Walking the Bible (59 page)

We grew nostalgic. Almost two years had passed since I first met Avner, and we began recalling various events. Remember finding those quail eggs in the Sinai? Can you believe they have e-mail at Saint Catherine’s? Do you think Parachute
really
found Noah’s ark? A second telling, our own private Deuteronomy.

As we talked, we drifted into a discussion of what we’d learned. Perhaps the most striking thing we gleaned from retracing the Five Books of Moses was not all that different from what had originally propelled me on this trip: The Bible is not an abstraction in the Middle East, nor even just a book; it’s a living, breathing entity, undiminished by the passage of time. If anything, the Bible has been elevated to that rare stature of being indefinitely immediate. That’s a principal reason few people ultimately care when the Bible was written; the text is forever applicable. It’s always now.

This ability of the Bible to continually reinvent itself is matched only by its ability to make itself relevant to anyone who encounters it. Probably the most surprising thing about our trip is that in every place we went—“three continents, five countries, four war zones,” I used to joke—we asked everybody basically the same question:“What does the Bible mean to you?” And
everybody
had an answer. Every single person had a way to relate to the story, whether it was a Kurdish freedom fighter in Dogubayazit, a Jewish settler on the West Bank, a Muslim archaeologist in Cairo, a bedouin shepherd in the Sinai, a Palestinian ambassador in Amman. In all of our travels, I never entered a room in which someone didn’t have a story, a theory, or a question about the text. An eight-year-old Jerusalemite wondered whether the reeds I brought back from Egypt were papyrus or bulrushes (they were bulrushes). A fiftysomething lawyer asked whether Petra could be the place Lot fled after leaving Sodom (unlikely). A forty-year-old priest wanted to know if the desert can truly be a spiritual place (absolutely).

This chameleon-like quality is what makes the Bible so vital. It’s an organism so universal it has the ability to engage its human interlocutors in whatever form they desire—geological, ecological, zoological, philological, psychological, astrological, theological, illogical. It can even regenerate itself in locations where it’s been dead for years, or even centuries, as happened when Byzantine travelers first came to the Sinai in the fourth century
C.E.
, or when large numbers of Jews arrived in Israel in the twentieth century. Put tautologically:The Bible lives because it never dies. As a rabbi friend of mine said, it’s like a fungus that can live underground for long periods then pop up and thrive wherever it appears.

Though my friend quickly regretted his remark, he actually made a significant point. Easily the most impressive thing I learned during my trip was that the Bible’s ability to be relevant to contemporary life was by no means guaranteed. If anything, over the last two hundred years it has undergone the most concentrated and ruthless academic scrutiny that any written work has ever faced. This scientific interrogation, from every conceivable corner—archaeology, history, physics, metaphysics, linguistics, anthropology—was designed, in many cases, to undermine the Bible, to destroy its credibility. But in every case (at least the ones involving historical events, after the primeval stories of Creation), the Bible not only withstood the inquisition but came out stronger, with its integrity intact, and its nuances more on display. This doesn’t mean that the stories are true, but it does mean that they’re true to their era. The Bible lives today not because it’s untouchable but precisely because it
has
been touched—it has been challenged—and it remains undefeated.

This remarkable ability of the Bible to thrive, even in a world dominated by skepticism and science, came home to me during a meeting I had just before leaving for Jordan. I went to see Israel Hershkovitz, a professor of anatomy and anthropology at Tel Aviv University, who was Avner’s deputy in the Sinai and now studies ancient skeletons. I was hoping to find out once and for all whether the attachment to the land I first felt in Turkey might be in my DNA or whether it was more likely in my mind. Israel was a warm, messy-haired man like Avner, who invited me into his laboratory, which was lined from floor to ceiling with hundreds of skulls from the ancient world, like some creepy vision out of Darwin’s, or maybe Frankenstein’s, laboratory. Seated in front of his collection, Israel looked like one of those experts who appear on
National Geographic
specials nodding gravely.

He conceded that certain aspects of the story were inconsistent with current knowledge: that humans could live to be six hundred years old, that the world was created 5,700 years ago, that all humans were descended from one couple. He viewed these as narrative devices. “If you take a group of people, and the group is very large, the only way to keep the people together, working toward the same goal, is to say, ‘We all came from the same forefathers.’ ”

But otherwise, he was a devotee of the Bible. He read it every day to his daughter, he said, and believed it captured larger truths about the ancient world: foremost among them, the power of the desert. “It makes sense to me that the desert is where most of the great religions were born,” he said. “More than any other place, it gives you time for thinking about spiritual things.”

“But is there a physiological reason for that connection?” I asked. I then outlined for him the somewhat eccentric idea I had been developing. If, as scientists say, human beings first evolved in Africa, and if, as he confirmed, they spread out to the rest of the world over the land bridge of the Middle East, and if, as he mentioned, the three monotheistic religions that sprung from that bridge all have at their heart the story of human beings finding God in the desert, is it possible that humans somehow developed in themselves a physical attachment to the deserts of the Middle East, their earliest home?

“In a way, yes,” Israel said. “Because if we take ourselves back eleven thousand years or so, men were basically hunter-gatherers. Then we had the agricultural revolution, and at that point there was a split. Most people became farmers and developed a food-producing economy. About ninety percent did that. But about ten percent didn’t, they were pushed aside. They developed a lifestyle that was in between the nomadic lives of their ancestors and the settled lives of the farmers.”

“So some people can have an attachment to the desert but not
everyone
has to have it?”

“Absolutely. We know now that genes have the ability to store ancestral memories. And these can survive for hundreds of years. The Jewish people, for example, are very stubborn. To keep up with their religion for all those years in exile, first in Babylon, then in the diaspora, reminds me of a very special people: the bedouin. You give up a lot, you live in marginal areas, you don’t enjoy all the benefits of life. But you preserve your identity.”

“So to bring this to a personal level, when I come to this part of the world and have a personal reaction, ‘This is where I feel at home,’ is it possible that I’m discovering something that was already within me?”

“I think so. Everybody discovers sooner or later where they fit into
the spectrum. I always say to Avner, if Sadat had not come to Jerusalem and made peace, I would probably have stayed in Sinai with Avner for the rest of our lives. It was quite a hard life. It’s not like you could go to a restaurant, or watch a movie. We were basically by ourselves. But we were happy.”

I asked him where God fit into his formulation.

“I believe in God,” he said.

I indicated surprise. “So where is your God?” I said.

“God is everywhere, everyplace,” he said. “The problem with God is that what the early Israelites meant by God in the Bible is very different from what present-day religious people mean when they say God. If you talk with the bedouin about their religion, they have holy places and holy mountains. The early Israelites were much closer to the bedouin in that regard.”

“So what is God then?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I know that when you go certain places you feel him, and you become a better person. When I go into the desert I become a better person.”

“And that’s not incompatible with what you know about science?”

“Absolutely not. Science is never going to prove the divine, but it’s never going to disprove it either. We explain many things, but we can’t explain what’s inside the human soul. That’s God.”

“What about the Bible?” I mentioned. “Is that part of your understanding?”

“Yes. Because I can’t always go to the desert, I can’t always take my children there. But I can read the stories. The way I see it, if you read the book, you also become a better person.”

“So you’re saying that the desert helps you to do that, and the Bible helps you to do that?”

“Yes, the desert and the Bible. They’re partners. They’re good partners.”

I repeated this story to Avner while we were sitting on the mountain. We had begun talking about the relationship between human evolution
and the Bible, a conversation we had started in the Sinai. Night had fallen over the Holy Land, revealing a full constellation of sky, the color of onyx. Jupiter was directly in front of us, Avner pointed out, Mars to our left. The crescent moon was resting on its rounded bottom, an empty candy dish. The sky seemed so close that the stars appeared as if they could be plucked from their positions and placed somewhere else.

Avner emphasized that in nature, new species develop in response to evolutionary pressure. The giraffe needed to eat the leaves of trees, for example, so it developed a long neck. Humans, however, developed a complex brain, which gave us the ability to change the environment to suit our needs. “Here we find ourselves in a sunny place,” Avner said, “but instead of waiting for all the people with light skin to die off and all the people with dark skin to survive, we put on creams to protect ourselves. It’s the same with the sweet tooth, the seeking of deep-fried foods and meat. These were designed for the time when people could hardly get food and they needed to store extra fat in their bodies. But things change, and now we have access to more food. We all know it would be better not to eat too much red meat and sweets, but we love them. So instead of curbing our appetite, we developed medicines and surgical procedures like bypass.

“What I’m trying to say,” he continued, “is that in humans, evolution now involves creating behavior patterns that we pass from generation to generation. Our genes haven’t changed that much since neolithic times. And that collection of behavior patterns is culture. Culture is the way that a group of people develop together in order to survive, to maintain their way of life.

“And when we talk about culture,” he added, “it’s like talking about a different species of wildlife. That’s the way this group of people deal with the environment. Therefore, being a Palestinian, or an Israeli, or an Edomite, is not some collection of crazy things. It is the essence of being.”

“So what you’re suggesting,” I said, “is that this attachment to the desert I feel is probably not in my physical DNA?”

“No, I don’t think so. I think it’s in your cultural DNA—as a Westerner, a member of the Judeo-Christian world.”

“If that’s the case, then presumably the reason it got there is that this”—I tapped my Bible—“is one of the greatest sources of cultural DNA ever invented.”

“I agree,” he said. “In fact, I agree even more after our travels.”

“What do you mean?”

“I would have agreed before we worked together, but now it’s become so much more solid in my understanding, and my feelings.” The Hebrew Bible, he continued, is clearly the most important document of the ancient Near East. It’s important because so many other documents—the Prophets, the Gospels, the Koran—grew out of it. But it’s also important because it incorporates so many elements from documents that
preceded
it. “There are countless ideas in the Bible that cross borders and civilizations—Creation, the Flood, the idea of a contract between humans and God—which the text captures perfectly because it draws from so many different cultures.”

“So let me ask you what I asked Professor Malamat,” I said. “When you think of the Bible, what do you think of ?”

“I think of creation. I don’t think of written material at all. These are stories that were crystallized over time, the deepest creativity of a certain culture. If the Bible comes from people, and not from God, as I believe it does, then it’s the essence of being human. It’s the story of the creation of a people. I don’t know of any other created thing that has had such lasting impact, and I wonder, I still wonder, why the Bible is greater than the collected works of Mozart, or Shakespeare, or Greek mythology?”

We took up that question. We agreed that the Bible shares with those works the ability to appeal to almost anyone. If you’re a woman who can’t have a baby, you can relate to it. If you’re a brother who fights with your brother, you can relate to it. If you’re a person who works your whole life toward a dream and are denied it, you can relate to it. Also, the Bible, like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or the Mona Lisa, is infinitely complex and infinitely simple. You can read it as a story, or you can read it as a philosophical tract.

But therein also lies a difference. Unlike most works of art, the Bible is ultimately about the relationship between people and God. It
shares that subject matter with Greek mythology, of course, as well as with other ancient religions that have long since died out. So why did biblical religion survive? One answer seems to be the abstract nature of God, his ability to be everywhere, not just on top of Mount Olympus, say, tinkering with events on earth. “In Greek mythology, you have
moira,
fate,” Avner said. “You’re born with everything already written among the gods. You cannot change things.

“With monotheism,” he continued, “God is the deity, but humans can choose whether they follow him or not. As human beings, we are responsible for our own actions. We can go one way, or the other. But the right way is the moral way.”