Walking the Bible (46 page)

“So is there a connection between a stone memorial built six thousand years ago and one built three days ago?”

“Sure, it’s the same thing,” he said. “In the Bible, Solomon says, ‘There’s nothing new under the sun.’ ”

“I thought that was the Beatles,” I said, half joking.

“If so, they took it from Solomon.”

“Wait. I can accept that Israel comes from the Bible, that the Ten Commandments come from the Bible, that monotheism comes from the Bible. But the Beatles?!”

“If you check their songs, their ideas, you’ll find a lot of things from the Bible.” He thought for a second. “Like ‘All You Need Is Love.’ It’s the same thing Rabbi Akiva, the famous sage, said. When he was asked to summarize the Bible in one sentence he said: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ That’s not an exact translation, but it’s similar.”

For the first time on the entire trip I could think of nothing to say.

“There’s another song,” Doron said, “on the
Abbey Road
record, the song before the last. ‘And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.’ Also from the Bible.”

He went on like this for the next twenty minutes, pulling lyrics from his memory and aligning them to biblical verses. It was the most awesome display I’d yet seen of the Bible’s ability to reinvent itself for every generation. One person’s daily inspirational is another’s Woodstock primer.

“And another example!” Doron said. “The whole point of the Bible is that you keep reaching for the perfect world but never reach it. It’s like Paul Simon said, ‘The nearer your destination, the more you’re slip-slidin’ away.’ ”

“You should do a compilation,” I said. “Doron’s Biblical Guide to Pop Music.”

He beamed.

“Which reminds me,” I said, “which do you know better: the lyrics of the Beatles or the lyrics of the Bible?”

Now for the first time
he
was quiet, before finally adding, “Is it okay if I don’t answer that question?”

Eventually we emerged from the mountains into a clearing. We were in a wide valley now with soil white like beach sand. To our right and left
was a vast, open plain, but up ahead were several small mountains. “Do you see those two breasts,” Doron said, pointing out two hills that rose alongside each other. “They mark the border. The right breast is in Egypt, the left in Israel.”

We were headed to the hill on the left, the highest point along the border, and the best vantage point to see Ain el-Qudeirat, the northern Sinai spring commonly associated with Kadesh-barnea. Far from a passing reference, Kadesh-barnea is central to the story of the Israelites’ time in the desert and the dominant location in the second half of the Five Books of Moses. Following the rebellion over the quail, the Israelites once again set out in the direction of the Promised Land. Another rebellion ensues, in which Miriam and Aaron, Moses’ siblings, speak out against their brother because “he married a Cushite woman,” an apparent reference to the land of Sudan or Ethiopia, meaning they were upset that the woman was black. God swiftly intervenes, scolding Miriam and Aaron and saying, “Moses is trusted throughout My household.” In further punishment, God inflicts Miriam with “snow-white scales,” or leprosy. Moses appeals for her recovery, but God insists she be exiled for seven days, at which point she is readmitted and the Israelites set out for the wilderness of Paran, an area believed to correspond to the southern Negev.

For the first time since leaving Egypt, the Israelites are now at the brink of the Promised Land, in a place the Bible refers to as “Kadesh in the wilderness of Paran.” God asks Moses to send a legion of spies to scout out the Promised Land. They return after a little more than a month, saying the land is too strong to conquer, and the Israelites once again rebel, crying, “If only we had died in the land of Egypt, or if only we might die in the wilderness.” It is this act of hostile doubt that prompts God to forbid this generation of Israelites from ever entering the Promised Land. “None of the men who have seen My presence and the signs that I have performed in Egypt and in the wilderness, and who have tried Me these many times and have disobeyed Me, shall see the land that I promised on oath to their fathers.” Your carcasses shall drop in this wilderness, he says, while your children roam the wilderness for
forty years. “You shall bear your punishment for 40 years corresponding to the number of days—40 days—that you scouted the land: a year for each day.”

The Bible implies that the Israelites spend the next thirty-eight years living in this location, which it refers to as Kadesh or Kadesh-barnea. The word
kadesh
derives from a Hebrew root meaning holiness or separateness; the word
barnea
is of unknown origin. In part because of the vagueness of this term, and in part because of the inexact description of the place, a precise identification of the location of Kadesh-barnea has been difficult to make. In the nineteenth century, the search for Kadesh-barnea focused on the Jordan valley, since the text suggests the site is on the border of Edom, which was located in the mountains of today’s Jordan. In the early twentieth century, archaeologists focused on locations in the northern Sinai. In 1914, Leonard Woolley, who later excavated Ur, and T. E. Lawrence, then an archaeologist/spy, declared that Kadesh-barnea was Ain el-Qudeirat, the largest water supply in the Sinai and thus the place most likely to be able to support a large population for decades at a time. Their identification has largely been accepted ever since.

We arrived at the summit of the mountain and disembarked. With the two neighbors—Egypt and Israel—face-to-face on the tallest peaks along the border (2,100 feet), each side built a sentry tower. Later, when the two signed a peace accord, the posts were abandoned, though not dismantled. “It’s a disaster,” Doron said. “These buildings remain to damage nature and nobody cares.” The Israeli site had a run-down steel observatory, which we climbed to get a better view. From the top, the scene was panoramic. To our right we could see the dunes of northern Sinai and the Mediterranean; to our left the mountains of southern Sinai; to our rear much of the Negev. Had Moses stood here, he might have rebelled himself: desert in every direction; no milk or honey for days.

The only source of green in the area was a small cluster of trees, much smaller than Wadi Feiran, on the other side of a small ridge. “That’s Ain el-Qudeirat,” Avner said.

“It hardly seems grand,” I said.

“It’s not like the great oases of the southern Sinai,” he said.

The most notable feature of the area was the empty plain surrounding the spring. “In the ancient world,” Avner noted, “the road from the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Aqaba went through here. That’s why the modern border is here.” That border, like most in the region, is fraught with intrigue. The Negev side is hilly; the Sinai side is flat. Before World War I, the British, who exercised imperial control over Egypt and the Sinai, drew the border with the Turks. Because the British had done extensive spying in the area, they knew that the chief water supply, Ain el-Qudeirat, was in the hilly area, so the otherwise straight line between the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Aqaba includes two brief detours, which the British referred to as Winston Churchill’s knuckles, after his role in the negotiations.

The strategic prickliness of the area has hardly diminished since then. Ain el-Qudeirat was the one place on our entire itinerary that we wanted to go but couldn’t. The Egyptian Army refused us access, citing intelligence concerns; the government’s main military post of the region is located near the spring. As it happens, the reason we weren’t allowed to visit—the area’s strategic importance—is one of the principal reasons to doubt the link between this site and the Israelites’ route.

In the world of biblical studies, the identification of Ain el-Qudeirat as Kadesh-barnea is viewed as a virtual certainty. Almost every article—professional or amateur—that discusses the Israelites’ route through the desert assumes as fact that they lived thirty-eight years in this region. This historical identification, though, is by no means certain. First, the spring, while the largest in the area, is nowhere near large enough to support the needs of six thousand people, no less two million. Second, the original link between Ain el-Qudeirat and Kadesh-barnea was made by Woolley and Lawrence in 1914. It turns out they spent only
three days
in the area. Subsequent excavations produced not one shred of evidence that the site was occupied between the third millennium
B.C.E.
and the middle of the first millennium
B.C.E.
Third, and even more devastating, the spring would have been strategically important
even then. If the Israelites were trying to evade the Egyptians, they hardly would have stayed for almost
four decades
less than a day’s walk from where the Egyptian Army controlled the main road of the world, the Via Maris. Even Exodus mentions the Israelites had not taken that route to begin with, presumably because it was well fortified.

“If you’re trying to convince me that the argument is not very convincing,” Avner said, “I agree with you. They’d be very vulnerable. Plus, it’s a very naive approach to suggest that if we find a place of water we’ll find the people. The view of the Israelites living together in a well-organized camp is also naive. It’s more likely that they lived in smaller groups all over the Sinai and the Negev.”

The stories, in that case, were probably a compilation, a “telescope” to use Avner’s word, of a series of events that took place over a wide area and a long period of time. That doesn’t mean the stories were made up. If anything, they appear to have deep roots in the desert and deep knowledge of the geographic personality of the region. To explore that side of the story, we pulled out our Bibles to read one of the events that takes place in Kadesh-barnea.

Following the return of the spies, Numbers 16 and 17 tell the story of another revolt, led by Korah. Commentator Gunther Plaut calls this event “the most serious rebellion that faced Moses and Aaron.” Korah, a nobleman, rouses two other men, Dathan and Abiram, along with 250 Israelite chieftains, and complains that Moses and Aaron have raised themselves above the Lord’s congregation. Moses promises that God will decide who deserves to be leaders. The next morning, Moses instructs the men to take copper fire pans and burn incense before God. Aaron also makes an offering, to give God the choice. God appears and tells Moses and Aaron, “Stand back from this community, that I may annihilate them in an instant!” Suddenly, the earth opens its mouth and swallows up all three men and their families. “They went down alive into Sheol,” the Bible says, a reference to the abode of the dead, and then God sends a fire that destroys the other 250 men.

The following day the “whole Israelite community” rises up in anger against Moses and Aaron for bringing death to the community. God, incensed again, sends a plague to annihilate the entire population,
but Moses instructs Aaron to burn incense before the Lord to expiate him. The plague is checked, but not before 14,700 people are killed, five times more than in the golden calf episode.

In many ways, the most memorable detail of this rebellion is not the crime but the punishment. As Pseudo-Philo, the second century
C.E.
Greek commentator, noted, by having Korah swallowed up by the earth, God seems to be administering the ultimate punishment, the direct inverse of creating Adam out of the soil. I asked Doron if he knew any examples of people getting trapped in quicksand, as happens in a famous scene in the film
Lawrence of Arabia
when one of Lawrence’s bedouin companions is sucked to his death in the Sinai.

“No,” he said. “But there is an area of dry sand on the other side of the spring where you can sink to your chest.”

“Quicksand?”

“Closer to a dune,” he said. “The wind brings sand and it gathers in loose mounds. If the story takes place there, it’s possible for someone to sink in the sand.”

“But not to their death,” Avner said. “Only to their shoulders.”

“But people were shorter then,” I joked.

“There’s another connection,” Doron said. “Behind us you can see a big mountain, Jebel Harad. Along that ridge there is a geological fault line, one of three in the Negev. There are places you can see where the ground collapsed, leaving a huge hole. A few years back, one of these holes suddenly appeared without warning, and people started falling inside. Trucks fell inside. Geologists were very surprised. It wasn’t an earthquake;it was something else. They still don’t know what happened.”

The fact that so many unique phenomena—collapsing holes, the
maktesh,
the Dead Sea, the rift—all existed in one place may be one reason the Bible includes such vivid geographical details in its stories. If nothing else, the details were sure to capture the imagination of a population curious—and perhaps concerned—about the world around them. “This may be another example,” I said, “like Sodom and Gomorrah, where biblical storytellers were aware of an occurrence and used their story to explain how it proved the power of God over nature.”

“From my point of view, there are three possibilities about the stories
in the Bible,” Doron said. It was late afternoon now and we were sitting on the edge of the sentry post with our feet dangling over the side. The bright white heat of midday had diminished. Our conversation had grown more personal. These were the moments I once avoided; now they were the ones I most craved. “First, things happened as they are told in the stories. Second, some things happened as they are told; others were made up. And third, a very, very clever man made the stories up.”

“So which one do you believe?” I asked.

“In some ways, it’s my personality to believe the religious way of thinking. In other ways it’s my personality to believe that somebody made it up. I don’t have a concrete opinion. And that’s the nice thing about the Bible. You can take it however you want. What really matters are the clues within the stories about how to behave.”

“So one, two, or three, in the end they’re all the same.”