Walking the Bible (50 page)
Authors: Bruce Feiler
After breakfast we went out and began exploring the area, visiting a series of abandoned Ottoman factories, British sulfur mines, and Israeli Army barracks that testify to the area’s many changeovers during the wars of the twentieth century. This part of the Near East has always been something of a strategic nexus: Just to the north are the habitable central hills; just to the east and south is the desert; just to the west is the sea. Gaza, the city that controls this hub, has been one of the most important urban areas in the world for five thousand years.
At one point Rami led me into a network of concrete bunkers, dating from the early twentieth century. “Now you are exactly like someone named Archibald Murray,” Rami said.
“I always wanted to be like Archibald Murray,” I replied. “Who is he?”
“Archibald Murray was here in 1917, during the First World War. The British were trying to take Palestine from the Turks. They came from the south, from Egypt, and wanted to go to Jerusalem. To do so, they had to cross this area. It took them three months to come all the way from the Suez Canal to here. They built a train. They built a road. They built a pipe. They brought water all the way from the Nile, because they needed steam for the train and water for thousands of horses.
In three months!
But they had to get through Gaza, which was controlled by the Turks. And one famous general helped them do that. Do you know which one?”
“Allenby?”
“Ah, you made a mistake.”
“Archibald Murray!”
He grinned.
“But I’ve never heard of him,” I pleaded.
“That’s the point,” Rami said. “One of them is famous, one of them is not. General Murray got the British Army here in three months from Egypt, but then they bogged down for
eight months
. Twice they attacked Gaza, and twice they were defeated, despite using tanks and gas shells. Over eleven thousand British soldiers died. Finally, General Allenby arrived and hatched a plan. The British dropped cigarettes on Gaza with propaganda on the packages. The Turks said, ‘Who cares about the propaganda, we want the cigarettes!’ ” For weeks they smoked free British cigarettes, but the day before the attack, the British laced the cigarettes with opium. On October 31, 1917, the British finally conquered Gaza. “Three months to come all the way from Suez,” he said. “Eight months to go three kilometers.
“And as always, Gaza was the key,” Rami said. “Take it and you take the land. Six weeks later he took Jerusalem.”
“So if what you’re saying about this area is correct,” I said, “then what they said in the Bible is correct.”
“And what did they say in the Bible?” he said, delighted by the point.
“They sent spies from Kadesh who said the Israelites couldn’t take Canaan.”
“And what did they
do
in the Bible?” he asked, in the manner of a lawyer asking a leading question.
“They decided not to come from the south.”
“And where did they go?” he said. “Aaaaalllllll the way around.” He swung his arms in a giant windmill to reflect the Israelites’ journey across the Jordan River, up the east bank of the river, to the central mountains of Jordan. “And where did they attack the Promised Land from?”
“Jericho,” I said.
Rami was smiling from ear to ear. “Hard to believe,” he said. “But it’s the same thing that happened in World War I. It’s all but impossible to conquer Israel from the Sinai.”
We drove a few miles to a large concrete memorial, about two stories high, in the shape of a giant
A,
built to commemorate the ten thousand soldiers of ANZAC, the Australian–New Zealand Army Corps, who died in the 1917 attacks on Gaza. From the overlook we had a clear view of the surrounding area: Gaza, the Mediterranean, the Sinai, the Negev, the mountains around Hebron. The afternoon light was changing to dusk, and the colors—pale yellow, powder blue, eggplant purple—reminded me of the Nile.
After a while we pulled out our Bibles and finally read through the story of the spies we had been referring to for so long. In Numbers 13, following the first few rebellions of the Sinai, but before the incident with the earth opening its mouth, God instructs Moses, “Send men to scout the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the Israelite people; send one man from each of their ancestral tribes, each one a chieftain among them.” Moses gathers the men and instructs them, “Go up there into the Negev and on into the hill country, and see what kind of country it is. Are the people who dwell in it strong or weak, few or many? Is the country in which they dwell good or bad? Are the towns they live in open or fortified? Is the soil rich or poor? Is it wooded or not? And take pains to bring back some of the fruit of the land.” The spies set forth through the Negev, along a route that probably had them brush alongside Ezuz and the Ramon Crater, as well as where we were now standing, before arriving in Hebron, where the patriarchs were already buried.
The spies make this trip “in the season of the first ripe grapes,” which Avner said probably meant late July. Fittingly, the only thing the text says they actually
do
in the Promised Land is harvest some pomegranates and figs, as well as cut down a branch with a cluster of grapes, which they carry back on a pole stretched between them. This image of
two men carrying grapes has become so famous a symbol of the Promised Land that the Israeli Ministry of Tourism uses it as a logo.
After forty days, the scouts return to Kadesh and give their report. “We came to the land you sent us to; it does indeed flow with milk and honey.” This term probably refers to goat milk and bee honey, Avner said, though some commentators suggested the honey could be referring to nectars from fruits like figs or apricots. Another line of thought suggests the term
milk and honey
is metaphoric, meaning the country enjoyed an abundance of animals. Either way, the first report is bearish. “The people who inhabit the country are powerful,” they report, “and the cities are fortified and very large; moreover, we saw the Anakites there,” a name that is derived from the Hebrew term meaning long necks and has long been interpreted to mean giants.
Still, as would be the case with countless espionage missions throughout history, different spies interpret the information in different ways. Caleb, one member of the team, rises to give his spin, saying, “Let us by all means go up.” Surely we can overcome any obstacle, he says. But the majority of his colleagues disagree, saying, “We cannot attack that people, for it is stronger than we.” The Israelites break into cries upon hearing this report, and weep half the night, eventually railing against Moses and Aaron: “It would be better for us to go back to Egypt!” Joshua and Caleb rend their clothes in frustration and exhort the community, “The land that we traversed and scouted is an exceedingly good land. If the Lord is pleased with us, He will bring us into that land, a land that flows with milk and honey, and give it to us.”
As the community threatens to pelt them with stones, the “presence of the Lord” appears before the people. Once again God threatens to destroy the people, and Moses talks him out of it, saying, “If then You slay this people to a man, the nations who have heard Your fame will say, ‘It must be because the Lord was powerless to bring that people into the land which He had promised them.’ ” The Lord pardons the people, but punishes them: Everyone above twenty years old will die in the wilderness. “Not one shall enter the land in which I swore to settle you,” save Caleb and Joshua, who are rewarded for their optimism. The other spies are killed by a plague sent by God. The Israelites, however, promptly
ignore God’s warning and march by themselves—without Moses and without the Ark—to the crest of the Promised Land, where they are “dealt a shattering blow” by the Anakites and the Canaanites, just like the British at the same place three thousand years later.
Standing near that spot, I began to understand the significance of the spies. After resisting God for two years, the Israelites, at this moment, finally decide they are ready to conquer the land that God promised them.
This
is their manifest destiny, they conclude. But by going forth to claim their destiny without their manifest, the Israelites learn an even greater lesson. The covenant is a triangular relationship among the people, the land, and God. Without God, the people do not deserve the land and can’t conquer it. Without the Ark—and the commandments within it—the people are helpless.
And this, I finally realized, points to the major lesson of the first half of Numbers and what I had been hearing in my conversations with Ramadan, with Ofer, with Rami: The desert is a cauldron where the Israelites must coalesce. The desert not only cleanses, it constructs. In Exodus, the desert is a vast sea of sand, a pool in which the Israelites rid themselves of their shackled past and receive the written law from God. Numbers tells a more complicated story. The Israelites begin their trek to the Promised Land, but at each step along the way they resist putting their faith in God. Finally, after the spies, God gets so fed up that he lashes out. And what punishment does he levy? He doesn’t kill them. He doesn’t send them back to Egypt. He doesn’t even rescind his oath of land. Instead he banishes them to
four decades in the desert
. Only by spending that additional time in the wilderness will they fully purge themselves of their past and become a nation of God. Only then will they become worthy of their corner of the triangle.
The rebellions thus become an important turning point in the Pentateuch, the crisis that marks the end of the second act. The final third of the story, including the rest of Numbers and the entire book of Deuteronomy, will be devoted to the story of how the Israelites finally become a people. The desert, having given the Israelites life, must now take their lives, so it can give life to a new generation. It’s the oldest cycle in the Bible: creation, destruction, re-creation. And it’s those seemingly
bifurcated roles, which directly mirror the split functions of God, that Ben-Gurion seems to have understood about the desert: Because the place is demanding, it builds character; because it’s destructive, it builds interdependence; because it’s isolating, it builds community.
Because it’s the desert, it builds nations.
C
rossing the border from Israel to Jordan is even more complicated than crossing the street in Cairo. Only here there aren’t any cars or buses or people around—just decades of distrust.
It was early summer when Avner and I arrived at the Arava border crossing north of Eilat, one of only two land crossings between the former enemies, and prepared to set out on the last leg of our trip, retracing the final third of the Pentateuch up the east bank of the Jordan. The Arava crossing is an isolated outpost in a dusty valley, with a large paved area and several industrial buildings, sort of like a Wal-Mart in the middle of the desert. Arriving from Eilat, one first has to pass through the legendary Israeli security system, which involves relentless prodding of one’s luggage, passports, travel plans, and personal history. “Why have you made so many trips to Egypt?” “Where did you sleep last night?” “Please take off your sunglasses so I can see your eyes.” The longer I traveled in the Middle East, the more passport stamps I gathered from Arab countries, and the more closely I was scrutinized at Israeli border crossings. “Are you Jewish?” “Do you speak Hebrew?” “Were you bar mitzvahed?” On this morning the questions seemed more intimate than usual—“Do you go to synagogue?” “Do you light candles on Shabbat?”—when suddenly the female security officer asked me a question that, given my recent travels, seemed more provocative than usual: “What is the meaning of Passover?”
I was startled, and a bit annoyed. “It celebrates the Israelites’ journey
from slavery to freedom,” I said, adding for good measure that if she wanted to learn more about it she could read Exodus chapters 12 through 15. “But I don’t believe there were six hundred thousand men,” I said.
If the Israeli side is prying, the Jordanian is plodding. Once you pass through the barrage of Israeli questions, unpackings, repackings, X-ray machines, and computer scannings, then carry your bags across the border, you are greeted by a wall of inefficiency, softened only by Arab hospitality. One undeniable reality of traveling in the Middle East is that the gross domestic product of Israel is roughly equal to that of Egypt, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria combined. As a result, of all the places along the biblical route, the Promised Land, even for its difficulties, is by far the easiest to maneuver. At the Arava crossing, for example, the Jordanian side has a series of small, concrete-block offices—one for applying for a visa, one for paying for a visa, one for receiving a visa, one for paying the entrance tax, one for inspecting passports, one for inspecting luggage, and one for selling soft drinks, ice cream, and duty-free cigarettes. On this morning, four guards were manning all seven offices, which meant, as a practical matter, that three were closed at any given time, except for the duty-free, which always remained open.