"God is the problem," says Snakes Hammurabi, explaining his crime. Arrested and imprisoned on a German prison barge for relieving himself upon a church altar, Snakes can find no one more responsible for his predicament than the Divine one himself. As he speaks, eleven hardened criminals, including a cannibal, an assassin, and a Nazi, listen to his story. Locked together by fate on the eve of the millennium, each has a story to tell.

Each man, that is, but the silent one on the bottom bunk who never sleeps or eats - the mysterious Ben Alef. When a violent storm rips the prison barge from its moorings and sets the prisoners adrift, these morally unbound men find themselves in real danger. But a series of remarkable events (dare one call them miracles?) deliver the escaped criminals to shore. Convinced that Ben Alef has saved them, they set out on foot, a small band of unlikely disciples attending their even more unlikely messiah.

Word spreads swiftly - and so does hysteria - as some people claim that Ben Alef is a fraud and some that he's deluded, while a daily growing rabble follows the procession with a deep need to believe, and does so.