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that reached to the sky for relief. Altogether, the formations reminded me of those pictures of bodies frozen, gasping, in the aftermath of an atomic bomb.
    As we drove, Avner had been playing with a toy that some friends had given him, a portable Global Positioning System, or GPS, device that tracked our route using military satellites. For several hours he had squirreled himself away in the back, frantically pressing buttons, trying to figure out how to program it. Just before noon he leaned forward, tapped me on the shoulder, and pointed out the window. “Look!” Sait jerked to a stop and through a break in the cliffs, fifty miles ahead and thousands of feet higher than anything around it, was the pure triangular crest of a mountain, like Mount Fuji with its solemn mien. And at that moment I had the first chilling intimation of what walking the Bible might bring. Genesis does not give details about where the ark lands. The Bible may not want us to know. But if a flood did cover the earth, if an ark survived that flood, and if that ark settled on a spot where land first appeared, there was little doubt in my mind that it would have landed here. And for me it was stunning confirmation that the Bible may or may not be true, it may or may not be historical, but it is undoubtedly still alive.
    The following morning, after our meeting with Parachute, we turned south for the final portion of this trip. Our first destination was Sanliurfa, a Turkish town not far from the border with Syria that for thousands of years has been associated with the great patriarch of monotheism. Considering his importance, Abraham seems to appear out of nowhere in the Bible. After the Flood, Genesis recites the generations that follow Noah, then relates another story with Near Eastern roots, the tower of Babel.The story begins by asserting the unity of the world:“All the earth had the same language and the same words.” The descendants of Noah then begin to settle in the “land of Shinar,” the biblical name for Sumer. In an echo of the agricultural revolution, the men decide to make bricks for themselves, then to build a communal monument. “Come, let us build us a city,” they say, “and a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for ourselves; else we shall be scattered all over the world.”
    God sees the city and decides to frustrate their plans, declaring, “Let us, then, go down and confound their speech there, so that they shall not understand one another’s speech.” God then scatters the builders “over the face of the whole earth.” The doomed tower came to be called Babel, the Bible says, from the Hebrew word for “confuse.”
    Following this story, the text outlines the ten generations that lead directly from Noah to Abram. According to Genesis 11, Abram, which means “the father is exalted”(he would later change it to Abraham, “father of a multitude”), was born in Ur of the Chaldeans where he took a wife, Sarai, before leaving for Canaan. The term Chaldeans is believed to refer to a later settlement, around 1100 B.C.E. , and was probably added to the story when it was written down. The term Ur, by contrast, has tantalizing ancient parallels and suggests biblical storytellers wanted their bloodlines placed deeply in Mesopotamia. The city of Ur was the capital of Sumer and one of the grandest cities of antiquity. Built around a stepped temple, or ziggurat, believed to have inspired the Tower of Babel, the city squeezed two hundred thousand citizens into labyrinthine quarters.
    Like most Babylonian cities, Ur was surrounded by satellite settlements of farmers or shepherds. At times the two groups clashed, as when farmers wanted to grow crops in the marshland and shepherds wanted to graze sheep. The Bible echoes this struggle when it makes Adam and Eve’s first child, Cain, a farmer, and their second, Abel, a shepherd. When God expresses favor for Abel, Cain murders his sheep-herding brother. Abraham was probably