2004-12-23-Armchair Jewishsightseeing |
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to Zion to Mt. Ararat and beyond |
Thanks to the multitudinous offerings on cable television, I was able to travel tonight (Thursday, Dec. 23) to Zion National Park in Utah, to the real Zion of Jerusalem, and onward to Mount Ararat—the reputed landing place for Noah’s Ark—in Turkey. Okay, so one would have
had to do a little “time shifting”—that is taping the shows, then
replaying them in one’s own order—to achieve proper geographic sequencing,
but, hey, the armchair sits squarely in the realm of imagination.
And Jewishsightseeing is going anywhere where Jewish people, history, or
culture have made their marks. Not only the park, but
some of the places within it, bespeak the connection these early Mormon settlers
felt with our Jewish Bible. The
narrow mountain peak known as Angels Landing was named by an explorer who mused
that “only an angel could land on top of it.”
Perhaps the angel who stilled Abraham’s hand atop Mount Moriah?
Or could it have been the one with whom Jacob wrestled? A road through the
sandstone cliffs that once blocked access to Zion National Park is called
“Mount Carmel Tunnel,” bringing to mind passageways that the Prophet Elijah
might have traveled en route to his showdown with the prophets of Baal. While most of the segment
was a recitation of facts well known to most of us, two points certainly should
raise eyebrows. First, of course, is the title’s contention that Jerusalem is
the capital of two states—a contention that Israel rejects by saying that the
City of David is its “eternal and undivided capital.” The second controversial point was a suggestion that Jewish
immigration to Palestine took place in the 1930s as Jews tried to escape Adolf
Hitler’s nazi regime. The program
failed to acknowledge that Jewish communities remained in Israel from the time
of the destruction of the Temple right up to modern times.
Nor did the modern Zionist movement begin during the nazi era; in fact,
Zionists were sponsoring immigration from Eastern Europe to Palestine during the
last quarter of the 19th century.
Friction between Arabs and Jews over the land existed long before Hitler
came onto the scene. Why is this important?
Because the mythology promoted by those opposed to Israel is that the
only reason the Jewish state exists is because the world made Palestinian Arabs
pay the price for the crime committed by the nazis. Wrongly placing the start of Jewish immigration in the nazi
time frame adds fuel to that fallacious fire. According to The Learning
Channel, had Noah built an ark as
large as that described in the Bible, it would have been the size of the
Titanic—and given the state of shipbuilding
in Noah’s day 6,000 years ago, also would have
sunk to the bottom of the ocean. Furthermore, according to
the speculative presentation, there’s no evidence in the geologic record of a
global flood such as described in the Bible.
Even if you melted all the water in icebergs, and threw in a good-sized
ice-bearing comet for good measure, you wouldn’t have enough water to cover
the entire globe. What happened, according
to The Learning Channel, is that Jewish scribes during the Babylonian exile
found tablets containing the flood story. There
was the Gilgamesh tale, which told of a flood, and an even earlier Sumerian
work, which also told of a great deluge. This flood, according to
The Learning Channel, would have been local in character, perhaps caused by a
freak combination of hurricane runoff from the mountains that fed the Euphrates
augmented further by the melting snow pack in the Armenian mountains
According to the story,
the “Sumerian Noah” already had barges lashed together like a pontoon bridge
for shipping animals, grains and beer. When
the floods hit, the barge traveled down an ever-widening river—so wide that
the banks could not be seen—to the Persian Gulf.
Instead of landing upon Mount Ararat, it settled in what is today Bahrain.
Not having fresh water to drink, the passengers aboard the barge
subsisted on beer. The Learning Channel didn't say so, but this might
correspond with the story about Noah getting drunk after the Ark made it to
safety. The
Sumerian story relates that this merchant prince was unable to return to his
kingdom because the flood had left him unable to pay his debts—and anyone in
that situation could be sold into slavery.
So he remained in Bahrain,
where today there are many unexplored burial mounds that date back to Sumerian
times, according to The Learning Channel. No one knows if this
theory can withstand the same kind of scientific scrutiny that long has been
directed at the biblical account of Noah.
In the comfort of an armchair, almost anything can sound plausible.— Donald
H. Harrison |