Walking the Bible (54 page)

He drew our camels to a stop at a serrated ledge overlooking the Dead Sea. The bone-colored rock was so dramatic here, cutting into the sky like one of those shark-tooth knives that saw through aluminum cans on late-night infomercials, that you could still feel the force of the earthquake that caused the great rift twenty-five million years earlier. Now within earshot of Israel, Avner reached into his knapsack and pulled out his mobile phone. He punched in Ofer’s number in Ezuz and outlined the plight of the missing camels, being careful to describe their brand—two horizontal lines and a vertical one like old-fashioned football goalposts. Ofer said he would check into the situation and call back. Who needs diplomatic immunity, when you have a network of desert missionaries and access to a cellular phone?

As we continued, I asked Avner about a persistent question I had read about in discussions of the historical accuracy of the Bible: Were camels domesticated during the time of the patriarchs? Camels appear frequently in the Hebrew Bible, surfacing as early as Genesis 12, when Abraham travels to Egypt during the drought and receives as a gift from the pharaoh, “sheep, oxen, asses, male and female slaves, she-asses, and camels.” Abraham’s servant later takes “ten of his master’s camels” on his trip to Harran to get a wife for Isaac, and Jacob subsequently brings even more camels back from Harran with his family. William Foxwell Albright, the archaeologist, was one of the first to conclude that camels were still wild animals in the Near East during this time of the patriarchs, the early second millennium
B.C.E.
The earliest inscription that mentions domesticated camels was not until the eleventh century
B.C.E.
, Albright noted, and camel bones were not found in significant numbers near cities—a sign of their domestication—until centuries later. Albright insisted that the use of camels in the Pentateuch, including a reference in Leviticus that prohibits eating camel meat because the animal has no hoofs, was an anachronism.

Avner mentioned that he knew an archaeozoologist, Liora Horowitz, who was studying the issue and who thought she might be able to date camel domestication early enough to include the patriarchs.
“We’ll have to call her when we get home,” he said. “No wait!” Though we were on a particularly tricky bend in the path at the moment, Avner again reached around for his phone, pressed a few numbers of recall, and spoke into the mouthpiece. Then he tossed the phone to me. “Professor Horowitz?!” I said, after juggling the phone in my hands.

I explained my question and she rattled off the results of recent surveys. An article appeared in
Archaeology
a number of years earlier, she said, that cited figurines and camel-hair rope to suggest that camels were domesticated in the Nile Valley as early as 2600
B.C.E.
But that data was inconclusive, she said. More recently, she had reviewed all the surveys of second millennium
B.C.E.
sites in Israel and found no evidence of bones. By contrast, in later periods, the site contained extensive camel remains used in cult sacrifice, suggesting camels had been herded by that time.

“All in all, I’d say there were no domesticated camels from the early second millennium
B.C.E.
,” she said. “Albright is holding up quite well.” I thanked her and tossed the phone back to Avner. Who needs the Internet when you can do research today on camels in the ancient world from the back of a camel on an ancient trail?

We continued for several more hours along a narrow ridge. The mountains were rugged here, though much paler than the ones in Sinai, roughly the color of saltines. The mix of cavernous valleys and ashen cliffs seemed lunar in its barrenness. We would navigate a particularly tight bend, then reach a flat area where we could see Israel to our left and Jebel Haroun up to our right, then descend into a valley where water collected in the rainy season and a shock of pink oleanders lined the ground like a Hawaiian lei on a beach. Then the path would jerk upward, the greenery would disappear, and we’d have to hold on tight.

When the camels needed to climb, they would place their right front foot tentatively on a rock to test its stability, then frantically pedal their back legs like a car stuck in the sand, before lurching forward with a hitch and a groan, and an occasional squeal from their riders. It took such concentration to stay on the saddle, gripping the pommels in front
and back, that I began to feel physically drained. All conversation stopped. The only sound I could hear was the gurgling and growling of the camels as they masticated their latest meal. The only smell was from the perspiration that ran down my face, intermingled with the dust that kicked up from the ground and the occasional grassy mulch from my camel’s sneeze. All this on a day we were visiting Petra, one of the most romanticized places in the world.

Just the name Petra alone evokes magic, like Xanadu, Shangri-La, or Timbuktu. It’s the boutonniere of the Middle East, a shimmering, illusory place, carved out of salmon-colored mountains, where Indiana Jones finds the Holy Grail at the end of
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
and where countless generations of European explorers tried but failed to locate its charms. Mention Petra today and people think of the Nabateans, the bedouin tribe from Arabia that hewed its capital in the corkscrew valley and gave Petra its glorious facade. The Nabateans thrived for four hundred years around the time of Christ. The chief source of their livelihood, frankincense, over which they had near monopolistic control, is prominently mentioned in the New Testament, when the Wise Men from the East offer it along with gold and myrrh as a gift to the baby Jesus.

But Petra also has roots in the Old Testament, long before the Nabateans. Because of its strategic location and abundant springs, the city was an important stopover on the King’s Highway as early as the second millennium
B.C.E.
In the Bible, Petra first appears in Numbers 31, when the Israelites are venturing north and slay Rekem, one of the kings of Transjordan. Rekem was the ancient name for Petra, and the king was likely a local chieftain who ruled some of the scattered Edomite population. Later, around 1000
B.C.E.
, King David occupied Petra in a failed bid to control Edom; his son Solomon consolidated control over the area and diverted Petra’s trading profits to his coffers.

This close association with the biblical story has led some to speculate that Petra may have played an even larger role in the history of the Israelites. Before leaving for Jordan, I had gone to visit a colleague of Avner’s, Dudu Cohen, an archaeologist, a guide, and a deeply observant Jew who lives with his family in a religious settlement south of Jerusalem. For years Dudu had been carefully constructing a radical theory
he had just published in a prominent journal of biblical studies: that Kadesh-barnea, the place where the Israelites lived for thirty-eight of their forty years in the desert, was not Ain el-Qudeirat in northern Sinai, as is popularly believed, but Petra.

The heart of Dudu’s theory concerns what the Bible calls the place where the Israelites camped. Sometimes the place is called Kadesh, other times Kadesh-barnea. The popular view holds that these names refer to the same place, but Dudu found evidence suggesting ancient commentators viewed the two as referring to different places. The spy story, for example, is usually associated with Kadesh-barnea, in the wilderness of Paran. The story of Moses striking the rock, by contrast, is associated with Kadesh, in the wilderness of Zin. Paran is generally linked to the Egyptian border, while Zin is connected to the border with Edom.

In addition, some sources directly connected Kadesh with Petra. In Aramaic, the vernacular language of the late first millennium
B.C.E.
, the name Kadesh is translated as Rekem, the same name used for Petra. Also, European travelers who came to the Middle East before the twentieth century, including the Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, who is credited with “discovering” the place in 1812, believed that Petra was the site of Kadesh. “Plus, it just makes sense,” Dudu said. “There is much more water in Petra than in the Sinai. At the time of the Nabateans, thirty thousand people could live there, and nomads require much less water. It easily could have supported the Israelites. Not six hundred thousand, but there probably weren’t that many anyway.”

So what difference does his theory make to the interpretation of the story?

“For starters, we didn’t wander around the desert for forty years,” Dudu said. “Sitting in Petra gave us a chance to form an identity. Usually, in sociology, one of the main elements in identifying a nation is territory. That’s why we have all the theories that Israel wasn’t formed as a nation until the time of David, when the country was unified under a single king. Before that, we were just tribes and didn’t have any territory of our own.

“But my theory gives a different perspective,” he said. “Slowly, sitting together in Petra, we formed a nation. We built roots. Moses told the story of our history. He planted in people’s minds the comments of
God to our patriarchs that we will get the Promised Land. It’s ours. God gave it to us. Then, when they moved from there to the border with Canaan, the people were ready. They just waited for the order to cross the Jordan and conquer! And I think that’s why the rabbis see that point as a miracle, because the big change had occurred. In Petra we finally overcame the desert and became a unified people.”

By late morning, the camel saddle had rubbed off most of the skin from my lower back and inner thigh. I was verging on being in considerable pain by the time we arrived at a resting area just shy of the summit of Jebel Haroun. It was here, in 1812, that Johann Ludwig Burckhardt completed the deception that enabled him to “discover” Petra. Burck-hardt, a Swiss-born adventurer, posed as a Muslim—and even learned Arabic—in order to travel through the Middle East, then largely hostile to Europeans. Arriving in Syria in 1810, he was asked about his strange accent. Burckhardt said he was a trader from India and that his mother tongue was Hindustani. Asked to demonstrate, he spoke a guttural concoction of Swiss-German, which seemed to satisfy his hosts.

Two years later he set off for Petra. He couldn’t express his desire to search for the lost city, since it would have been interpreted as spying. Also, Muslims were not supposed to be interested in Petra, which was considered the work of infidels. But Burckhardt said he had vowed to sacrifice a goat at Aaron’s tomb. When he reached the outskirts of Petra, his guide suggested making the sacrifice there, but Burckhardt wanted to press ahead. They arrived at the entrance to the city, and again the bedouin suggested making the sacrifice. Again Burckhardt demurred. Finally they arrived at the Treasury, Petra’s signature structure. Burckhardt was the first Westerner to see the building since the Romans were kicked out almost 1,800 years earlier.

Somehow masking his excitement, Burckhardt managed to describe the building, and even sketch it, all the while concealing his journal underneath his robe. He continued to draw buildings throughout the site. Had his journal been discovered, he surely would have been killed as a spy. As it happens, he spent so much time making drawings that he
ran out of time and was forced to sacrifice his goat at the terrace just below the summit of Jebel Haroun.

He clearly was not the only one to use this site for sacrificing. As we left our camels and walked up the final ascent of the mountain, which reminded me of the freestanding peak atop Jebel Musa, we saw dozens of burnt-out fire circles with animal bones scattered around them. Avner identified the bones—goat, sheep, even camels—which clearly had been used in ritual sacrifices by local bedouin. “Do Muslims actually sacrifice camels?” I asked Mahmoud. “Yes,” he said, “but rarely. They’re very expensive.”

About twenty minutes later we arrived at the top of the mountain, where a whitewashed shrine dedicated to Aaron sits atop a bald pate of flesh-colored stone. Holy buildings stood on this site as early as the Byzantine Era, when Christian travelers first associated the mountain with the place of Aaron’s death. The current shrine, which dates from 1459, is about the size of a small diner; it’s made of stone and topped with a dome that looks like the head of a giant snowman. The building was administered by Greek Christians in the seventh century when the ten-year-old prophet Mohammed passed through on a trip from Mecca to Damascus and climbed Jebel Haroun with his uncle. The guard, a monk named Bahira, prophesied that the boy would change the world. Today’s Muslim pilgrims pay homage to the prophet by draping the shrine with green and white pieces of fabric, twined threads, and seashells. These remembrances are considered the Islamic equivalent of lighting a candle to a saint.

We explored the inside of the building, which was dark, bare, and surprisingly cool. A stairway led down into a dank basement, where Aaron is said to be entombed. Two iron gates block the crypt, but we were able to catch a faint glimpse of a large stone tomb.

Back outside, we climbed the narrow stairs to the roof, which had a spectacular view of the surroundings. From here, the true charm of Petra became apparent. The only thing visible for miles in any direction was cluster after cluster of foreboding mountains, each one more parched than the next. In this scene, like a tub of Cracker Jack spilled onto the desert floor, Petra was clearly the prize. The tree-lined valleys
around the ancient city looked like mint jelly dripping down a lamb shank. “I’ll say this about Dudu Cohen,” I said. “I don’t know about the historical accuracy of his thesis, but viewed from this location, it makes much more sense for the Israelites to have lived here for thirty-eight years than to have been in Ain el-Qudeirat.”

“Certainly for them,” Avner said. “It’s much nicer.”

“It’s also better protected. There’s plenty of water.”

“And the weather is better.”

We sat down on the roof and reviewed the story. In Numbers 20, during the Israelites’ fortieth year in the desert, after the incident in which Moses and Aaron disobey God’s instructions about the rock, God suddenly announces to the brothers:“Let Aaron be gathered to his kin,” a biblical euphemism for die. “He is not to enter the land that I have given to the Israelite people, because you disobeyed my command about the waters of Meribah,” God says. “Take Aaron and his son Eleazar and bring them up on Mount Hor. Strip Aaron of his vestments and put them on his son Eleazar. Then Aaron shall be gathered unto the dead.” Moses does as instructed, and Aaron dies “on the summit of the mountain,” a location identified only as being “on the boundary of the land of Edom.” The people bewail Aaron for thirty days.