Walking the Bible (2 page)

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 book You 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 marble 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.

Then I went to Jerusalem. I had just completed a long project and decided to reward myself with a trip to the Middle East. On my first day in the country I joined an old friend, Fred, who was giving a tour to some high school students. We stopped for lunch on a promenade overlooking the city. “Over there,” said Fred, “is Har Homa,” a controversial new settlement. “And over
there,
” he said, pointing to the Dome of the Rock, “is the cliff where Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac.” Real or not, that piece of information hit me like a bolt of Cecil B.DeMille lightning. It had never occurred to me that that story—so timeless, so abstract—might have happened in a place that was identifiable, no less one I could visit. It had never occurred to me that the story was so concrete, so connected to the ground. To here. To now.

In subsequent weeks I had the same experience in a variety of places—the Dead Sea, Petra, the Pyramids. In the Middle East, I realized, the Bible is not some abstraction, nor some book gathering dust. It’s a living, breathing entity unencumbered by the sterilization of time. If anything, it’s an ongoing narrative: stories that begin in the sand, get entrenched in stone, pass down through families, and play themselves out in the lives of residents and visitors who traverse its lines nearly five thousand years after they were first etched into memory. That was the Bible I wanted to know, and almost immediately I realized that the only way to find it was to walk along those lines myself. I would take this ancient book, the embodiment of old-fashioned knowledge, and approach it with contemporary methods of learning—traveling, talking, experiencing. In other words, I would enter the Bible as if it were any other world and seek to become a part of it. Once inside, I would walk in its footsteps, live in its canyons, meet its characters, and ask its questions
in an effort to understand why its stories had become so timeless and, despite years of neglect, once again so vitally important to me.

At first, few people thought this was a good idea. I returned home and tried to put it out of my mind, but couldn’t. A few months later I traveled back to Jerusalem, and on my first day went to visit Avraham Biran, the dean of biblical archaeologists and the colleague of a friend. Professor Biran listened attentively to my ramblings. He squinted at me from behind clouds of cigarette smoke. And when I finished, he leaned across his desk and told me politely that I was out of my mind. There were few confirmed sites. Most sites that did exist were in war zones. And most were supervised by archaeologists who were far too busy to explain them to me. “It really would be an imposition,” he said. I sat back, deflated.

But even as he discouraged me, Professor Biran could not resist reaching out his hand. Over the next two hours, he plucked photographs from his desk, pulled books off his shelf, and eventually took me to the maws of his laboratory to show me some shards of pottery. That night he called me at home. “What you need is someone to go with you,” he said, “someone who has a sense of poetry. Somebody like Avner Goren.” Several days later, in the Negev, I ran into two young Israeli guides and discussed my plan with them. “What you need is someone like Avner Goren,” they said.

Two days later I telephoned Avner at his home in Jerusalem. He agreed to pick me up the following morning and arrived at dawn in a rickety blue Subaru. In his fifties, with a body that reminded me of Winnie the Pooh’s, he had squinty blue eyes, bulbous cheeks, a boyish grin, and curly hair. Though he was dressed in standard Israeli fare—blue jeans, T-shirt, and sandals—that morning his most dashing feature was a long white scarf, Lawrence on his way to Arabia but still clinging to Oxford. After greeting me warmly, he drove around the corner to a coffee shop in the fashionable German Colony where we chatted over herbal tea and croissants—instant neighbors in the global bistro.

A charming, charismatic figure, Avner was a romantic, a child of the desert. For the fifteen years that Israel controlled the Sinai—1967 to 1982—he was the region’s chief archaeologist and preserver of antiquities.
But soon after, he abandoned the academy to become a popularizer of biblical history, one of Israel’s most eloquent spokesmen on life in the ancient world. He tutored prospective Israeli and Palestinian guides, gave lectures on ancient history around the world (for the State of Israel, the UN, and others), and was a charter member of a pioneering group of Israeli, Jordanian, and Palestinian educators who were using archaeology to open the fabled Nabatean Spice Trail to cross-border traffic. Indiana Jones, meet Dag Hammarskjöld.

As we talked, a sort of implicit teacher-pupil relationship developed. “I was thinking about which route in the Sinai to take,” I said. Avner didn’t flinch. “I prefer the southern route,” he said. “It offers the best experience.”“I’m concerned that I won’t be able to get to certain sites in Egypt,” I said. “Fear not,” Avner said, rubbing his fingers together in the international expression for an exchange of money. Finally, after tiptoeing through this logistical minefield, I told him about my conversation with Professor Biran. “Half the people I meet tell me I’m out of my mind,” I said. “They tell me it can’t be done.” As I finished a smile slowly crept across his face. “I don’t think you’re crazy at all,” he said. “I think it sounds exciting.”

I sat back, relieved and exhilarated. “Somehow I knew you would,” I said. “By the way, would you come along?”

A year passed between that meeting in Jerusalem and our first foray into the field, in Turkey. During that time I returned to the United States and set about preparing myself for the trip. First I read the Bible, chapter by chapter, verse by verse. It took me almost a month, and I was amazed by how little I remembered. Abraham went to Egypt? Moses committed murder? What were all those rebellions in the desert? I began making a chart linking places in the text to places on the ground. Was Abraham born in Iraq or Turkey? Where was Mount Sinai? Was there really a place called Sodom? This process led me to read about what those places would have been like at the time the stories were written. I started with books on history, archaeology, geography. These were rational subjects, consistent with my past as an undergraduate history major, as a master’s
student in international relations. Keep it real, keep it concrete, keep it safely removed from spirituality. “This is a literary quest,” I kept telling myself. “This is about me and the Bible. This is not about me and God.”