By Donald H. Harrison 

I watched Bruce Feiler's special on public television, "Walking the Bible," with a growing sense of unease last night. For the Garden of Eden story (Genesis 2), he takes us to Turkey—not Iraq—to gain an understanding of Mesopotamia, the area where the biblical stories arose.  Why Turkey?  Given the fact that Feiler, who has rediscovered his Jewish religion,  is traveling in the company of  Israeli guide Avner Goren, travel in most Arab countries—but particularly in places like Iraq , Syria or Lebanon— is all but circumscribed.  On the other hand, Israel and Turkey have diplomatic relations.

Feiler glosses over these facts in his travelogue, implying that if one wants to "walk the Bible," and sense what the Garden of Eden might have been like,  Turkey is the way to go. Before we have time to adjust to this concept, Feiler is trekking up Mount Ararat in the company of a mysterious Kurdish guide, who claims to have once found direct evidence of Noah's Ark  (Genesis 9) somewhere on its slopes.  But the guide won't say where this "discovery" was made, nor will he even tell his real name to Feiler, only his nickname, "Parachute."  This was the point in the "documentary" that I started thinking about bailing out.

Zoom, we are next racing into Genesis 11-25, the Abraham stories.  We visit Sanli Urfa, a Turkish town near the Syrian border, which locals and some scholars hold to be Abraham's real birth place, rather than the Iraqi city known today as Ur.  Places bearing similar biblical names are located throughout the Middle East, but by now one suspects that political logistics, rather than archaeological argument, dictated Feiler's choice of what to show us.  My suspicions were aroused.  How did the Turkish Tourist Board pull off such a coup?  Next it is to Haran, also in Turkey, from whence Abraham left the land of his fathers and set forth for a land that God would show him (Genesis 12).  We are informed that this biblical portion, Lech Lecha, was the one Feiler had read for  his bar mitzvah. 

Next it is to Shechem, which today is better known as the West Bank city of Nablus. We watch Feiler and Goren board a train en route to Shechem, and can't help but wonder what route such a train would take.  A map implies that from Turkey,  they went across Syria, then down through Lebanon, into northern Israel and on to Shechem.  That would have been a very interesting train ride for an Israeli, as both Syria and its Lebanese vassal are technically still at war with Israel.  One suspects we are being misled.

Onward to the Judean Desert and the Dead Sea, where we are reacquainted with the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and shown an example of that salt pillar formation known to Israeli school children as Lot's Wife. We are introduced to Gabi Barkai, an Israeli archaeologist who chooses his words carefully.  Was this where Abraham walked? "I don't know," he responds truthfully, "I wasn't there."  Were the Abrahamic stories myth or history?  Barkai responds that the evidence indicates they were a little of each, with some "anachronisms" also thrown in.

Feiler journeys onward to examine the place of the Akedah  (Genesis 22) where Abraham was ready to sacrifice Isaac in obedience to God, but, at the last second. was precluded from doing so by one of God's Angels.   To illustrate this story, we are taken to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem where frescoes depict the story the story of the near sacrifice. Christians draw parallels between this story and that of God and Jesus. In their belief, God committed what He could not require of Abraham—the sacrifice of  His own son.  The Church of the Holy Sepulcher is built over the places where Christians believe Jesus died on the cross and was buried in a tomb prior to his resurrection.

From the church, it's on to the Dome of the Rock atop the Temple Mount, where we see the rock which tradition identifies as that portion of Mount Moriah where the near sacrifice of Isaac took place.  In sharp contrast to how he glossed over his train  route between Haran and Shechem, Feiler all but gloats over being a non-Muslim being permitted, along with Israeli guide Goren, to visit the Dome of the Rock.

Here, the first part of "Walking the Bible" ends; we viewers being given to understand that in the second of three installments, we will be taken to Egypt, land of Joseph and of Moses.  

To cover so much "ground," obviously Feiler needed to skip vast portions of the Bible. He could have spent more than the allotted hour examining any of the biblical places he chose to visit, but instead gave short shrift to each in turn.  Feiler seemed so preoccupied with the journey, with maintaining a sense of hurtling through the Bible, that he gave viewers no time to linger, to absorb, to question.  But not to fret: the Discovery Channel and the History Channel can fill in so many, many of Feiler's gaps.