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.

According to the “Secrets of Zion & Bryce,” a program broadcast tonight on the Travel Channel, the 229-square-mile Zion National Park in southwestern Utah was named in the 19^th century by Mormons seeking to escape religious persecution.  The area’s magnificent scenery reminded them of a passage in Isaiah describing Zion as a place of sanctuary and beauty in the mountains.

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?

One of the most spectacular views, looking up, is from the Zion Narrows, a place so beautiful that it prompted one park ranger to tell the Travel Channel that “if Zion is the City of God, then the Zion Narrows is His private chamber.”

One monolith called “The Watchman” is such an impressive site that “it will make a believer out of you,” according to the Travel Channel.  Hyperbole or not, it is a nice image.

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.

 “Jerusalem: Capital of Two States” was a segment broadcast on Instructional Television (ITV)’s regular series, Power of Place The key interviewee for this program was America’s former top Mideast negotiator Dennis Ross—who, as President Bill Clinton’s point man, tried unsuccessfully to talk Ehud Barak and Yassir Arafat into a peace deal during the final days of Clinton’s presidency. 

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 19^th 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.

Next, through the medium of armchair Jewishsightseeing – and courtesy of The Learning Channel— I was able to go back to the time of Noah.  TLC’s presentation, “Noah’s Ark: The True Story”  gives little credence to the biblical account of the flood, suggesting the story in Genesis was just an overblown rewrite of an earlier Sumerian story involving a merchant king of  Shuruppak, a city on the Euphrates River in Iraq.

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.

Loading all the animals two by two would have taken 30 years, given the scientific estimate that there are 30 million species on earth, according to The Learning Channel.  And notwithstanding numerous scientific expeditions to Mount Ararat, and a thriving tourist industry in that part of Turkey, there’s no credible evidence a giant ark ever settled upon that mountain.

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