THE BIBLE IS IN TROUBLE BUT IT'S NOT DAN BROWN

A person doesn't have to be a believer to understand the Bible is important. Three billion times important. To Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. This is because all three of these Abrahamic faiths find roots in these texts. Roots that have helped shape not only the religions, but many of our world's most enduring value systems.

That is until now....!

No, it's not Dan Brown's DaVinci Code books and movies. They're only fictions. It's facts that have been stirring the biblical pot. Facts being excavated by biblical scholars. Until recently,they tended to confirm the Bible. Now they challenge it.

The challenges are much more than the stuff of fussy academicians. If these new challenges end up changing old beliefs, it will impact all of us. Something like finding out your parents aren't your parents! Suddenly you're jolted into an entirely new paradigm. Everything you thought you knew buckles beneath you in a seismic shift. Ask anyone who's been in an earthquake if they can ever trust the ground under them again.

Using the exacting tools of disciplines like geology, archaeology and anthropology, scholars have begun questioning whether the Exodus from Egypt ever happened, whether the Israelites actually conquered Canaan, whether David's mighty kingdom was all that mighty, and whether an itinerant Jew could possibly rise from a sealed tomb. Of course they're right to challenge, but of course each challenge is the tail of a tiger. More than Passover and Christmas are at stake here, folks. So are such values as the sanctity of life, of parenthood, oaths, the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln's most stirring rhetoric, Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, and your daughter's wedding vows this June.

The way this works is illustrated by some recent excavations at Mt Sedom in Israel where stands the celebrated Lot's Wife. A pillar of salt in the form of a human that has been held by many as God's punishment when she disobeyed his order not to look back at his destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Carbon dating shows the formation goes back to the right biblical time-line for the event. However, geology shows how ancient earthquakes and soil erosion over these same 4000 years can scientifically explain the phenomenon.

So here's our tiger!

Do the facts help confirm or deny the story? Does the story require confirmation or denial in the first place? Can any two visitors to the site be expected to see the same physical object and hear the same spiritual message? Ride this tiger far enough and you're left with the same foundational question many of us have. If the biblical god exists and if science is one of his gifts to his creatures, why can't the scholar and the believer arrive at the same conclusions here at Mt Sedom?

If I ever book a trip to Israel, I'm going to ask the travel agent this question. Not that travel agents know how to ride tigers any better than scholars and believers. It's just that they're so good at making everything on the itinerary so ecstatic. In the long run, maybe it's the ecstasy of belief more than the thrill of truth that travelers like me want.