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birth to a son, Noah, who in turn gives birth to three sons of his own. Around this time, God sees how wicked and lawless mankind has become and announces, “I will blot out from the earth the men whom I created,” for “I regret that I made them.” But Noah finds favor with God, because he is a “righteous man.”
    God tells Noah to build an ark out of gopherwood, lined with pitchand divided into three separate decks, which he should fill with seven pairs of “clean” animals, presumably kosher animals like chickens, cows, and fish, and one pair of every other animal. He also takes along his own family. In the six-hundredth year of Noah’s life, the fountains of the deep burst apart, the floodgates of the sky break open, and it rains for forty days and nights, until the highest mountains everywhere are covered in water and “all the flesh on earth” is killed.
    After seven months on the water, the ark comes to rest on “the mountains of Ararat,” where it sits for another three months until the tops of the mountains become visible. Another month passes and Noah sends out a raven, which flies around until the waters have dried from the earth. Then Noah sends a dove, which is unable to find a resting spot, suggesting that water still covers the ground. Noah sends the dove again seven days later, and it returns with an olive branch, a sure sign of life. A month later, Noah removes the covering of the ark, goes ashore with his family, and sets the animals free.
    As with Creation, the story of Noah fits into an extensive tradition. Flood stories appear in 217 cultures around the world, according to authors Charles Sellier and David Balsiger. Ninety-five percent of these stories talk about a global flood, Sellier and Balsiger note, 73 percent say animals and a boat were involved, and 35 percent claim a bird was sent out at the end. Babylonian flood stories seem directly connected. In the story of Gilgamesh, Enki warns the hero, Utnapishtim, about a flood sent to destroy humanity and orders him to build a cubical ship. After a seven-day flood, the ship comes to rest atop a mountain and a bird is set free. The Babylonian stories also share a thematic parallel with the Bible. Both stories represent a shift away from mythology and toward history, with names, dates, and biological ages. As Avner noted, Noah is the father of a new generation and the Flood is another example of land emerging from a watery chaos, a second creation.
    Beyond its literary roots, the story of Noah’s ark begins another, more fascinating side of exploring the Bible today: namely, the race to prove that it happened. Some explorers have claimed they found the “real” Garden of Eden, but even the most credulous Bible enthusiasts believe those efforts are probably fantastical. With Noah, though, andthe introduction of historical details, these efforts begin to gain credibility. They reach the point of hysteria with attempts to authenticate later passages like the ten plagues, the splitting of the Red Sea, and Moses’ receiving of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. Almost every day of our journey we would encounter another of these enthusiasts, and in time I came to marvel that in addition to creating communities of believers, the Bible had created equally passionate communities devoted to the arcane, quasi-scientific analysis of, say, whether the zebras would have been on the second deck of Noah’s ark next to the lions, or on the third deck next to the koala bears. I marveled even more when I got caught up in the same questions.
    The story of the Flood has provided a mother lode for such speculation. In the summer of 1929, the English archaeologist Leonard Woolley was digging in the Sumerian capital of Ur when his workers came across a provocative find: a deep stratum of Euphrates silt poised between two layers of civilization. Titillated, Woolley, a former intelligence officer with a flair for the dramatic, lowered himself thirty feet into the