Walking the Bible (32 page)

Suddenly, though, in the middle of Exodus 17, a nomadic tribe called Amalek appears and declares war on Israel. Moses asks Joshua to lead the troops while he, Aaron, and Hur, a previously unmentioned aide, climb to the top of the hill to oversee. Once there, a strange development occurs. Whenever Moses raises his hands, the Israelites prevail; when he drops his hands, Amalek prevails. No reason is given for Moses to perform this action, and no explanation is given for its power. Moses grows tired, though, so Aaron and Hur bring a stone for him to sit on. Aaron and Hur then each take a hand and hold it in the air until sunset, when the Israelites finally triumph.

“So what’s the purpose of this story?” I said. “What’s it suddenly doing in the middle of Exodus?” We were sitting on top of the mountain now, in the apse of a ruined chapel. A modern cross stood on the spot. Down below, several wadis came together at the foot of the great palm forest. At the intersection was a nunnery, built alongside the ancient tel.

“Maybe there’s some oral tradition behind it,” Avner said. “Maybe the Israelites faced some attacks in the desert.”

“And what about the raised arms? What does that symbolize?”

“The nuns say it foreshadows the cross on which Jesus is crucified.”

“Really?”

“They also believe the twelve palm trees represent the apostles, and the Red Sea is a kind of baptism.”

“Surely the hands form some connection with God.”

“Ancient people went into war carrying likenesses of their gods. In this case, it’s as if Moses is a likeness for God.”

“A living icon.”

“And an aging one, too. He’s eighty by now, you know.”

I asked him what he thought of Moses at this point in the story.

“I have some problems with Moses,” he said. “Problems with him as a negotiator between God and the people. He’s the one who’s carrying the covenant that God gave to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the Israelites are supposed to follow him. But many times he gives up. ‘I’m too tired to continue,’ he says.”

“But he’s given a pretty tough assignment,” I said.

“Very much so.”

“Jacob couldn’t even control twelve sons.”

“Sons are always more difficult,” he said, chuckling.

“So maybe he’s just working out his role,” I said. “He doesn’t yet have the confidence he does when he goes up Mount Sinai. He doesn’t even have the power to hold up his own arms.”

“The point is: He never has that power. He’s just a middleman. God has the power. The Israelites have that power. But they’re both wary. Moses’ role is to deliver them to each other.”

Back down the mountain we waved good-bye to the boys, who were now idly tossing stones at passing cars, and turned inland. We hoped to make it to Saint Catherine’s by nightfall and begin several days around Jebel Musa. The road was climbing higher now and the surroundings growing more severe: The mountains were no longer armadillos, with rounded tops, but rhinoceroses, with rough, angular peaks. The light was brighter, almost a white neon. It was as if we were driving through a pile of discarded bones.

By midafternoon we reached another cluster of vegetation, the Oasis of the Tamarisks of Saint Catherine’s. We pulled over for lunch. This oasis was much smaller than Feiran, closer in size to Ain Musa. Only here the majority of trees were tamarisks, a chiefly desert tree, with stringy bark similar to cedar and feathery leaves akin to fir. To explain the concentration of greenery, Avner began constructing another of his models in the sand. He drew a shape that looked like a
bottle. He dug out the model several inches deep and then went over to a well and brought back a jug full of water.

“This is a wadi,” he said, gesturing to his creation. “Most of the water from the mountains drains down into these basins. But the wadis are wide, so the water is equally distributed on the water table just below the surface.” He poured the water into the bottom end of the bottle and it dispersed evenly across the width. “Now watch,” he said. “As the water nears the neck, it begins to rise, because the width of the water table shrinks.” And indeed the water did spill over at the neck; not with a splash, but with a gurgle. “Where the water bubbles up,” he said. “That’s where you get an oasis. It’s the part where the valley narrows. The water table pushes through the ground, and plants have enough water to survive.”

“So where does the word
oasis
come from?” I asked.

“It’s Greek.”

“What’s the Hebrew word for oasis?”

“
Naot midbar,
” he said, “the most beautiful place of the desert.”

Once we finished with the model, we turned our attention to the real focal point of the site, the trees. Oases are mentioned throughout the Bible as locations where the Israelites camped. Though tamarisk trees are not mentioned, they, too, may have played a part in inspiring one of the more memorable details of the Exodus story, the “bread from heaven.” In their second month on the road, the Israelites complain bitterly about the lack of food, and God promises Moses that he will rain down “bread” from the sky every morning and “flesh” every evening. The flesh turns out to be quail, and the bread a “fine and flaky substance, as fine as the frost on the ground” that the Israelites call manna, from the Hebrew expression they mutter when they first see it,
man hu,
“What is it?” Manna is described as being like coriander seed, white in color, and tasting like wafers in honey, or rich cream. In addition to providing the food, God provides a warning: Each person should take only one portion every morning, and two on the sixth day. There is no manna on the Sabbath. The Israelites, of course, ignore the warning, but they soon find that all their hoarded manna “became infested and stank.” Having learned their lesson, the Israelites eat manna for the rest of their forty years in the desert.

The unusual details of the manna story have inspired curiosity since the first days of the Bible. Early rabbis said manna was created between the sixth day of Creation and the first Sabbath. Anyone who ate manna gained the strength of angels, interpreters said, and had no need for bowel movements, since the flaky substance was entirely dissolved into their bodies. Even better, no one ever tired of manna, the commentators agreed, since manna had the ability to adapt to each person who ate it. “One had only to desire a certain dish,” wrote one commentator, “and no sooner had he thought of it than manna had the flavor of the dish he desired.” To little children, he said, it tasted like milk; to strong youths like bread; to the old men like honey; to the sick like barley steeped in oil and honey. On the Sabbath, the manna saved from the previous day “sparkled more than usual” and tasted even better. One can almost hear the commentators say, “It tasted just like chicken.”

While rabbis speculated on the taste of the manna, others focused on what manna actually was. Some commentators said it must be snow, others said hail, ice, or dew. When Byzantine travelers started visiting the Sinai in the fourth century, they realized there may be a natural inspiration for the manna. Tamarisk trees grow in many oases around the Sinai. In spring, two types of plant lice—
Trabutina mannipara E.
and
Najacoccus serpentinus—
infest the stems of tamarisk branches. They suck in the sap of the trees, which is rich in carbohydrates, and excrete the surplus onto the twigs in the form of white, resinous globules. As the text says of manna, these excretions are sweet, edible, and crystallize rapidly in the sun. If they’re not harvested in the morning, they quickly dry up or, worse, get devoured by ants. Either way, they quickly disappear.

According to estimates, the Sinai creates about five hundred pounds of tamarisk manna a year. The droplets, which the bedouin call
mann rimth,
from the translation of manna in the Koran, have been a cash crop in the Sinai since the fifteenth century, when a German visitor reported that local monks “gather, preserve, and sell manna” to passing pilgrims. In the nineteenth century, Konstantin von Tischendorf, a Bible scholar, was able to eat the “excrescences like glittering pearls.” The thickish lumps were clammy, he said, and had “the same powerful scent emitted by the shrub. I tasted it, and the flavor, as far as I could find a suitable
comparison, greatly resembles honey.” In the twentieth century, manna was harvested commercially and exported to the West, where it was sold under the brand name Mannite and marketed to what one observer calls “pious gourmets.”

These tamarisk excretions are almost surely the inspiration for the manna in the Bible, and suggest, once again, that biblical storytellers had intimate knowledge of the Sinai, most likely passed down through oral tradition. But if manna has such easily identifiable natural roots, does that undermine the role of God in the story?

Not necessarily. As we were lounging in the faint shade of one of the tamarisks, a bedouin man in a flowing cotton laborer’s gown came strolling over to our carpet. Avner leapt up and embraced the man fervently, kissing him three times on alternating cheeks and holding his hands. Khaled had worked with Avner when he lived in the Sinai and the two men hadn’t seen each other for a number of years. They spent a few minutes holding hands, catching up. Khaled was in his forties, but looked twenty years older. He had a white kaffiyeh around his head and a prominent gold tooth. Despite the heat, he wore black jeans underneath his robe and a gray sweatshirt that said “Winner Casual Wear.” Eventually Avner told him about our discussion of the tamarisk trees and asked him what time of year the manna appears.

“Only when the apricots are ripe,” he said. “In June.”

I asked him what it looked like.

“Like small cotton balls,” he said. “In the morning they’re liquid, but as the sun comes out, they become fluffy, like fur. By noontime they’re dead. They just disappear, melt.”

“So how do you collect them?”

He reached down and grabbed some small pieces of granite and a handful of sand. “The manna covers the ground in early morning,” he said. “You pick it up, then let the wind take away the dirt.” He opened his fingers to let the sand blow away, leaving only the rocks. “The wind sorts it out,” he said.

“So what does it taste like?”

“It’s very sweet, sweeter than honey,” he said. “There’s even a special blessing, since it’s mentioned in the Bible and the Koran.”

“And do you feel connected to those ancient people when you eat it?”

He squirmed momentarily, as if trying to find the right emotion. “It’s spiritual to eat it,” he said. “It’s not like bread or meat. It’s kind of a surprise. Some years you have it; some years you don’t. And you never know which one it’s going to be. It’s not like a flower that you know to expect. It’s like a person with no children who suddenly becomes pregnant. It’s like an idea that comes out of the back of your head and not the front.” He stopped for a second and ran his fingers across his teeth. “It’s a blessing.”

Dusk was descending by the time we returned to the jeep and proceeded southeast for the slow climb to the monastery at the base of Jebel Musa, the second-highest peak in the Sinai. The mountains no longer gently shadowed the road, they now completely overwhelmed it with a range of peaks over seven thousand feet. No longer gray, the mountains were a rich, reddish granite, the color of sweet potatoes. Dense, almost burdened by their bulk, they looked like mounds of slightly rancid hamburger meat waiting to be molded into loaves. With the sun catching the sparkle in every fold of the rock, I felt as if we were driving inside a rust-colored geode.

The southern mountains are the oldest part of the Sinai, having broken from Egypt during the formation of the Great Rift Valley. As Avner explained, the soil in the Sinai gets older the farther south it goes, with limestone and sand on the surface near the Mediterranean, sandstone on the surface in the middle, and exposed granite in the south. In effect, the Sinai is like a giant slice of apple pie where the crust, to the north, is flat, the dough bulges in the middle with a small amount of filling, and finally the wedge spills over in the south with oversized chunks of fruit. If the Israelites did come this way, they must have felt as if the ground was preparing them for something special. Especially for a population that had grown up in the terminal lowland of the Nile Delta, the Sinai would have been a tease. First they would have come upon the dunes of the north, which themselves would have felt large for flatlanders. Then
they would have arrived at the central hills, which at two thousand feet must have seemed daunting. And finally they would have faced the southern mountains, a formidable seven thousand feet high, which must have made even the “stiff-necked” Israelites crane with awe—and fear.

And what better emotion to describe this place. All through our journey, I had been fascinated by the ability of the places we were seeing to evoke sentiments conveyed in the text: from the capricious fertility of the Tigris and Euphrates, to the scorched destitution of Sodom, to the menacing power of the Nile Valley. It’s as if the changing dimensions of the landscape were somehow reflected in the sweeping range of emotions in the narrative—the Bible as psychological atlas.

This gamut of topographical—and psychological—extremes was starting to have an effect on me, as well. I come from a flat, sandy place, with pine trees, live oaks, azaleas, and daffodils; temperate winters, sunny springs, swampy summers. I realized I had never spent much time in places with exaggerated geography—high mountains, hollow valleys, dense rain forests, desert. The Middle East was by far the most severe place I had ever been in; and within that, the Sinai was the harshest stretch. And inevitably, perhaps, for someone so identified with place, I found these extreme landscapes stirring in me more extreme emotions. It’s as if the act of mapping the land was forcing me to remap my own internal geography, suddenly taking into account a broader range of feelings than I had ever previously explored—deeper canyons of confidence, perhaps, but also wider expanses of uncertainty and higher elevations of need.

The emotion I felt upon reaching these levels was not all that different from the emotion I felt upon being in extreme positions at other times in my life, whether it was pulling myself up a rope as a child, climbing a mountain as a teenager, or scuba diving as an adult: fear. Fear that I might lose control. Fear that I might fail. Fear that I might disappoint myself. When your god is self-reliance, and you let yourself down, there is nowhere else to turn.