Walking the Bible (58 page)

“So can someone like me, who was not born in that world, feel that attachment?” I asked.

“I don’t know why not,” he said, now openly giggling. “I wasn’t born in the desert, and I feel the same!” He leaned forward, as if in confession. “I’m not a specialist in this,” he said, “but when you go to the mountains along the Jordan Valley, if you know the Bible, and if you leave the roads behind and walk two or three miles by yourself, you expect Moses to come looking for you!

“I’ve been to Petra a hundred times,” he continued. “But this year, for the first time, I walked up Jebel Haroun. And it was such an experience. I hiked seven hours, and when I got near Haroun mountain I got confused. I could not see the top of the mountain. And if you go the wrong way, you’re lost. All of a sudden a man appeared, a bedouin. He was eighty-one years old. I said, ‘How long to Jebel Haroun?’ He said, ‘I will go with you.’ I said, ‘You are a great man.’ And he said, ‘No, I am a servant of our master Haroun.’

“And he walked in front of me, for one hour and thirty minutes, until we got there. I reached what I thought was the top of the mountain, but I was not there yet. I had to walk up another twenty minutes. If you have disease, or sickness, or any psychological problem, you will never do it! And once I got there I went inside the chapel, I went down
the stairs and saw the real tomb where Haroun is located, and then I went up on the roof and looked over the land. It was the best experience of my life.

“And before I left,” Abu Tayeh continued, “I read two things: the Koran and the Bible.”

“Really?” I said. “So what did you learn?”

“I learned that this shrine is there as a symbol, to remind us that we belong to the same tradition. The mentality of our people may have changed, but we have the same roots. There’s no reason we can’t get along.” By the time he finished his story, the entire room had been transformed. It went from being a chilly diplomatic parlor to my home away from home. Within minutes Abu Tayeh was giving us a private tour and showing us a signed copy of one of the original editions of
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
. He summoned his college-age son from his room and asked him to bring out some old family photos. Finally he called back to the kitchen and ordered up an impromptu feast of chicken, rice, yogurt, and sweet Arab
knafi
cake, which we shared with neighbors and ate with our hands while drinking toasts of alcohol-free wine in the most lavish meal we ate on our entire journey. All this happened with so little effort, and so much affection, that when Abu Tayeh ushered us to the door of our jeep and bid us good-bye with a hug and smile, I knew that the desert had served up an antidote to our clash in Nissim’s tent and to my meeting with Biltaji. I knew that the openness of the place had triumphed over the hostility.

It was almost 2
P.M.
by the time we left Abu Tayeh’s house and began our drive southeast of Amman toward Ma’daba, a small town that houses the most famous mosaic map of the ancient world. This part of the King’s Highway shows how pleasant the Middle East could be with a little more rain and a lot less diesel exhaust. The hills are gentle with an occasional mountain stream that spawns meandering banks of green that could almost be in Switzerland. The only thing missing are cows. There is another similarity with the Alps, though. Occasionally one
hears the shrill cry of bedouin tongues, a high-pitched, quavering ululation that if it moved deeper into the throat and took on a bit more melody would sound exactly like a yodel.

Since this is the Middle East, however, the verdant pastures quickly give way to dust-infested towns crowded with onion stands and pita vendors. Ma’daba, located about fifty miles southeast of the capital, is one such city. Once part of the kingdom of Moab, Ma’daba is mentioned in Numbers 21 as a place the Israelites destroyed on their bloody trip north. The city continued to be a pawn for the next millennium, switching from Israelite hands back to Moabite, from Hellenistic to Nabatean. By the first millennium
C.E.
, Christianity took hold, leaving the city its richest legacy: dozens of Byzantine mosaics.

We parked and entered the modest Saint George’s Church, a whitewashed Greek Orthodox facility with several brass lanterns dripping from the ceiling and a few wooden icons hanging from the walls. The church reminded me of Saint Catherine’s, but was smaller and less ornate. In 1976, a worshiper noticed that one of the icons, depicting the Virgin Mary, had suddenly grown a third hand, which was blue, and which had been invisible to congregants only minutes earlier. The protuberance was declared to be a miracle, and soon drew visitors from around the world.

The real attraction in Saint George’s, however, is its mosaic map, dating from the sixth century
C.E.
, which is considered one of the oldest existing depictions of the Holy Land. Spread out on the floor in incomplete patches that collectively are about the size and shape of the stain that would result from spilling a gallon of paint on the floor, the mosaic represents only a fragment of the original, which stretched fifteen feet by forty-five feet and included over two million tiles. Uncovered when the church was reconstructed in 1884, the map depicts over 150 biblical sites across the Near East, from Egypt to Lebanon.

Oriented to the east, as if the viewer is standing in the Mediterranean looking toward the Jordan River, the map is focused around Jerusalem, labeled the “center of the world” and portrayed in vivid red, yellow, brown, and white tiles. The map is so precise that it depicts the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in three dimensions, as if done by
Picasso in his cubist phase. Jericho, the “city of palms,” is surrounded by palms, and Hebron shows the Cave of the Patriarchs. There are even a few playful asides. At the mouth of the Dead Sea, one fish from the Jordan swims eagerly toward the sea, while another swims even more eagerly
away
from the sea, apparently desperate to flee the salt.

I was struck by the number of places we had visited that were represented on the map, including Nablus, Goshen, Gaza, the Sinai, the Negev, even Edom and Moab. “We didn’t have to make our trip,” I joked to Avner. “We could have just come here.”

“In fact, this was probably put here originally to help guide pilgrims,” he said.

As we were leaving, we ran into a bookish-looking American man in his forties, dressed in a khaki shirt and straw hat, who we guessed was an archaeologist. He was, as well as a pastor. Doug Clark was a thin, fair-haired native of Washington State who had been coming to Jordan for twenty-five years in his capacity as a professor of biblical studies and archaeology at the School of Theology at Walla Walla College. A passionate excavator of ancient sites and an ordained Seventh-Day Adventist pastor, Doug seemed to embody all the tensions—between science and religion, between history and faith—that characterized so many conversations along our route. As we sat in a pew, I asked how he reconciled his work as an archaeologist with his beliefs.

“I guess I have come to terms personally with the Bible, a book which is precious to me,” he said, “so that I don’t have to lock in every story as being factual. My own sense of Scripture is that I believe some kind of divine activity is behind the Bible, but I don’t assume that every detail in the story is true. It can’t be. But I don’t believe the details are important. I believe the lessons are important.”

“So as a person of the Bible, do you wish you never encountered archaeology?”

“I remember the first time I came to Jordan to dig,” he said. “It was 1973, and this man, who must have been sixty and had nothing to do with archaeology, said to me, ‘Be very careful about archaeology.’ I have applied that a number of times since. I think that if one is honest with
the archaeological data, one will confront issues and have a crisis of faith. And I had my crisis of faith.

“But”—and his voice lifted here—“I think anyone who has a wish to be faithful and honest will have a crisis of faith. Still, I think that crisis has made my faith stronger. It’s just no longer rooted in the same way. I’m not dependent on factuality in everything. I can look back and say, ‘Okay, so it didn’t happen that way. So there weren’t two million people in the Exodus.’ But I still have a sense that historically, archaeologically, we can see the larger elements of the story.”

“So has coming here enhanced your faith?”

“It’s been very much an enhancement,” he said. “I grew up in a tradition in which the earth was only six thousand years old, but I was working in a site today that’s 250,000 years old. So on the one hand I continue to grow in my awareness of the facts, and I’m enamored by that. On the other hand, to visit places like Ma’daba, or Nebo, is a devotional experience. I continue to be touched by the fact that somehow God chose to interact with human beings in this place. I don’t know how he chose it, but he did.

“Take Mount Nebo,” he continued. “Three days ago I got an e-mail from one of my friends at home; her daughter had been murdered. So I went to Mount Nebo the next day. I just sat there. I wanted to think about the Promised Land. I wanted to look at Jericho. And when you think about Moses on that spot, about God choosing to make a connection with human beings there, about the Israelites on the verge of achieving their destiny—that, for me, is worship.”

By the time we made it back to our jeep and turned eastward it was late afternoon and the sun was starting to fade. Instead of the glorious reds and pinks of Petra, dusk was mostly grayish here, the color of concrete. The road slowly climbed through a series of villages. We were moving westward through the Jordanian mountains, which reached their peaks and then collapsed into the Rift Valley, meaning, as a geographical matter, that the mountains were far steeper on their western side than their
eastern. We were in a temperate zone, and in what seemed a fitting ode to a place of ending, the terrain had many of the topographical elements we had seen across our route: the medieval thatched roofs and wooden carts of eastern Turkey; the pine trees and sage bushes of the Jerusalem hills; the craggy rocks and sandy soil of the Negev. And, as in the Sinai, everywhere the sense of drama: big boulders, big mountains, big sky.

Eventually we climbed our way to the series of peaks collectively referred to as Mount Nebo, the single most important biblical site in Jordan and, after Ararat and Sinai, the third emblematic mountain of the Pentateuch. In Deuteronomy 32, after Moses delivers a passionate speech to the Israelites, God tells him, “Ascend these heights of Abarim,” the biblical name for the Jordan hills, “to Mount Nebo, which is in the land of Moab facing Jericho, and view the land of Canaan which I am giving the Israelites as their holding. You shall die on the mountain that you are about to ascend, and shall be gathered to your kin, as your brother Aaron died on Mount Hor and was gathered to his kin.” God reminds Moses of the reason, saying it’s because “you broke faith with Me among the Israelite people,” at the waters of Meribath-kadesh, then adds:“You may view the land from a distance, but you shall not enter it.”

Like Mount Ararat, the mountain now called Nebo has a natural claim to its identity: At 2,540 feet, it’s the tallest in the area, though it’s only a third as tall as Jebel Musa and an eighth as tall as Ararat. The mountain actually consists of a number of peaks, the two tallest being Siyagah and el Mukhayyat. Though Siyagah is slightly lower, it’s also flatter, and holy buildings have existed on it since the first millennium
B.C.E.
The first Christian building was erected in 394
C.E.
and was later expanded to include a church and a monastery, which was abandoned in 1564. In 1933, the ruined site was purchased by the Franciscans, who excavated and restored the basilica and monastery, both of which still function today.

The front gate to the Franciscan facility was closed when we arrived, so we walked along the southern side and rang the private bell of the proprietor. A crotchety Italian man in his seventies opened the door. “Garbo” was the caretaker hired by the Franciscans, and we’d been given his name by an archaeologist in Amman. We explained what we were doing and asked if he would let us spend the last night of our journey on
Mount Nebo, so we could see sunrise from the spot where Moses is said to have died. Garbo grumbled a few minutes as he mulled our request. He asked if we had a letter from the chief archaeologist of Mount Nebo; we didn’t. He asked if we were Catholic. Finally, citing regulations, he politely turned us down, but said that if we returned at 5
A.M.
he would personally open the gate for us. He gestured to the neighboring peak, el Mukhayyat, and implied that we should sleep there. He knew it was illegal to spend the night on the mountain. Mahmoud also knew it was illegal, and advised against it. Even Avner’s wife, Edie, knew it was illegal. Before we left she had said she might not be willing to bail us out if we got arrested. “I’ve got better things to do with my money,” she said.

We stayed anyway. We drove on the dirt road that circled the bald peak of el Mukhayyat until we found a gravelly area flat enough to sleep on. We doubled back to one of the villages, bought a few bags of provisions—bread, cheese, tuna, honey, even orange juice—as well as two bedouin mattresses wrapped in purple flowery fabric. Back at the site, we gathered dried branches of wormwood and sagebrush in case we wanted a fire. We bid good-bye to Mahmoud, who agreed to pick us up at the monastery around 8
A.M.
, and settled into our jerry-built home.

Nebo is located on a geological seam. Behind us were the central mountains of Jordan, followed by the eastern desert, then the vast deserts of Saudi Arabia and Iraq, like two coattails that never end. In front of us was the precipitous drop-off of the Rift Valley, followed by the Judean hills of central Israel. From our vantage point, we had a complete, 180-degree panorama of the misty infinity of the biblical Promised Land. At this hour, with the sun already set, the dark screen of dust settling over the horizon had the density of steel wool. To the left was the Dead Sea; to the right the huddled lights of Jericho. Jerusalem, in between, was invisible. Nothing seemed to be moving, but there were sounds of life: donkeys braying, motorbikes sputtering, wind blowing, birds chirping.