Walking the Bible (41 page)

Even the
shema,
the holiest words in Judaism and what one commentator calls “the great text of monotheism,” seems to imply that other gods exist. The traditional translation is “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God. The Lord is One.” But the words, which come from Deuteronomy 6, are considered vague by Bible scholars and are often translated today as “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.” God, the words suggest, should stand apart and above other gods, meaning he is the superior god but not the
only
god.

The ever-shifting interaction between the God of Israel and the gods of neighboring cultures is embodied by the
matzevot,
the standing stones. The ones we were viewing date from the fourth millennium
B.C.E.
, but the Bible uses them later, during the time of the patriarchs. In Genesis, after Jacob has the dream in which he sees the angels on the ladder, he erects a
matzevah
. “And this stone, which I have set up as a pillar, shall be God’s abode.” He repeats the gesture later, when God renews his promise to bestow the Promised Land to Jacob and his descendants. “And Jacob set up a pillar at the site where He had spoken to him, a pillar of stone, and he offered a libation on it and poured oil upon it.” In these stories, Avner noted, the stones mark a holy location, a sort of notarization of the communication between God and Jacob.

“Isn’t this pagan?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t say that. I would say that this is part of a language used by all the people of the Mediterranean. Therefore it appeared in the Bible.”

“But these stones are essentially the land,” I said. “These are rocks. That’s the ground. And they become symbolic of God. That’s pagan, isn’t it?”

“Yeessss,” he said, tentatively.

“Isn’t the whole point of the Ten Commandments ‘Don’t make graven images of God’? Leviticus explicitly warns against constructing
matzevot
.”

“That’s why in the text it never says that such stelae should represent God. But the reality is, sometimes they did, even after the Ten Commandments were given.”

“So as a practical matter,” I said, “these
matzevot
are a transitional step between paganism, which said that God existed in the rock, to something more abstract, which said that God needs no representation.”

“You must remember,” Avner said, “monotheism went one step beyond the existing understanding of God, but it didn’t change the whole concept of daily life: that the world was created out of water, that it was created in a certain order, that a flood followed. Those details show that certain features were shared across the area by all people of the region. So the Israelites, even when they became monotheistic, did not pull themselves out of the world entirely. They were part of the world. They just trumped the world with the larger idea of God.”

As he spoke, I began to realize how much conversations like this had altered my view of the Bible. On the one hand, they shattered a host of
childhood myths I still clung to about the story—that Noah put all the animals into the ark, that hundreds of thousands of Israelites crossed the Red Sea, that the patriarchs believed in only one God. On the other hand, those myths were being replaced with new ideas, far more complex, but no less compelling. If anything, this new framework made the Bible
more
intriguing to me as an adult. Flood stories exist in many cultures; the Bible simply recast its version to include God’s disappointment with humanity. The Exodus may have involved a smaller number of people and occurred over a longer period of time, but its historical significance is in no way diminished by this fact; and its literary significance may even be magnified. Dispelling childhood illusions may have been painful, but discovering adult nuances can be palliative—even restorative. I didn’t have to feel juvenile, or willfully naive, to be interested in the Bible. I could embrace it as a sign of health—and maturity.

This was nowhere more true than with the issue of the Israelites and their monotheistic God. “One of the things I’ve taken away from this whole endeavor,” I said to Avner, “is that the Bible is not a direct line: the triumph of the Israelites, the rise of monotheism. Instead, it’s one step forward, two steps back. Three steps forward, two steps back.”

“True for today as well.”

“But why?” I said. “Why was it so hard to accept the notion of an abstract God?”

“Because you have to be capable of having such an abstract notion
and
living with it daily. That’s not always so easy. Look at today. In Christianity and Judaism, there are many examples of representations of God: building sculptures of Jesus, putting faxes into the Western Wall. Are you faxing your prayer directly to God?”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “You’re not worshiping the stone. The stone is just the representation of a holy place.”

“Okay, that’s a nice way to put it. So it is with the
matzevot
. Even monotheism needs its monuments.”

We drove north to the Ain Khudra Valley, a wide, winding former riverbed dominated by a sandy floor with sheer sandstone walls on
either side. The crumbling brown cliffs reminded me of one of those ready-made graham cracker piecrusts. We unloaded at an oasis and decided to hike across the valley floor, eventually climbing up a steep path to visit the Written Stone, a free-standing rock with numerous inscriptions in Nabatean, Greek, and Latin. There we would meet up with our jeep and camp for the evening.

Compared with the mountain air, the atmosphere was thick, filled with heat and dust. Also the glare was more pronounced, as the light bounced off the sand in starbursts. The desert was not only one of the least quiet places I’d ever been but also one of the most alive, with particles leaping and jumping, as if they wanted to transform themselves, kaleidoscope-like, into a different formation. Look long enough at one patch of sand and the effect is like watching an ant colony under a strobe light. Before long, you find yourself asking:“Is it really changing, or am I?”

In time we reached the end of the valley and began climbing the path, which was like a scratch of white on the otherwise sandy cliff face, as if someone had taken a knife and carved an
S
in the skin of a Bosc pear. This was a camel path, Avner said, as opposed to one for donkeys or goats. Camel paths are less steep because of the animals’ size and deeper because of their weight. Camel dung is also bigger—and lighter—than that of donkeys and goats. When all else fails, follow the camels; they’re blazing superhighways through the sand.

We reached the top and settled onto a rock. It was clear we were now in a transitional area. The granite mountains of the south were behind us; the sandstone cliffs of the center were around us. Soon we would enter a flatland, with few of the extremes in height or climate, but none of the water runoff from the mountains, either. Here was the broad emptiness of the desert; here, for travelers, is the true test of the land.

Considering the drama the Israelites had already faced by this point—crossing the Red Sea, receiving the Ten Commandments, implementing the laws—it seems surprising to read at the beginning of Numbers that they have been in the desert for only little more than a year. Specifically, on the twentieth day of the second month of the second
year since the Exodus, a cloud that God has been using to shelter the Israelites lifts from the Tabernacle, and the population sets out on its journey from Mount Sinai. The group marches according to tribes. There are twelve tribes in all. Ten of them—Asher, Dan, Naphtali, Issachar, Judah, Zebulun, Gad, Reuben, Simeon, and Benjamin—are sons of Jacob. The final two—Manasseh and Ephraim—are sons of Joseph. (The descendants of Jacob’s other son, Levi, serve as priests.) The tribes carry the Tabernacle, which contains the Ark of the Covenant. Whenever the Ark sets out, Moses proclaims, “Advance, O Lord! May Your enemies be scattered, and may Your foes flee before You!”

No sooner do the Israelites begin their travels than they begin to complain—to Moses, to God, to anyone who will listen. This act of grousing begins a distinct cycle in the Book of Numbers, generally called the rebellion narratives, in which the Israelites proceed through a series of attempted coups d’état—six or seven, depending on how you count—that will dominate, and ultimately lengthen, their trek to the Promised Land. In the first of these incidents, no reason is given for the Israelites’ grumbling. Nonetheless, God becomes incensed and sends a fire that ravages the outskirts of the camp. The people cry out to Moses, who prays to God for peace. The fire retreats. “That place was called Taberah,” the Bible says, from the Hebrew word for burn, “because a fire of the Lord had broken out against them.”

“Now look around,” Avner said. He pointed to a few of the cliffs on this upper shelf above the valley, which were coated with what looked like a wash of India ink. The debris at the base of these cliffs looked especially dark. “Early visitors said this must be Taberah,” he said.

“This place does look like a pretty burnt landscape,” I said.

In no time the Israelites find another reason to complain: They’re hungry. The “riffraff ” in their midst feel a gluttonous craving, crying, “If only we had meat to eat!” They remember the fish they ate in Egypt, along with the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, and garlic. “Now our gullets are shriveled,” they shriek. “Nothing but this manna to look to!” Moses, feeling the plight of his people, appeals to God, saying, “Why have You dealt ill with Your servant, and why have I not enjoyed Your favor, that You have laid the burden of all this people upon me?” Where
can he get meat for his people, Moses asks. God appears to relent, instructing Moses to gather seventy elders and to tell the people that the next day they shall eat meat; but God gets angry. “You shall eat not one day,” God says, nor two, five, ten, or twenty, “but a whole month, until it comes out of your nostrils and becomes loathsome to you. For you have rejected the Lord, who is among you.” Moses questions God’s ability to provide enough meat for the entire six hundred thousand men, but God retorts, “Is there a limit to the Lord’s power?”

God summons a wind, sweeping quail from the sea, and strewing them over the camp, until they cover an area that’s a day’s walk in either direction and two cubits deep, or about three feet. The people gather quail for two days, until each gathers ten
homers,
an amount estimated at between fifty and one hundred bushels. God is outraged by their gluttony. “The meat was still between their teeth, not yet chewed, when the anger of the Lord blazed forth against the people and the Lord struck the people with a very severe plague. That place was named Kibroth-hattaavah”—the Graves of Craving—“because the people who had the craving were buried there.”

The phenomenon of the quail, Avner noted, like manna, has a curious natural correlative in the Sinai that suggests the story may have roots in reality. Huge flocks of quail,
Coturnix coturnix,
migrate every autumn from Europe to Central Africa and return in the spring. The birds are often so exhausted by this flight that they drop, near-dead, in the hundreds along the northern coastline of Egypt and the Sinai. Diners at sidewalk cafés in Egyptian coastal towns like Alexandria and Port Said occasionally report being “invaded” by quail, and bedouin in the Sinai report that the quail occasionally land so thick on the ground there is no room for more, unless they alight on others’ backs. Avner told of seeing bedouin setting up elaborate nets over the shore to catch the falling birds before they could get waterlogged. Given this phenomenon, some scientists have suggested that the death of the Israelites after eating the quail can be attributed to a rare ornithological disease the birds carried after ingesting a poisonous fungus in the Nile Valley.

Regardless, it seems safe to assume that biblical storytellers knew about this occurrence—either because they passed through the northern
Sinai, or because they lived in the Delta for hundreds of years and witnessed it there. “It did come every year,” Avner said. Still, the birds rarely reach this far south, he noted. “If you believe the quail are based in reality, you really shouldn’t believe that Jebel Musa is Mount Sinai.”

“Not necessarily,” I said. At this point, I was less inclined to accept a sterile, naturalistic explanation for every event, particularly when it threatened to undermine the meaning of the story. I was more interested in how the writers took possibly factual occurrences and shaped them with spiritual objectives. To overlook those objectives was to overlook the stories’ undeniable source of power. As a practical matter, Avner may not have changed, but I had, in effect, slid around him and was now having conversations from a new point of view. While I didn’t necessarily
believe
every story, I had become, in essence, a defender of the story, particularly its moral imperative. I had become an advocate of God.

In the case of the quail, that meant going back to the Bible and noticing that the text implies that the deluge wasn’t
entirely
natural, and that God played a pivotal role. “The story says God summoned a wind,” I said, reading now from the page, “ ‘swept the quails from the sea, and strewed them over the camp.’ If the Israelites were in the north, where the quail fall anyway, the wind would not have been needed. Divine intervention is key to the story.”

“Okay,” Avner said. “Plus, this top layer of rock does look like charcoal here, and it doesn’t up north.”

“If you didn’t know it was igneous rock, you might think it’s burnt rock.”

“Burnt by God.”

We packed up our Bibles and set out through the sand for the Written Stone. The ground was coarser here and sparkled less than the floor of the valley. The sun was starting to set. In the distance were some small bedouin huts. We walked about fifteen minutes when suddenly a small stream of people came pouring out of the huts—first children, then teenagers, finally some older women with toddlers on their hips.
“Abunar!”
they shouted.
“Abunar! Abunar!”
It was the call I had seen
numerous times before—in the desert, in oases, in villages. Once a car passed us on the road going seventy-five miles per hour, came screeching to a stop, then turned around and chased us for several miles—just so one of the people in the truck could give Avner a kiss hello. Even twenty years after he left, in an open election for president of the Sinai, Avner would win hands down. The reason, I was coming to see, was that he respected the bedouin, gave them work, dignified their culture, and, simply, listened. And he did it with a grace that few before, and certainly fewer after him, had shown. Avner didn’t need to pretend he was one of them, as Lawrence had done. He simply became a part of their world.