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Reclaimers of the Lost Ark

A new sattelite image of the famous protruding structure high on Turkey’s Mt. Ararat reveals it to be “boat shaped.”

For years, it has been claimed that the structure is indeed the biblical ark of Noah, which allegedly came to rest on that very mountain. Now, the first ever investigative expedition permitted by the Turkish government will set forth in hopes of reaching the ark. The results may disprove the popular scientific theory that although the flood could have happened, it is impossible for the ark to have settled that high.

While the risky expedition may contain a serious element of “survival of the fittest” (as with any cold mountain climbing endeavor) the potential discovery could leave non-believers treading high water.

11 thoughts on “Reclaimers of the Lost Ark

  1. Am I the only one who thinks this is totally moronic? The Bible is not an ancient newspaper, people! It’s a book of stories that are meant to teach us things! Bereshit is not journalism!!!
    I don’t think these people understand religion at all…

  2. Don’t understand religion? Maybe it’s you, Sam, that doesn’t understand religion. If the Bible is merely a set of educational materials, it’s remarkably effective and complex. I’m not arguing the existence of G-d, but I am supporting the possibility that the stories are true, irrelevant of the motivation for writing them down.
    But my big problem is that you, in your great wisdom, choose to negate people’s faith. So what if these people spend their money searching for symbols and bits of history. Every culture through history has important symbols. Maybe the money could go towards finding a cure for cancer or feeding the hungry. But the emotional and spiritual needs of people are just as important as the physical ones. If you are open minded enough to consider the possibility that religion is false, open it a little wider to consider that religion is true.

  3. Oh, I wasn’t clear enough. I totally think religion is true. I just believe in a different kind of “truth” than the Creationists, say, who will only believe the Bible is “true” if they can “prove” that the world is 5,000 years old. Frankly, proving that the world is millions of years old has no effect on my own beliefs about the Torah’s truth, and neither would finding or not finding a huge boat on a mountain. Faith is FAITH, it’s not supposed to be “scientifically proven.” Attempting to do so shows that one is really committed to science as a higher value above religion, because one’s religion stands or falls on the basis of scientific evidence.

  4. No offense taken, I recognize that I was unclear in the first post and could have sounded condescending towards religious people.

  5. The Torah is not only a work of faith, it’s a chronicle of early Jewish history. I remember one of my good teachers telling me that nothing in the Torah has been found to contradict historical and archaelogical evidence. No people inventing myths about their origin would say “Our ancestors were slaves in the land of Egypt.” Instead, they would claim divine descent, as the ancient Greeks and Egyptians did. What other aicient people acknowledged that their ancestors were slaves?
    According to the Torah, God buried Moses and concealed his grave, that it might remain secret forever. And history has already vindicated the Torah on that account: no one has ever found Moses’ grave.
    I don’t claim that every bit of Genesis is provable historical fact, but the more we discover about life in the old days, the more we realize how accurate a record the Torah is.
    On a more facetious note, if you’ve ever seen those supermarket tabloids (especially the factually-challenged “Weekly World News”), they’ve published front-page stories on the “rediscovery” of Noah’s Ark every 3 years or so. Of course, they have also published stories about Elvis sightings, JFK’s survival, marooned Titanic survivors, vulture-sized butterflies, dolphins with arms and hands, and Wild West towns on the moon, so their veracity is somewhat questionable.

  6. okay, but it’s pretty easy to make a prediction that “no one will discover” something. we could probably make a whole list of things in the Torah that are commanded not to be found, which haven’t been found. another one: the garden of eden.
    stupid christians went looking for it throughout the middle ages, no dice.

  7. Yes, Sam, but that doesn’t mean that there never was a Gan Aiden, just that it hasn’t been found. If you believe the frum view, many of the wonderful things mentioned in the Torah, such as the jar of manna collected by Moses, on God’s command, as a testimony of the miracle in the desert, and his staff, are hidden away, waiting for the right moment to be found, as part of the miracles surrounding the re-establishment of the Temple. Archaeologists have made some fabulous discoveries (e.g., Masada). I have read conflicting stories over what happenedto the Ark (Aron Kodesh)–some sources claim it’s hidden in a repository in the Vatican along with other treasures looted from the Temple; others that it’s hidden in Africa. (And I read the African item online.) I believe that the truth will someday be known.
    Certainly, it can be awfully hard to distinguish truth from fiction and history from myth. What we have lost and haven’t been able to regain, we remember, and we hope.

  8. This Ark thing is turning into big news. I heard it mentioned on NPR twice today. on two different shows.
    However, i don’t really care if it’s found. I like my religion supported by science as much as the next semi-religious engineer, but i’m not going to lose faith in science or G-d if they aren’t reconciled in my life time. That said, Let’s hunt wabbits, two by two.

  9. *Sigh*
    Let me get this straight:
    The Bible is LITERALLY true, and the Ark of the Covenant has somehow been secreted away, hidden carefully away from the prying eyes of the ENTIRE FRICKIN’ WORLD, and the way that we know about it is because SOMEONE WROTE ABOUT IT ONLINE?
    Are you KIDDING ME?!?

  10. Oh, and one more thing:
    I’ve heard that “the-Bible-must-be-true-because-why-would-someone-make-up-a-story-about-being-slaves” argument before, and I think it’s time to put it to rest.
    Dig it:
    The reason someone created a story about Israel’s origin having been in slavery is because THE END OF THE STORY asserts that ISRAEL DEFEATED EGYPT. The story has religious power precisely because it describes Israel’s TRANSFORMATION and the fictional overthrow of an ancient superpower.
    Israel’s slavery is literarily and structurally (but probably not historically) significant — exactly like the first act of the stories about Cinderella, Luke Skywalker, Rocky Balboa, etc.
    Those of us for whom it is vitally important to live a meaningful, observant Jewish life had better find a better way of justifying it than by pinning our religion to the Bible’s historicity.

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