Walking the Bible (29 page)

Before coming to Egypt, I had been somewhat apologetic about this leg of our trip. I would travel down the Nile in search of Joseph; I would visit the pyramids and the land of Goshen; but I didn’t expect to
find much directly related to the Bible. Now I realized more than ever that you can’t understand the Bible without understanding Egypt. The text itself seems to hint at this connection. Joseph could simply have lived in Egypt. Instead he rose to prime minister. Moses could have been raised in any household. Instead he grew up in the pharaoh’s. From the use of dreams with Joseph, to the importance of the Nile to Moses, Egyptian motifs fill the Pentateuch and lend a geographic—and cultural—balance to the Mesopotamian themes that dominate the early chapters of Genesis. Even the story of the parting of the Red Sea has an Egyptian antecedent. During the reign of Snefru, the father of the king who built the Great Pyramid, the pharaoh one day convened a rowing party. A young woman dropped a brooch into the Nile and became inconsolable, so the pharaoh summoned a magician who separated the waters, reached to the dry ground, and retrieved the brooch. The waters soon returned to normal.

Like many, I suspect, I’d always thought of Egypt in the Bible as being the adversary, the wicked tyrant of the west. Now I’d come to see that that view was too narrow. Egypt, like Mesopotamia, was a powerful empire that the Israelites first had to understand and cohabitate with; later they could draw ideas from it; later still they could supplant it. In effect, the Israelites were taking the best elements of each belief system they encountered along their journey and combining them with their own notion of a universal God to create a new pan–Near Eastern religion that could therefore become the dominant creed of the Fertile Crescent.

And maybe it was appreciation at having made that discovery; maybe it was the sense that I had touched the two outer wings of the biblical narrative and was now on my way to the desert core, the place where the people finally receive their blessing; or maybe it was relief at having persevered through a trying day (and the antagonism of Ahmed and Yasser), but as I sat on the water that afternoon, listening to the gulls, smelling the salt, I felt something inside of me suddenly open up that I didn’t even know was closed. I felt a quiet snap of release, like a door clicking open in the middle of the night, beckoning me to a place I’d always been afraid to go. So when Mohammed mentioned that he
rowed to this spot every day trawling for
Moses
fish, I felt myself giving in to the emotion.

“So what do you know about Moses?” I said.

“He was a prophet, wasn’t he?” the boy said.

“Yes, he’s the one who split the sea,” I said. “Do you think you can do that for us?”

Mohammed smiled and tugged a little harder. “Sorry,” he said, “that’s a miracle.” And for the first time since I started the trip, I felt myself start to cry.

1. A Land of Fiery Snakes and Scorpions

L
ight. The first thing you notice about the desert is the light. It’s a white light, bleached across the horizon, that bounces off the blue helmet of sky, picks up the glint of quartz in the sand, and washes out everything in its sight. The desert may be defined by the absence of rain, but a watercolor painting of the place would have far more water than color.

The second thing you notice about the desert is the space. The panorama is almost overwhelming, with sand blowing across the ground, bushes bent against the wind, and everywhere rocks, mesas, dunes, and mountains. Montana may be Big Sky country, but the Sinai is Big Land country. One almost needs wide-angle vision to take it all in, and even that’s not enough. Stand facing the Sinai from the Suez Canal, as I did with Avner in early spring, having returned to begin the next leg of our trip, retracing the Exodus through what the Bible calls “that great and terrible wilderness,” and two eyes are not enough to take in the scene; two arms are not enough to embrace it. The Sinai would diminish any crowd.

The last thing you notice about the desert is the noise. In preparing for this part of our journey, I steeled myself for the silence. The desert would surely feel isolated, an island of seclusion. But once I stepped into the open terrain I was amazed by the din—the wind whining through the mountains, the sand tinkling against your face, the rocks crunching beneath your feet. As Jim Crace wrote in
Quarantine,
a retelling of Jesus’
stay in the desert, no wild land is ever truly silent. “Earth collapses with the engineering of the ants; lizards smack the pebbles with their tails; the sun fires seeds in salvos from their pods; pigeons misconnect with dry branches; and stones, left loosely to their own devices, can find the muscle to descend the hill.” The desert may be empty, but it’s the least quiet place I’ve ever been.

And the most alluring.

From the moment I crossed the Suez and set foot in the Sinai I felt a sense of exhilaration. It was partly the openness of the place, partly its inhospitality. It was partly the feeling of anticipation after the changes I marked in Egypt. But mostly it was the feeling of being drawn to the land. Having passed, at least in spirit, through the congested histories of Mesopotamia, Canaan, and Egypt, I understood even more the importance of the Sinai to the Bible, to the need of the Israelites to shed the skins of other cultures and start growing one of their own. The desert destroys affectation; it demands authenticity. The Sinai, in particular, poised between Africa and Asia, compels a certain clarity. Come with a vague sense of identity; leave with a deeper sense of self. If God knew this, as the Bible suggests, he may, indeed, have known everything.

The importance of discovery hits one almost immediately in the Sinai, if for no other reason than it’s impossibly easy to get lost, even for a onetime resident like Avner, who from 1967 to 1982 was the chief archaeologist of the Sinai. As we started our trip, accompanied by a new driver, Yusuf, a reed-thin Nubian from Aswan with Dagwood hair and a constant smile, we were disoriented at once. We were heading south on a two-lane, coastal highway from Lake Timsah, looking for Ain Musa, the Spring of Moses, believed to be the Israelites’ first stop in the desert. The narrow strip of blacktop was mostly barren, with a few budding resorts popping out of the sand: Queen Beach, Banana Beach, Mykonos. The resorts were just road signs and empty shells at the moment, part of Egypt’s nascent effort to turn the Sinai, one of the most desolate peninsulas in the Middle East, into a Club Med–style paradise. We drove into a few of the abandoned complexes and even
skirted the shore, in a vain attempt to find someone to ask for directions. Finally we were ready to give up and turn south, when we spotted a few palm trees on the horizon, a cartoon vision of a mirage.

The Spring of Moses is one of about four hundred oases in the Sinai. A compact area about the size of a baseball diamond, the oasis is little more than a cluster of trees—mostly palms, with a few eucalyptuses and tamarisks—huddled around a spring. The landscape seems random, as if the palms had been dropped from the sky. They protrude from odd angles, jut, swoop, lean, and prod. Some are dense with fronds, like one of those sponge brushes used to clean drinking glasses. Others look like tired feather dusters. Many are barren, with their tops decapitated in one of the Sinai’s recent wars. An Israeli battery stationed at the oasis bombed the Suez Canal during the War of Attrition between 1967 and 1970. Even the palm trees here have a past.

We got out of the jeep with our Bibles and sat on the stump of a tamarisk tree facing the Suez Canal. After they cross the Sea of Reeds, an event described in Exodus 14, the Israelites briefly celebrate by chanting the Song of Miriam, widely regarded as one of the oldest pieces of text in the Bible. “I will sing to the Lord, for He has triumphed gloriously;/Horse and driver He has hurled into the sea./The Lord is my strength and might;/He is become my salvation.” Then the Israelites set out into the “wilderness of Shur.” After three days they arrive at a place called Marah, where the water is too bitter to drink. When the people complain, God points Moses toward a piece of wood, which he tosses into the water, making it sweet. Having performed this miracle, God promises the Israelites that if they obey him, he will protect them from the desert. He then leads them to Elim, where there are twelve springs of water and seventy palm trees. Tradition holds that Ain Musa is one of these two sites, an identification helped by the fact that the water here is strongly malodorous and works as a laxative—bitter by any definition. “There certainly are seventy palm trees,” I said, to which Avner replied, “Would you care to count?”

As with many places in the Sinai, the absence of evidence hardly matters, as modern visitors have decided these sites
are
the ones mentioned in the text. As we were sitting, a tour bus rolled up and fifty
South Koreans disembarked, said a quick prayer by the spring, and prepared to re-embark. “This is the site of Marah,” the minister explained, when I asked him why he had come. Moments later a van full of American college students appeared and repeated the ritual. Their professor was less confident. “I don’t worry about assigning places,” he said. “In the end it doesn’t matter whether they took the northern route, the central route, or the southern route. What matters is that they were here.” Minutes later, a carload of Frenchwomen arrived. “Who cares if the Israelites were actually here?” one woman said. “We’re here because it’s biblical!”

We piled back in the jeep and headed south. Outside its few resort towns, the Sinai is essentially empty, sixty thousand bedouin in an area the size of Ireland. As a result, there are only a handful of paved roads, and those are vulnerable to flash floods. One shifts instead among two-lane highways, dirt causeways, dried riverbeds, and open terrain. Because of this variety, each all-terrain vehicle must be a veritable Pullman-style sleeper, capable of surviving for days on end with the help of pillows, cushions, cans of tuna fish and okra, raw onions, extra water tanks, and garishly colored blankets that looked like beach towels from Atlantic City. In our case, the only thing we didn’t have in ample supply was cassette tapes. Yusuf had only one: a Bob Marley collection called
Exodus
. For months afterward if anyone mentioned the word
Sinai
in conversation, I would instinctively repeat the reggae lyric, “Movement of the people!”

The Sinai has actually been defined by its absence of people. Often referred to as “24,000 square miles of nothing,” the peninsula is a giant isosceles triangle wedged between Africa and Asia that has always served as something of a spillover zone for people who wanted to pass through it in order to get to someplace else. About fifty invading armies have crossed its plains since the Early Bronze Age, but few have tarried: never the prize, always the prizemaid. The name Sinai, which is thought to be derived from the Mesopotamian god of the moon, Sin, may have been transferred to the area from the Euphrates Valley by one of those armies or by a wandering Semitic tribe, not unlike Abraham’s.

Because of its proximity to places of belief—and conflict—the Sinai has also been an escape ward, a refugee park for persecuted prophets. In addition to Moses, Elijah came here, as did Mary and Joseph. Christian extremists fled here in the early years of the Church, and Empress Helena later built them a chapel, which eventually gave rise to Saint Catherine’s monastery. More recently, the Sinai has held tantalizing possibilities for persecuted Jews. In the nineteenth century, when Theodor Herzl first resurrected the idea of a Jewish homeland and ran into concern among the Turks, who controlled Palestine, he suggested the northern Sinai. Jews could make the desert bloom, Herzl suggested, with garden cities along the Mediterranean. The British liked the idea and sent an expedition in 1903. But when surveyors realized the difficulty of finding enough water—the average rainfall is forty millimeters a year, about an inch and a half—the British soured on the idea. Later Zionists tried to encourage Egypt to issue its own “Balfour Declaration” and invite Jews to settle in the area, but the plan never ignited. Had the idea worked, many of Judaism’s most hallowed rituals—from the veneration of Jerusalem to the Passover seder—might have taken on a slightly different meaning. The desert would no longer have been a necessary evil; it would have been home.

The fact that Herzl recommended the northern Sinai is not accidental. The Sinai is divided into three distinct regions, each more inhospitable than the last. The northern tier is the most classically desert, with silken dunes, breezy oases, and marshy flats. But it’s also the most temperate. Most of the bedouin population lives in this area. The vast middle, full of sandy hills and colored canyons, is known as the “Wandering Plateau,” from the biblical story of forty years in the desert. This stretch is so scarred with mines and jeep tracks that it has been likened to a canvas by Jackson Pollock. The southern zone is the most dramatic. This jagged region is an irregular tableland, with hills slowly tilting upward, erupting in a startling array of craggy red granite mountains created from the fault line of Africa’s Great Rift. As the fifteenth-century monk Felix Fabri wrote, commenting on these geographic differences:“Every day, indeed every hour, you come into a new country, of a different nature, with different conditions of atmosphere and soil, with hills of a
different build and color, so that you are amazed at what you see and long for what you will see next.”