Walking the Bible (26 page)

He suggested Thutmose III, who ruled from 1479 to 1425. Besides being compatible with the Solomonic figures, Thutmose III was the son of a concubine, who took over as king after Thutmose II was unable to have a son by his wife/half-sister Hatshepsut. Within a year, though, Thutmose III was joined in a coregency by Hatshepsut, leaving open the possibility that he was humiliated by a mass exodus of slaves. Because he was short and stocky, and known for being militaristic, Thutmose III has been called “Egypt’s Napoleon.” Was the Red Sea his Waterloo? Unlikely, Avner noted. From the fifteenth century until the
early thirteenth century
B.C.E.
, Egypt exercised hegemonic control over Canaan, making an Israelite conquest of the area forty years after the Exodus all but impossible.

Yasser, for his part, also shied away from traditional choices. He based his decision on his knowledge of mummies. “Rameses II was an old man when he died, not like in the movies,” he said. “He would have been unable to ride a horse into the Red Sea. He died of old-man diseases.” As for Merenptah, Rameses II’s son, who is also considered an option: “His mummy had lots of salt, more than most kings. It’s possible he died in the water, but more likely that he just stayed longer in the natron salts.” Yasser was equivocating. “Give us your vote,” I prodded. “Get off the fence,” Avner joked. “I would look for a strong king,” Yasser said. “One who trampled his enemies. I would think Seti I, the father of Rameses II. He attacked the Libyans. He built forts in the Sinai. And Seti means death, the god of death. If you’re called Seti, you are called evil.”

Avner disagreed with Yasser, preferring the more traditional view, but for nontraditional reasons. As an archaeologist, he tended to reject the notion of a single, mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of slaves. Instead, he preferred the idea of waves of smaller flights—
exodi,
if you will—that took place over many years, perhaps decades. These likely took place in the thirteenth century, he said, because the entire region was undergoing dramatic change. “The year 1200
B.C.E.
was a landmark in ancient history,” he said. “It’s not only that the Israelites got to the Holy Land. The Sea Peoples, a mixed population from Greece, started moving into the Near East. And Egypt, which had been the prime power for over a millennium, lost its power and never regained it.” Why? “We don’t know,” he said. “It’s like the Soviet Union—who can say why it collapsed? There was no victory that defined the change, but when it was over, one hundred years later, the region was no longer dominated by either the Egyptians or the Hittites. The world was divided into many states—Amorite, Edomite, Israelite—which allowed David and Solomon to build their empire.” Since this change began under Rameses II, Avner said, he is the most likely candidate.

“So, now it’s your turn,” he said.

“Okay, I’m off the fence,” I said.

Since we don’t have much historical evidence, I suggested, and since we don’t have references from Egypt, the most logical place to turn for clues is the Bible. Exodus 1 says the Israelites were building Pithom and Rameses, which would seem to date their enslavement to sometime in the thirteenth century. The text says it was this pharaoh who ordered that all Israelite boys be murdered, whose daughter took in Moses, and who later threatened to kill his surrogate grandson after he murdered an Egyptian. But Exodus 2 says this pharaoh subsequently died, meaning his
son
would have been pharaoh by the time Moses returned from the desert. The son who took over from Rameses II was Merenptah, a decrepit man (his father had ruled for sixty-six years) who was bald and overweight. In the fifth year of his reign, a group of Libyan tribes who had long threatened Egypt swept into the Delta, imperiling the authority of the king. Even more than under Thutmose III, this chaotic situation would have been an ideal opportunity for some slaves to escape while the pharaoh was busy fighting a war in their midst. “I’m going with Merenptah,” I said.

“But what about the victory stela?” Avner said. “Already by that time, Merenptah claims to have defeated Israel in Canaan.”

“It could be an exaggeration,” I said. “Pharaohs were famous for that. Or, if you use your theory of a rolling exodus, it could be that some Israelites had already escaped and were on their way to Canaan. Either way, the fact that he mentions the Israelites at all indicates that he was afraid of them. They were no longer just slaves, they had become a threat. Why else would he chase after them?”

“Fair enough,” Avner said.

“Still, why not tell us who the pharaoh was?” I said. “Why doesn’t the Bible use his name?”

“The names meant nothing,” he said. “Nobody in Israel knew that there was a Rameses or a Thutmose or a Merenptah. They didn’t care.”

“Should
we
care?”

“Maybe. We should certainly understand Egypt. We should understand that the Israelites lived here, that they were part of this culture, but that they left here, hoping to find a better life. Maybe that’s the reason
the Bible doesn’t give us the pharaoh’s name. It wants us to have this conversation. It wants us to relive the Exodus.”

After almost two hours of driving around the Delta, we still seemed no closer to Sa el-Hagar. We were traveling on roads without any signs, without any pavement, without any other cars. The only people to give us conflicting directions were farmers who happened to be plowing near the canal, and they were becoming increasingly rare. “The distances have been getting longer the closer we’ve gotten to the place,” Avner said. Finally we emerged into a small clearing—a town?—huddled with houses with grass roofs. A man rolled by on his bicycle. Ahmed lowered his window. “We are looking for Sa el-Hagar,” he said, in the one Arabic expression I now knew by heart. “This is Sa el-Hagar!” the man exclaimed. It was 10:50
A.M.

We drove a few miles to the tel, which was closed. Ahmed climbed over the fence and walked to the small guard building. He returned with several men, who unlocked the gate and invited us into the compound. I reached for my wallet but was told to wait:Some baksheesh is given at the beginning of a service, it turns out, some at the end. One needs a Ph.D.

We walked up a small hill and began to catch glimpses of the tel, an enormous empty mound of slightly reddish dirt that rose out of the surrounding countryside, which was still covered with trees and fields. With almost no visible remains, the tel seemed like it belonged on the face of Mars. As the size of the site began to become apparent, Avner started sprinting to the top of the highest hill. “I’ve never seen such a huge tel!” he said, giggling with delight. “Just look: This is one big city! I visited a tel once on the other side of the Delta. It took an hour to walk from one side to the other. But it was nothing compared to this. This is bigger than the Old City of Jerusalem!”

We hurried down the hill, sand flying in every direction, and came to the one area of the tel that had been excavated, a giant temple to Amen that had been shattered, as if by a hammer flung by the gods. Cracked pillars and splintered lintels littered the ground. The randomness, and the rawness, reminded me of the feeling I had in Harran of
being inside a terra-cotta jug that had been flung to the ground and broken into a thousand shards. Only here, because the structure was Egyptian, the shards were covered in hieroglyphs. Avner jumped on one fallen pillar that was wider than I am tall and pointed out the name of a daughter of Rameses II. “We came all this way and found the signature of the woman who found Moses,” I said. “Not bad!”

“But remember, Rameses II had ninety-five children,” Avner said. “Fifty-five boys and forty girls.”

“No wonder he didn’t mind having another grandkid around,” I said.

“No wonder he built such a big house.”

As it turns out, this probably wasn’t his house at all. Sa el-Hagar, otherwise known as Tanis, was once thought to be the site of the biblical city of Rameses, or what Egyptians called Pi-Rameses, the Delta residence of the pharaohs. Petrie raised money to excavate the tel by promising insights into the plight of the Israelites. His dig seemed to confirm the biblical connection when he found ruins with visible marks from Rameses II. But later excavations proved that these monuments were moved here from another site, Qantir, which is more likely the town of Pi-Rameses that the Bible describes. Qantir, about twenty minutes away, is smaller than Sa el-Hagar, but still large by Egyptian standards. A third site, Tell el-Maskhuta (the Arabic spelling of tel has two
l
s), is probably the site that the Bible refers to as Pithom. Though once excavated, it was now covered in undulating mounds.

What was clear from visiting these sites was how vital the Delta was in the late second millennium
B.C.E.
These were not frontier towns, forgotten by the central authority; they were bustling cities whose intake from international commerce was central to the strength of the country. Indeed, the volume of trade coming from Palestine, coupled with the Delta’s enormous food-generating powers, produced multiple thriving cities within a very small area, much more congested than anything in Canaan. The Land of Goshen was the Northeast Corridor of ancient Egypt, with all the benefits—and drawbacks—of a concentrated zone. This might explain the large gathering of immigrant labor; it also might explain how if conditions worsened, and word spread quickly, a relatively
rapid emigration would be possible. Think of the Irish decamping after the potato famine, or Americans fleeing the Dust Bowl, and one gets a sense of the possible undercurrents of the Exodus. As with other stories in the Bible, economic revolutions join with geographic realities and spiritual objectives to create a story that serves both the mythological needs of the nation as well as the glory of God.

By the time we finished exploring the tels it was almost 2:00 and we’d lost track of time. We still hoped to cross the Red Sea by sunset. We rejoined the paved, two-lane road and began sprinting east toward the Suez Canal. We passed through a few small communities, each with what appeared to be a designated purpose: one for fixing lorries, another for making furniture. The only consistent curiosity was dozens of dovecotes that hung from many buildings and trees. Dovecotes, also known as pigeon farms, are wooden bird shelters with large bottom trays designed to gather droppings, which are then used as fertilizer. As Avner explained, once Nasser built the dam and trapped the silt in Aswan, alternative means of fertilizing became necessary. Egypt: the gift of the pigeons.

About twenty-five minutes into our drive we burst through a border of palm trees and suddenly found ourselves in open desert. The transition was abrupt, and unnerving, the inverse of what I had seen on my flight to Luxor. The ground was slightly higher here, and thus out of reach of the many canals from the river. We were in a land bridge between the Delta and the Sinai, a dead zone between the Nile and the Red Sea. It was tempting to visualize the hordes of Israelites racing to an unknown fate at water’s edge. It was even more tempting to imagine this landscape as the setting for one of the bleakest countdowns in history, the world’s first Top Ten List: the plagues.

After Moses returns from the wilderness, his first act is to ask the pharaoh directly, in the name of God, to let the Israelites depart from Egypt. The pharaoh dismisses the request and redoubles his tormenting of the Israelites, insisting that they start gathering their own straw for making bricks. Moses makes a second appeal to the pharaoh, who asks for proof of Moses’ god. Aaron tosses a rod onto the ground, which
becomes a serpent. Unimpressed, the pharaoh has his magicians turn the same trick with their rods. Aaron’s serpent promptly devours the others. The pharaoh’s heart “stiffens,” and he denies Moses’ request.

God then initiates a series of “signs and wonders” designed to persuade the pharaoh to release the Israelites. In the first act, Aaron spreads his rod over all the waters of Egypt and turns them to blood. Egyptian magicians duplicate this act, too, and the pharaoh walks away, unpersuaded. God then overruns the country with frogs, which enter the palace, the pharaoh’s bedchamber, even his bed. This time the pharaoh feigns acceptance, but when God withdraws the frogs, the king rescinds his offer. God responds by covering the land with lice, and the magicians, unable to duplicate this act, announce, “This is the finger of God.” Pharaoh’s heart remains stiff.

Six more plagues quickly follow. The land is overrun with insects, pestilence strikes the livestock, humans and animals are overcome with boils. Hail lashes the landscape, locusts swarm the territory, and darkness covers the country. Each time, the pharaoh refuses to back down. Several times he pretends to, but God now stiffens his heart. God wants to display
all
his signs, he tells Moses, and make a mockery of the Egyptians. Finally God tells Moses, “I will bring but one more plague upon Pharaoh and upon Egypt; after that he shall let you go from here.” Moses passes the warning on to the pharaoh, saying that at midnight God will kill every first-born in the land of Egypt, “from the first-born of Pharaoh who sits on his throne, to the first-born of the slave girl who is behind the millstone; and all the first-born of the cattle.” A loud cry shall be heard in the land of Egypt, Moses warns.

The pharaoh remains stiff-hearted. The confrontation is set.

Almost since these stories were recorded, commentators have tried to find natural explanations for each of the ten plagues. Philo said that God-given elements of the universe—earth, water, air, and fire—all conspired in a state of hostility against the impious country. Another theory held that a comet passed too closely to earth, showering debris that was mistaken for hail and trailing dust that darkened the sky. More recently, a number of commentators have tried to find a single explanation for all ten plagues. Greta Hort, a biblical ecologist, has suggested
that the plagues could be traced to an unusually high flood triggered by heavy rainfall in the Ethiopian Highlands. The amount of tropical red soil in one of the Blue Nile tributaries would have been uncommonly high, creating the illusion of blood. In addition, a higher-than-normal number of flagellates drawn from the highlands would have killed many fish, which in turn would have caused the frogs to seek refuge on the land, where they would have died from anthrax, which had also been spawned by the dead fish. The virus,
Bacillus anthracis,
later killed the livestock and caused the boils, Hort suggested. The excessive amount of water, meanwhile, would have generated an excessive amount of mosquitoes (an alternative translation of lice), as well as the insects. All this destruction, inevitably, left the land decimated, so that by the time the khamsin, or strong easterly wind from the Sahara, arrived in March, it kicked up all the dust and left the air black as night.