Walking the Bible (11 page)

The next morning Abraham gives Hagar some bread and water and sends her into the desert. When the water runs out, near Beer-sheba, Hagar leaves the teenage boy under a bush so she doesn’t see him die, then bursts into tears. God opens her eyes and reveals a well, which she uses to give water to the boy. God stays with the boy until he grows up and marries.

Around that time, King Abimelech announces to Abraham, “God is with you in everything that you do,” and the two sign a pact of peaceful
relations. For a time this
pax Canaanica
stands, but eventually Abraham complains that Abimelech’s men seized his well. Abimelech claims no knowledge of the act. Abraham sets aside seven lambs as an oath that he, in fact, did dig the well. The two make a covenant, calling the place Beer-sheba.
Beer
is the Hebrew word for well;
sheba
means both seven and oath. Abraham plants a tamarisk on the site in honor of the Lord.

By this point certain patterns in the Bible are becoming clear. For one, wells are crucial. In addition, there are repeated examples of tense relations among the patriarchs and local rulers in Canaan. Also, the story constantly has God repeat his promise to Abraham, in what appears to be an escalating manner:“I will give you this land,”“I will give this land to you and your descendants,” “I will give this land to you and your descendants, who will rule over the rest of the world.” To help understand the roots of these patterns, Avner suggested we stop off in Beer-sheba to meet a colleague of his, one of the senior archaeologists in the Middle East.

Eliezer Oren lives in a spacious ranch house in a neighborhood lined with lemon trees and gated homes. He ushered us into his office, stacked with books and pending Ph.D. theses, and festooned with pennants from Harvard, NYU, and Penn. Above his desk was a silhouette, cut out of black paper, showing him as a Sherlock Holmes figure with a meerschaum pipe. With his bushy mustache and formal demeanor, he reminded me of stories I had read about the grand archaeologists of the past—Heinrich Schliemann, Leonard Woolley, Arthur Evans—sitting in the desert being served five-course meals on silver trays with crystal goblets.

“You have made a correct observation,” he said when I asked about the importance of wells. “Water is the key to all life here. But more important, water symbolized attachment.” Abraham, he explained, was not a pure nomad, one who wanders from place to place. Instead he was a pastoralist, one who wanders but returns regularly to a few places.

“That’s why he came to Beer-sheba,” Eliezer continued. “It’s the edge of the desert, but there’s water here. It’s the same reason Beer-
sheba was picked to be the hub of desert administration—by the Kingdom of Israel and much later by the Turks. Modern Israel is doing the same thing. Such an important location is always a place of worship.”

I asked him why God promised Abraham such a specific piece of land, and not the entire world.

“In ancient civilization, religion is not international,” he said. “It does not cross boundaries. Religion is closely integrated with land. The god of Babylon is not the god of Egypt, the god of Hebron. It’s only Judaism and later Christianity and Islam that made God universal.”

“Why, then, is the relationship between God and man expressed in a contract?” I asked.

“Now why would this surprise you?” he said.

“It’s very anthropomorphic. It’s almost putting it in terms of a business relationship, yet it’s the most intangible of relationships. Also, it’s not a relationship of equals.”

“To start with, from all the records we know, in the ancient Near East the relationship between gods and man is always contractual. Every single one of them: the Hittites, the Mesopotamians, the Assyrians. And a contract is binding. Every partner has its obligation. If man behaves in a certain way, then he assures the prosperity of his family, his tribe. The gods, meanwhile, must make it rain and make the land bear fruit. In this respect, the Bible is beautifully embedded in its surroundings. If the relationship was not codified through a contract, I, myself, would be very worried that the Bible was not part and parcel of the ancient Near East. Finding so many contracts assures me that the Bible, indeed, is an accurate account.”

“So would rival groups accept these contracts?”

“Usually not. The contract is between you and your god. Other people have their gods. The struggle between cities is over hegemony. To put it in the terms of children, ‘My god is stronger than your god.’ That’s why a contract is so important. It guarantees that a relationship has a history, continuity. My father had a contract with God, so I have it, too. And you don’t just sign it, you read it out loud. You pronounce it. Abraham renews the contract, as does Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and
Moses. It’s like renewing your driver’s license. In Mari, up in Syria, we actually found similar contracts written down. We’ve finally proved it archaeologically.”

“So let me ask you,” I said. We’d been sitting for close to an hour now and would soon be overstaying our welcome. “Is the archaeological research you’re doing enhancing your ability to believe that the stories in the Bible might have happened, or undermining it?”

“I’m going through a certain transformation,” Eliezer said. “When I was younger, I was in my rebellious phase. In my lectures, I kept saying that since we don’t have evidence, these stories did not take place. That goes for the patriarchs, the Exodus. The older I get, perhaps I get more stupid. But I feel that my archaeological experience only enhances my understanding that even if I cannot relate a certain event, or personality, in the Bible with a specific archaeological stratum, it doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, the question is this: Is the Bible unusual for its time and place? And the answer is: It’s not. It’s part of it. Dating is becoming secondary in my opinion. When I’m digging here, I’m digging with Abraham.”

“So what effect has that had on your faith?” I asked.

“Those are different camps,” he said. “But I can tell you this: today I treat the Bible with much more respect.”

“Can you give it a grade, in terms of archaeological accuracy?”

For the first time all morning he grinned. “A plus plus.”

We said good-bye and drove the few minutes to Tel Sheba, the ancient site. Overlooking the Negev, the site had all the ingredients of well-preserved tels in Israel, a guard gate, a green map for tourists, an ice cream stand, and knee-high remains of mud brick and limestone. There is a familiar, almost elusive geography to these places. To be blunt: There’s little to see. But in the same way that people who do crossword puzzles learn the keys that unlock those blank squares, the frequent visitor to archaeological sites begins to see through the blank spaces to the thriving story lying just underneath. And what better story than the
great ages of Palestine—the patriarchs, the kingdom of Judah, the conquest by Rome.

Tel Sheba is a small site, around five acres, or one-tenth the size of Tel Dan. Though the biblical events likely took place a few miles away, under the modern city, the tel contains buildings from the Iron Age, beginning in the tenth century
B.C.E.
According to Avner, who perked up like a kid returning home as we entered the gates, the city was probably a military headquarters for the kingdom of Judah, starting around 926
B.C.E.
, with limited civilian population.

The tel’s most notable feature is a well, located just outside the city gate. The water is collected from an underground river, and as we arrived, one of Avner’s former students was demonstrating the process for a group of visitors. The well poses a curious question. Common sense would dictate that it be inside the gate for security reasons, but it’s on the outside. Avner’s explanation was that even in the early first millennium
B.C.E.
, centuries before the Bible was written down (and a thousand years after Abraham likely lived), Beer-sheba was already known as the place of Abraham’s well. Pilgrims visiting the site would have needed protection, which would explain why there was a military base nearby. If he’s correct, Beer-sheba would have been one of the world’s first tourist attractions, a full millennium before people came to the Holy Land looking for pieces of Jesus’ cross. Two thousand years later, it seems safe to say that the Bible, besides its ability to inspire piety and devotion, has also prompted more tourism than any other work in history.

We wandered inside the gate where we caught sight of a small group of visitors in their forties. Approaching, we saw that one of the men, in a beard and T-shirt, had a map spread out on one of the ancient altars. “I had this vision,” the man said, in English. “I saw a line. Abraham entered the country from the north—” He opened a Bible and began turning pages. “He went to Shechem, then Bethel, then Hebron, then he came here, to Beer-sheba.” Having satisfied the group that they were in the right place, the man retrieved a shofar, a long, curly ram’s horn, polished smooth. The man reared back and blew the horn with jet-
engine intensity, eliciting a screechy plaint. The others held hands and prayed.

At this point, a thin man with blue Dockers and a blue-and-white-striped button-down shirt stepped into the center of the circle. The leader—a preacher, a rabbi, a guru?—filled a Dannon strawberry yogurt carton with bottled water and held it in his right hand as if he were about to pitch a baseball side-armed. He rested his left hand on the thin man’s head, said a quick prayer, and with a swell of force that seemed to draw strength from the three thousand years of history beneath his feet, slammed the carton into the man’s abdomen, creating a powerful splash, eliciting deep, mournful moans from the small congregation, and from the man himself, prompting a gasping cry: “Torah! Torah! Hallelujah!! Praise, Jesus. I am found!”

At first tentative, but fascinated, I watched from the narrow walkway. Within minutes, though, one of the women approached me. “I don’t know who you are,” she said. “But God has sent you.” She invited me to join them. I asked what religion this ceremony was. “We’re all believers,” she said. “He who accepts the Messiah is circumcised in the heart.” The man being blessed, John Powell, stepped forward and explained. He was an American, a Gentile, he said. He had found Jesus Christ as his savior when he was eighteen and for years studied the Bible and spread the word of God. In his twenties he found a passage in Second Corinthians, which indicated to him that the Church had become too removed from its Jewish roots and had forgotten the meaning of the seven feasts, the seven pieces of furniture in the Temple, the seven days of Creation. “The Spirit gives life through symbols,” he said. He vowed to return to the Old Testament and moved to Kissimmee, Florida, near Disney World, to start a new mission.

As he was preparing to move, a friend in Massachusetts had a vision of him peering into a well. “This well was not being used,” he said, “but I put a bucket in and pulled out fresh water, pure water. The people gathered around thought they had seen a miracle.” He turned to John 4, where Jesus comes upon Jacob’s well near Shechem, and decided to come to Israel. After arriving, he learned that visiting Shechem would be unsafe. “The Lord took me back to Genesis,” he said. “To chapter 26,
where Isaac builds a well in Beer-sheba. It’s the same well that Abraham had dug, though it had been filled in by the Philistines. And I realized: This was the well that was not being used. I saw the connection. I felt the spiritual pull between my work and Beer-sheba.” With some friends he met in Jerusalem, he decided to come here and sanctify his vision.

At this point John’s wife, Starr, joined him in the center. She was wearing a peach-colored turtleneck. The leader, Luke, began to fill the yogurt cup with water. John was concerned that the cup had become dented and used his finger to unpucker the dent to ensure that his wife had the same amount of water. Once again Luke cocked his arm, summoned the Lord, and slammed the cup into Starr’s stomach, lifting her off the ground in the process. Then he flung water onto her face. It was chilly atop the tel, the breeze was blowing. But it didn’t matter. Starr was crying now, as was half the group. “From this day forth you will come out of the Land of Israel,” Luke said. A woman, Barb, stepped forward with a
talit
made of white silk with blue stripes. Thirteen-year-old boys receive these shawls when they become men, she explained. She wrapped it around John’s shoulders and recited the Wayfarer’s Prayer, the same one I heard on the bus to Hebron. When she finished she asked John if he owned a
talit
. He shook his head. “Well, you do now,” she said. John leapt like a boy. “Wow!” he said. “Glory be! Somebody asked me the other day if I wanted to buy one, and I didn’t know which one was right. Thank you. Hallelujah! Praise Jesus.”

Barb and several others then proceeded to turn the
talit
into a wedding canopy and invited John and Starr to repeat their vows. The entire episode was astounding not only in its raw emotion, but also in its pandemic religious inclusion—part baptism, part Bar Mitzvah, part wedding, part rebirth. I was struck by the idea that John and I, from different backgrounds, had come to this place for the same reason: It was in the Bible, the patriarchs had passed here, there was meaning in this soil.

After the ceremony, Barb retrieved a tiny vial of margarine-colored oil. She dabbed some on John’s forehead, then Starr’s. It smelled of lilac. “Father, we come to you in the name of Jesus,” Barb said, crying. “You can put some right on my eyelids,” John said, but she resisted. “I don’t know what’s in this, so I better not.” “No, I beseech you,” he said, and
she obeyed. Finally, in her emotion, Barb fell to her knees. John and Starr were wearing sandals, and Barb began reenacting the last moments of Jesus’ life, spreading oil on John’s toes. A general sobbing ensued, and husband and wife collapsed to the sandy ground in a giant exhale of prayer, now, at last, reconnected to the dust of eternity, which more than water, oil, or the sound of the shofar, had the ability to give them purpose to their lives. “God bless,” they muttered. “God bless. God bless.”