National Geographic: Riddles of the Bible - First Season

A wicked world.

An angry God.

A righteous man named Noah, who built an ark, and survived a flood.

But did it happen the way the Bible describes it?

While some scientists are looking for answers,

others search for confirmation of the biblical account.

Will they find it?

Or was the story of Noah simply a story...

..of God and man...

..and a promise?

The story of a man and a boat and a flood first appears in the Middle East,

the same part of the world that gave birth to Judaism, Christianity, and lslam.

lt's told in both the Bible and the Koran,

the account of a catastrophic event that happened very early in human history,

not too long after the creation.

In the beginning, God created everything.

Many of us learned the story when we were kids, even if we didn't go to Sunday school.

So what God decided to do was create a great fIood,

and the fIood wouId wash everything away,

except for one famiIy God saw was doing very good things.

- Noah! - And that was Noah's famiIy.

But how seriously should we take the story of Noah and his ark?

Did it happen the way the Bible tells us it did?

A Iot of peopIe doubt that there was a fIood and an ark, but I beIieve the BibIe is historicaIIy true

and I beIieve there was a fIood and there was an ark.

Was there reaIIy a worIdwide fIood? I doubt it.

I don't see any evidence in the geoIogy or anything eIse for a worIdwide catastrophe.

I beIieve the story about the fIood.

Now, if you ask me, do I beIieve that there was a 450-foot-Iong ark

with aII the animaIs of the Earth, you know, crammed inside of it,

I, you know, I have a IittIe... I... SpecificaIIy, probabIy no.

The story of Noah and the flood is told in the Book of Genesis,

which is an account of the origins of Earth and of man.

According to the Bible,

the descendants of Adam and Eve lost sight of why God put them on the Earth,

and fell into wicked ways,

so God decided to do something about it.

And the Lord said, ''l will destroy man, whom l have created from the face of the Earth,.

both man and beast and the creeping thing. ''

Everyone and everything was going to die, except Noah and his family.

But can the Bible be taken literally?

Let's start with the ages of the people involved.

Noah, for instance, was about 500 years old when he got the warning,

and that poses a problem for many modern readers.

The age of the peopIe mentioned in the bibIicaI record,

how oId they are when they die, is an unusuaI probIem,

because that's not what we see today,

But it's not an insoluble problem.

Maybe, for exampIe, humans, when first created, were intended to Iive Iong Iife,

but environmentaI changes might have come aIong,

and aII of a sudden, peopIe began to Iive Iess Iength of time.

Some theologians take the biblical numbers as metaphors.

When the BibIe taIks about years, age, it's taIking about respect.

It's a... It's a cuIture in which age was respected,

so when you assign more years to a person,

you're taIking about the respect with which they're heId.

Fundamentalists, on the other hand,

take the Bible's description of days and years as statements of fact.

God's word can be taken IiteraIIy,

and in the beginning, ''God created in six days''

means he created it in six IiteraI, 24-hour days.

The literal interpretation of the timeline given in Genesis

has had a number of interesting consequences.

Among them was this..

lt provided the basis for calculating both the date of creation

and the date of Noah's flood.

The person who made the calculations

was a 1 7th century lrish archbishop named James Ussher.

He started by adding the ages of 21 generations of people in the Old Testament,

beginning with Adam and Eve.

Using known historical dates as fixed points, and after 1 00 pages of calculations,

he divined that the world was created in 4000 BC.

To adjust for a calendar error,

he put the date of creation at Sunday, October 23, 4004 BC,

which fact was duly noted in the margins of some Bibles.

Using the date of creation, Ussher then calculated the year of the great flood.. 2348 BC.

According to the Bible, it was roughly 1 00 years before that,

when Noah received God's instructions about how he and his family were going to survive.

God told Noah to build a boat, a very big boat, an ark,

and the instructions were quite specific.

''The length of the ark shall be 300 cubits,

the breadth of it 50 cubits, and the height of it 30 cubits. ''

A cubit is the length of a man's arm from elbow to fingertips, about a foot and a half.

So, if the Bible's dimensions are correct,

it would have been the largest wooden vessel in the history of the world,

the original man-made wonder,

and some people apparently believe

it's still out there, somewhere, waiting to be found.

ln the past hundred years or so, ark hunters have descended on the Middle East

and climbed various mountains,

looking for the peak the ark might have settled on.

The Bible isn't precise about the location.

We're only told the ark came to rest on the mountains, plural, of Ararat.

Ararat was a region, an ancient kingdom called Urartu.

Mount Ararat, singular, in eastern Turkey,

wasn't named until centuries after the kingdom disappeared.

But that hasn't stopped it from being the arkologists'favourite hunting ground,

and there are plenty of leads to follow up.

One story goes that in 1 91 7 a Russian pilot, Vladimir Roskovitsky,

thought he spotted an ark-like object on the mountain.

Tsar Nicholas ll of Russia sent an expedition to investigate.

From there, the story gets a bit hazy.

No records of an expedition have ever come to light.

Roskovitsky claimed that the photos were destroyed in the revolution later that year.

But it's unlikely that the expedition ever even took place.

lt just so happens that by 1 91 7, Tsar Nicholas ll was no longer in power.

Then, in the 1 950s, an apparent breakthrough.

A Frenchman named Fernand Navarra brought back wood from the peak

that was dated to the early Bronze Age.

lnterest in Mount Ararat soared,

until Navarra's guide revealed

that the Frenchman had not only lugged the wood down the mountain,

but also up it a few months earlier.

An article about an Ararat expedition sparked some interest in creationist circles in 1 972.

They were using it to plan their own expedition.

The story had first appeared in a publication called The Sword Of Gideon in 1 933.

lt turned out the editor had adapted the story from another publication,

which in turn was copied from a German article published on April 1 st, 1 933.

That paper later confessed that the entire story had been an April Fool's Day prank.

The German public enjoyed the joke, but the creationists were not amused.

ln ark lore, stories like these abound,

and may account for ark-hunting's dubious reputation.

If somebody does cIaim to find the ark, it wiII be a hoax.

I'II be very, very surprised if anybody ever finds Noah's ark.

But in 1 959, the discovery everyone had been waiting for hit the news.

A Turkish army captain named llhan Durupinar

was poring over aerial photos of Turkey, near Ararat,

when he spotted a small, boat-like shape lying at an altitude of about 6,300 feet.

Arkologists began making the trek to the site,

and sure enough, they found something,

a large boat-shaped mass, buried under tons of mud and ice.

Hassan Bey has been living at the site, guarding it, for the past 20 years.

I am the historian of Noah's ark, Haji Hassan Bey.

There is no Iegend about Noah's ark being on Mount Ararat.

Whatever they say, it's here. Noah's ark is here!

Americans announced it, aII the writing's inside.

They bring sheep and goat and Iamb, and pray and say, ''Thank God Noah's ark is with us.''

Of course, they beIieve it.

One of the most persistent visitors to the site

was an American fundamentalist named Ron Wyatt,

who was the first to pronounce

that these large carved stones found near the site had been used as anchors for the ark.

The conventional explanation is that they were ceremonial stones,

carved by Stone Age tribesmen.

ln the 1 980s, ark hunting got an infusion of credibility from an unlikely source.. an astronaut.

One of the peopIe that was vastIy interested in Noah's boat

was my Iate coIIeague and friend, James Irwin.

Jim Irwin was the eighth man to waIk, the first to drive, on the moon,

and he'd had an epiphany.

It was a Iife-changing experience when he stood on the moon,

and he Iooked across the bIack canopy of space and he saw the Earth puIsing with Iife.

He knew that that wasn't by accident, that a creator breathed that into existence.

And therefore, God must reaIIy have some good reason for him to be on this Earth.

He became very reIigious, and one of the things that he wanted to do

was to go ahead and seek the Iocation of Noah's boat on Mount Ararat.

He opened the door for ark searchers.

He made ark searching respectabIe, having a great scientist Iike him go.

lrwin made a number of trips to Turkey,

though he died before finding any conclusive evidence of the ark's existence.

He would inspire a whole new generation of ark hunters,

and one of them came up with a cutting-edge way of searching.

The conventional ark hunter mounted an expedition and climbed a mountain,

but Porcher Taylor came up with a unique approach

after hearing an interesting rumour when he was a West Point cadet.

In 1 973, I was on the debate team at the academy,

and one day, one of my coIIeagues on the debate team said,

''Did you hear the rumour ricocheting off the waIIs here,

that one of our space-based birds accidentaIIy turned its cameras on too earIy,

fIying over Mount Ararat, coming up on the Soviet Union,

and the image appears to be a bow of a ship sticking out of a gIacier?''

And I said, ''Geez, there reaIIy might be a ship up on Mount Ararat,

and it might be Noah's ark.''

lt turned out the Noah's ark stories had been floating around the ClA since 1 949,

when a photo reconnaissance mission had snapped a picture of...something.

The ClA called it ''the Ararat anomaly''.

lt took years, but Taylor finally managed to get the photo declassified,

and decided to take a closer look at the boat-like shape.

ln 1 999, he convinced a remote-imaging company

to point its hi-resolution lkonos satellite at the Ararat anomaly.

On October 5, 1 999, it captured these images.

The Ikonos images show what appear to be

reaIIy a very Iarge titanic-shaped structure

heaviIy submerged in the gIaciaI ice.

But Taylor wanted more resolution,

and in February 2003, he got it,

with a new DigitalGlobe satellite that could see a grapefruit from space.

This image has never been reIeased to the pubIic,

and that in and of itseIf er...is...is exciting.

Here, for the first time ever,

we reaIIy see that this is very much a ship-shaped,

boat-shaped structure from end to end.

It's 1 ,01 5 feet Iong.

Now, what about width? RoughIy, 1 60 feet.

Is there any significance to that? Yes, there is.

The Genesis bIueprint is a six-to-one Iength-to-width ratio, 300 cubits by 50 cubits.

Our ship-shaped structure here

is right in the baIIpark of about a six-to-one, Iength to width ratio.

We might reaIIy be on the verge of seeing

something of bibIicaI proportions on Mount Ararat.

Taylor decided to show the pictures to some outside experts,