Bruce Feiler has written books about a variety of subjects, from teaching English in Japan (Learning to Bow) to joining the circus (Under the Big Top), but with Walking the Bible, he mostly eschews the whimsy and humor of his previous work in favor of something considerably more profound: an epic search across the Middle East for the locations of the stories found in the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament. Feiler’s trek yields some fascinating revelations (so to speak): The Garden of Eden, in Mesopotamia, was mostly water. In order to accommodate the 18,000 or so animals it took on board, Noah’s Ark would have been half the size of the Titanic, with an entire deck just for the 600 tons of manure the creatures deposited. The body of water that Moses parted might not have been the Red Sea, but rather a shallow, reedy lake. And the burning bush, which monks at Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai say still lives within the walls of their sanctuary, has blossoms like roses and fruits like raspberries. Yet while the prospect of visiting the actual places where Biblical events took place is an intriguing one, the results are often inconclusive at best. When Feiler climbs Mt. Ararat, long thought to be the final resting place of the Ark, a local known as “the mayor of the mountain” boasts that he knows where the remnants are but refuses to show them to the visitor. Other locations remain elusive, rooted as much in myth as in fact; there are 22 possible candidates for Mt. Sinai, where Moses was said to have received the Ten Commandments from God. Feiler is no fundamentalist, and he wrestles with the imbalance between science and belief. But in the end, matters of physical evidence and proof become relatively unimportant. “The Bible transcends science,” he says; it is the “larger meaning” that matters. Clearly, his sojourn had a profound impact on his faith.
Run time : 2 hours and 48 minutes
Studio : PBS
Writer and Presenter: Bruce Feiler
Number of discs : 2
