Walking the Bible

by Bruce Feiler

  As he flipped to the page I grabbed for my copy, the same one that had sat by my bed for years. I was nervous. This was our first chance to test one of the central ideas behind our trip. In addition to retracing the first five books of the Bible, also called the Five Books of Moses, we planned to read the stories in the locations where they took place. Still a newcomer to the text, I hoped this effort might deepen my appreciation of the stories by freeing them from their covers and replanting them in the ground. For Avner, it would be an attempt to revisit the stories in light of a lifetime of learning. But the truth was, neither of us quite knew what to expect.

  “Listen to the words closely,” he said. “Listen for the sound of the rivers: ‘When God began to create the heaven and the earth, the earth was unformed and void.’ ” These words suggest a vast emptiness, Avner noted, but the next line is more evocative:“And darkness was upon the face of the deep.” “In Hebrew,” he said, “the word for deep is tehom, which means chaos. In Mesopotamia, chaos was represented by a sea monster, Tiamat. Tiamat is the root for tehom. We’re only in the second line of Genesis, and already we have a direct link to the cult of water in Mesopotamia.”

  We continued reading. For the next chapter and a half, the Bible tells the story of how God created the world. On the first day God creates light and dark. On the second day he generates an amorphous mass, “an expanse in the midst of the water,” and also forms the sky. On the third day he divides this expanse into the earth and seas and brings forth vegetation. On the fourth day he creates the sun and the stars; on the fifth, birds and sea creatures; on the sixth, cattle and animals that creep. Also, on the sixth day God, using the plural, announces, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness,” and creates an unnamed male and female. Finally, on the seventh day, having “finished” his work, God declares the day holy and rests.

  In many ways, this story, which appears without preamble at the beginning of Genesis, seems completely removed from time and place. But in other ways, the story is deeply rooted in a particular time—the second and third millennia B.C.E.—and in a particular place, Mesopotamia. Specifically, Genesis draws on the Mesopotamian obsession with water. Considering the importance of rivers, it was inevitable that water would play a vital role in ancient creation stories. The unanimity across cultures, though, is striking. The earliest stories date from the third millennium B.C.E. and come from Sumer, in today’s southern Iraq. Living in an area the size of New Hampshire, the Sumerians generated a vast literary outpouring: Over forty thousand lines of Sumerian script have been found, compared with twenty-three thousand lines of biblical script. The root of the Sumerian worldview was a primeval sea, which split into a vaulted heaven and a flat earth, an idea almost identical to that of Genesis. The Sumerian universe was controlled by humanlike gods, the most important of whom was Enki, the god of water, who created light, plants, animals, and humans.

  The Babylonian creation story, also from Mesopotamia, is even closer to Genesis. In the story, the world is presented as a watery chaos, represented by the monster Tiamat. During a rebellion, another god, Marduk, slays Tiamat and slices her carcass in two, creating heaven and earth. After his triumph, Marduk proceeds to create, in succession, light, the firmament, dry land, heavenly lights, animals, and man. Afterward he rests and celebrates.

  “So you see,” Avner said, “in both stories, water precedes everything, a struggle ensues, and everything else emerges from that.”

  “But when Westerners imagine God creating the world,” I said, “they don’t imagine a struggle.”

  “Yes, but the struggle is still there,” he said. “The Bible states very clearly, ‘And God says, “Let there be light.” And there was light. And God saw the light: that it was good.’ Here you have the start of good things and bad things. On the third day God says twice that something is good. There is clearly an echo of struggle here, getting rid of evil.”

  “So how did that echo get there?” I asked. “The biblical story was written down in the first millennium B.C.E. These stories come from the third millennium.”

  “Ah. That’s the story of the Bible. Though it was written down later, large parts of it consist of oral traditions that were passed down for hundreds of years, many with the same words. The Bible, like The Iliad, combines large amounts of ancient texts.”

  In the story of Adam and Eve, for example, ideas like the tree of life, the snake, and man being made from clay were well known in Mesopotamia. The name Eve is derived from a Sumerian pun on the word for rib. Even the Garden of Eden has ancient roots. In one prototype, the god Enki summons water from the ground to create a garden, which the mother-goddess fills with plants. When Enki eats these plants without permission he is ostracized and cursed to die. In the story, the garden is located “east of Sumer.”

  Genesis also places its garden “eastward, in Eden” and begins with a watering:“There went up a mist from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground.” The Bible seems to place Eden near Sumer specifically, saying the garden is located at the junction of four rivers. One of those rivers is the Euphrates, another the Tigris. Though we are only in the second chapter, and clearly in the realm of allegory, already the Bible is rooting itself firmly in the ground, in actual places, in geography. The stories seem to be reaching out, saying:These are not mere tales—this is not recreation—these words are as indispensable to you as the landscape, the soil, even water itself. Stories, like rivers, give life.

  “All of which raises a question,” I suggested. The light was mostly gone by now and a green haze had settled over the bank. The cows had wandered away, leaving only a stir of mosquitoes. “If these stories draw so heavily from Mesopotamia, how are they different?”

  Avner removed his glasses and smiled, as if he had been waiting for this. “The difference is God,” he said. “He’s much more abstract. There’s no biography, no mythology. He just appears and begins to create the world, using only words as tools. Yet from the beginning, he’s solely in control—at least of nature. His ability to control man is much less complete.”

  The next morning we headed out early for a two-day drive into the highlands. Quickly the terrain began to change. The congestion of Diyarbakir faded, giving way to pastoral surroundings that seemed to grow more antiquated as we climbed higher. The roads deteriorated and mud houses appeared, with sheaths of tan-colored sesame on the roof. Turkeys scurried in the yards, where men on stools played backgammon. Women with black veils, balancing baskets of zucchini on their heads, dotted the roadside.

  Eventually our conversation turned as well. With so much focus on rivers, it was only natural that ancient storytellers fixate on one notable side effect: floods. The Bible gets to this almost immediately, in the sixth chapter of Genesis. After telling the story of the Garden of Eden, the text outlines the successive generations that lead from Adam and Eve to all humanity. Eight generations into this line, Lamech gives birth to a son, Noah, who in turn gives birth to three sons of his own. Around this time, God sees how wicked and lawless mankind has become and announces, “I will blot out from the earth the men whom I created,” for “I regret that I made them.” But Noah finds favor with God, because he is a “righteous man.”

  God tells Noah to build an ark out of gopherwood, lined with pitch and divided into three separate decks, which he should fill with seven pairs of “clean” animals, presumably kosher animals like chickens, cows, and fish, and one pair of every other animal. He also takes along his own family. In the six-hundredth year of Noah’s life, the fountains of the deep burst apart, the floodgates of the sky break open, and it rains for forty days and nights, until the highest mountains everywhere are covered in water and “all the flesh on earth” is killed.

  After seven months on the water, the ark comes to rest on “the mountains of Ararat,” where it sits for another three months until the tops of the mountains become visible. Another month passes and Noah sends out a raven, which flies around until the waters have dried fr
om the earth. Then Noah sends a dove, which is unable to find a resting spot, suggesting that water still covers the ground. Noah sends the dove again seven days later, and it returns with an olive branch, a sure sign of life. A month later, Noah removes the covering of the ark, goes ashore with his family, and sets the animals free.

  As with Creation, the story of Noah fits into an extensive tradition. Flood stories appear in 217 cultures around the world, according to authors Charles Sellier and David Balsiger. Ninety-five percent of these stories talk about a global flood, Sellier and Balsiger note, 73 percent say animals and a boat were involved, and 35 percent claim a bird was sent out at the end. Babylonian flood stories seem directly connected. In the story of Gilgamesh, Enki warns the hero, Utnapishtim, about a flood sent to destroy humanity and orders him to build a cubical ship. After a seven-day flood, the ship comes to rest atop a mountain and a bird is set free. The Babylonian stories also share a thematic parallel with the Bible. Both stories represent a shift away from mythology and toward history, with names, dates, and biological ages. As Avner noted, Noah is the father of a new generation and the Flood is another example of land emerging from a watery chaos, a second creation.

  Beyond its literary roots, the story of Noah’s ark begins another, more fascinating side of exploring the Bible today: namely, the race to prove that it happened. Some explorers have claimed they found the “real” Garden of Eden, but even the most credulous Bible enthusiasts believe those efforts are probably fantastical. With Noah, though, and the introduction of historical details, these efforts begin to gain credibility. They reach the point of hysteria with attempts to authenticate later passages like the ten plagues, the splitting of the Red Sea, and Moses’ receiving of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. Almost every day of our journey we would encounter another of these enthusiasts, and in time I came to marvel that in addition to creating communities of believers, the Bible had created equally passionate communities devoted to the arcane, quasi-scientific analysis of, say, whether the zebras would have been on the second deck of Noah’s ark next to the lions, or on the third deck next to the koala bears. I marveled even more when I got caught up in the same questions.

  The story of the Flood has provided a mother lode for such speculation. In the summer of 1929, the English archaeologist Leonard Woolley was digging in the Sumerian capital of Ur when his workers came across a provocative find: a deep stratum of Euphrates silt poised between two layers of civilization. Titillated, Woolley, a former intelligence officer with a flair for the dramatic, lowered himself thirty feet into the ground and that afternoon issued a telegram:“We have found the Flood!” The news electrified the press and intrigued scientists. “We all agree that your theory is mad,” one colleague said. “The problem which divides us is this: Is it sufficiently crazy to be right?” Within days even Woolley had to concede that it wasn’t, as excavations proved that it was a localized flood. “It was not a universal deluge,” he wrote.

  But the bait had been laid, and generations of scholars have been unable to resist lowering themselves in after it. One question:Where did all the water come from? Some have said underwater volcanoes, others melting glaciers. Because the text says the forty days of water came from above and below, a few hydrologists have suggested a vapor canopy may have enveloped the earth. (One side benefit of the vapor: It would have blocked ultraviolet rays, thereby helping Noah live six hundred years.) Many have tried to date the Flood. Two oceanographers recently suggested the Mediterranean may have flooded around 5600 B.C.E. Woolley himself placed the event around 2800 B.C.E. But Gene Faulstich, founder of something called the Chronology Research Institute in Iowa, puts them to shame. Using astronomical dating, he says the Flood occurred on May 14, 2345 B.C.E. It was, he says, a Sunday.

  If the Flood has been grounds for speculation, the ark has been ripe for obsession. The Bible says the ark should be three hundred cubits long, fifty wide, and thirty high. A cubit is the length of a forearm from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger. Using eighteen inches as a standard, the ark would have been roughly the size of a soccer field, four stories high. That would make the ark, built without metal, five times longer than the Mayflower and, notably, half as long as the Titanic. Though most scholars, including Avner, consider the numbers in the Bible to be idealized, such thinking has not deterred enthusiasts. One problem has been that since the world has over one million species of animals today, how could they fit onto one boat? In The Genesis Flood, John Witcomb, a theologian, suggests that with common ancestry Noah would have needed no more than 3,700 mammals, 8,600 birds, and 6,300 reptiles, which would have been fine considering volumetric analysis shows the ark could have held up to 100,000 sheep.

  But could one family of eight possibly have tended all these animals? That, too, is no problem, says Ken Cumming, a biologist: Many of the animals would have responded to the lack of light by going into hibernation. Even if the animals could have fit and been cared for, could they have been housed in a food-chain-proof way? Easily, says Eddie Atkinson, a reverend and amateur ark-builder: Birds and rodents would have been on the top deck; lions and tigers on one end of the second deck, hippos and rhinos on the other, elephants and giraffes in between. The bottom deck, analysts assert, must have been empty, because according to zoologists at the San Diego Zoo, during their year aboard the ark the animals would have generated eight hundred tons of manure.

  By our second day the drive had become downright eerie. All through Turkey the scenery had been pastoral, but hardly otherworldly. Now, six thousand feet above sea level, with an almost complete absence of agriculture, we were entering a palette ripe for mythology—and conflict. Tanks were parked every mile along the highway, with soldiers sitting in front on white plastic lawn chairs. A giant billboard said, in Turkish and English, HOMELAND ABOVE ALL, and in the road signs that show people crossing the road, the people were dressed in traditional costumes.

  Most unnerving was the topography itself. The hillside plateaus were covered for miles in basalt coated in pale green fungus that looked like mold growing on charcoal. The basalt, while cooling from a volcanic eruption, had splintered into hundreds of fists, which in turn had splintered into jagged fingers that reached to the sky for relief. Altogether, the formations reminded me of those pictures of bodies frozen, gasping, in the aftermath of an atomic bomb.

  As we drove, Avner had been playing with a toy that some friends had given him, a portable Global Positioning System, or GPS, device that tracked our route using military satellites. For several hours he had squirreled himself away in the back, frantically pressing buttons, trying to figure out how to program it. Just before noon he leaned forward, tapped me on the shoulder, and pointed out the window. “Look!” Sait jerked to a stop and through a break in the cliffs, fifty miles ahead and thousands of feet higher than anything around it, was the pure triangular crest of a mountain, like Mount Fuji with its solemn mien. And at that moment I had the first chilling intimation of what walking the Bible might bring. Genesis does not give details about where the ark lands. The Bible may not want us to know. But if a flood did cover the earth, if an ark survived that flood, and if that ark settled on a spot where land first appeared, there was little doubt in my mind that it would have landed here. And for me it was stunning confirmation that the Bible may or may not be true, it may or may not be historical, but it is undoubtedly still alive.

  The following morning, after our meeting with Parachute, we turned south for the final portion of this trip. Our first destination was Sanliurfa, a Turkish town not far from the border with Syria that for thousands of years has been associated with the great patriarch of monotheism. Considering his importance, Abraham seems to appear out of nowhere in the Bible. After the Flood, Genesis recites the generations that follow Noah, then relates another story with Near Eastern roots, the tower of Babel. The story begins by asserting the unity of the world:“All the earth had the same language and the same words.” The descendants of Noah then begin to sett
le in the “land of Shinar,” the biblical name for Sumer. In an echo of the agricultural revolution, the men decide to make bricks for themselves, then to build a communal monument. “Come, let us build us a city,” they say, “and a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for ourselves; else we shall be scattered all over the world.”

  God sees the city and decides to frustrate their plans, declaring, “Let us, then, go down and confound their speech there, so that they shall not understand one another’s speech.” God then scatters the builders “over the face of the whole earth.” The doomed tower came to be called Babel, the Bible says, from the Hebrew word for “confuse.”

  Following this story, the text outlines the ten generations that lead directly from Noah to Abram. According to Genesis 11, Abram, which means “the father is exalted”(he would later change it to Abraham, “father of a multitude”), was born in Ur of the Chaldeans where he took a wife, Sarai, before leaving for Canaan. The term Chaldeans is believed to refer to a later settlement, around 1100 B.C.E., and was probably added to the story when it was written down. The term Ur, by contrast, has tantalizing ancient parallels and suggests biblical storytellers wanted their bloodlines placed deeply in Mesopotamia. The city of Ur was the capital of Sumer and one of the grandest cities of antiquity. Built around a stepped temple, or ziggurat, believed to have inspired the Tower of Babel, the city squeezed two hundred thousand citizens into labyrinthine quarters.

  Like most Babylonian cities, Ur was surrounded by satellite settlements of farmers or shepherds. At times the two groups clashed, as when farmers wanted to grow crops in the marshland and shepherds wanted to graze sheep. The Bible echoes this struggle when it makes Adam and Eve’s first child, Cain, a farmer, and their second, Abel, a shepherd. When God expresses favor for Abel, Cain murders his sheep-herding brother. Abraham was probably a shepherd, too. He likely would have lived outside of Ur, but later moved during a period of drought, tension, or economic change. He and his clan would have gone to another city, perhaps stayed five or ten years, then moved again, most likely in a northwesterly direction, until they arrived in Harran, a well-known ancient crossroads. This type of migration happened throughout the third millennium B.C.E., except for a period of economic collapse around 2000 B.C.E. According to scholars, Abraham was likely born near the end of that downturn, around 1900 B.C.E. To be sure, no evidence exists that Abraham—or any other central character in the Five Books—lived during this period. By contrast, much evidence suggests that Abraham is a compendium—a crystallization, to use Avner’s word—of many oral traditions. But one thing is clear:The story is uncannily realistic to the history of the area. As Avner said, “It could be true.”