove that any of these stories happened, then people will believe in God.”

  “What about you?” I asked. “What did you think when you found it?”

  “I was happy. I was walking along—it was a particularly warm year—when suddenly I fell into this cavern covered by snow and ice. And there it was.”

  “I would like to believe your story,” I said. “But I find it impossible to believe that in four thousand years you’re the first person to go into this hole.”

  “Around here there are only five guides licensed to go up the mountain,” Parachute said. “Two are in jail, one is ill, one won’t go. That leaves me.”

  “Will you show me the pictures?”

  He refused.

  “What if I tell you that you’re being selfish, that there are several billion people in the world who would like to know if Noah’s ark exists?”

  He didn’t react.

  “What if I tell you that you could be the savior of the Kurdish people by bringing millions of tourists to this area?”

  He didn’t move.

  “What if I tell you that my mother is dying”—a lie—“and that she could die in peace if she knew that Noah was real?”

  Nothing.

  I was stunned. “Not even for my mother!?” I said. “Do you understand what you have here? More people believe in this book, more people have died because of this book, more people are influenced by this bookYou could change the world!”

  Parachute was silent for a moment and unfolded his arms for the first time in hours. “You can tell your mother that she can be happy, that in the world there is one person who has seen Noah’s ark. The Bible is true.”

  “So if she sees your ark, will she believe in God?”

  “She’ll have to,” he said. “And you will, too. God is real. I have seen the proof.”

  Outside, darkness had fallen, and I was a bit unnerved by our conversation. I suggested we take a Turkish bath to decompress. As we walked, I asked Avner what he thought about Parachute’s claim. “I suspect he uncovered something,” Avner said, “though I don’t believe it was the ark.” If nothing else, he noted, the chances of finding remains from a five-thousand-year-old wooden boat seemed remote. And yet, now that we were here, the truth seemed far less important. What was important, I realized, was the ongoing hunt, the often-eccentric never-ending quest to verify the biblical story, which itself masked one of the oldest human desires: the need to make contact with God.

  Back at the hotel, we picked up some supplies and wandered a few blocks to a run-down, concrete building. Inside we paid a small fee and were ushered into dressing rooms. I stripped off my clothes and wrapped a faded brown dishtowel around my waist. The attendant pointed through several doors, where the musty atmosphere gave way to an empty gray m
arble sanctuary filled with perfume and steam. The attendant took a bucket of hot water and splashed it over an octagonal platform. I lay down and closed my eyes.

  The idea of writing about the Bible had sneaked up on me. Like many of my contemporaries, after leaving home at the end of high school, I lost touch with the religious community I had known as a child. I slowly disengaged from the sticky attachment that comes from a regular cycle of readings, prayers, and services. I separated myself from the texts as well. And ultimately I woke up one morning and realized I had no connection to the Bible. It was a book to me now, one that sat on the shelf above my TV, gathering dust on its gilded pages. The Bible was part of the past—an old way of learning, a crutch. I wanted to be part of the future. Over more than a decade of living and working abroad I found that ideas and places became more real to me when I experienced them firsthand. It was the opportunity—and curse—of being alive in the age of discount airfare.

  But even as I traveled, I found that certain feelings from my past kept resurfacing. I sensed there was a conversation going on in the world around me that I wasn’t participating in. References would pop up in books or movies that I vaguely understood yet couldn’t fully comprehend. I would read entire newspaper articles about wars I couldn’t explain. At weddings and funerals the words I heard and recited were just that—words. They had no meaning to me. No context. They were not part of me in any way. And yet I wanted them to be. Suddenly, almost overnight as I recall, I wanted these words to have meaning again. I wanted to understand them.

  No sooner had I made this realization than I discovered how daunting it seemed. For starters, the idea of reading the Bible from cover to cover seemed undoable. The text was too long; its structure too convoluted; its language too remote. I went to the bookstore seeking help, but found instead fifty different translations, with assorted concordances, interpretations, and daily inspirationals. Other options seemed equally unappealing. Though there are shelves of books on every aspect of the Bible—from spelling to sex—none seemed to offer what I craved. Were these stories real or made up? When did they take place, and where? Looking further didn’t help either. None of the classes I considered tackled these questions. I was left with the book, which sat by my bed for months on end, suffering from renewed neglect. After several years I was no closer to reconnecting to the Bible than I had been at the start.