Walking the Bible (6 page)
Authors: Bruce Feiler
“So why did he do it?”
“The Bible doesn’t say. As far as the text is concerned, God says to do it, so Abraham goes. That’s it. But Jewish tradition says that Abraham was the first person to recognize that this was the
one
God.”
“But he had never heard God before. He didn’t know who or what God was. He didn’t
see
God. And suddenly, this voice says ‘Go,’ and he goes.”
“The concept in the Bible is that the voice was such a powerful thing that Abraham had no doubts. He had faith.”
“So what would have been the biggest change from the world he left to the world where he was going?”
“The biggest difference would be leaving an area that was the core
of civilization to a place that was just emerging. It was not the heart of everything.”
“But because he went, it became the heart of everything.”
“And that’s the point,” Avner said. “Abraham begins a new cycle.” All through the Bible, he noted, the text follows a pattern of creation, followed by destruction, followed by re-creation. First God creates the world, for example; then, unhappy with how humans are behaving, he destroys it and begins again with Noah. Abraham marks the start of a new cycle, one that will continue throughout the Five Books of Moses. Even more important, God’s decree to Abraham to leave Harran and go to the Promised Land, which overlapped much of Canaan, marks an end to the phase of Genesis that takes place in Mesopotamia. As a result, it also brings to a close the part of the story that was dominated by Mesopotamian imagery, specifically water as the chief source of creation.
“Do you want to know the real difference between here and the Promised Land?” Avner asked, not waiting for a reply. “There are no rivers. There are no floods. Canaan was settled. It had some rain. But the water wasn’t predictable, or plentiful. In saying
lech l’cha
”—go forth—“God changed the history of the world. He gave Abraham the power of fertility, the power to create a great nation, which up to now had belonged only to the rivers: the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Nile. From now on, people—not water—would control the world. People who believed in God.” We sat silently for a few moments and watched the sun slide out of sight, leaving a pink glaze on the horizon. The herd of goats had disappeared. The dust had completely settled. For the first time since we started, I felt a sense of contentment—and peace. No matter the difficulty of what we were trying to do—regardless of my internal doubts about why I had come—I felt a certain equilibrium, like a child on a bike who starts out wobbly but slowly gains stability. And with that feeling I returned to the paradox at the heart of the injunction “go forth.” For all the rational explanations I used to account for choices in my life, for all the intellectual reasons I used to justify this particular endeavor, I now realized it was possible—maybe even likely—that I had been motivated
by some internal longing that I hadn’t even identified.
Some journeys we choose to go on,
I realized; some journeys choose us. No journey better illustrates that than the one at the heart of the Five Books of Moses.
A few minutes later, as we stood up to go, Avner looked at his watch and realized it was Friday evening.
“Shabbat shalom,”
he said. “Good Sabbath.”
T
he guard eyed me squarely as we approached his post, moving one hand from his belt to his walkie-talkie. His other arm rested on a rifle. He had gel in his hair and three stripes on his sleeve. “Yes?” he said, arching his eyebrows.
It was 9:35 on a late-autumn morning when Avner and I strode toward the security checkpoint at the Damia Bridge, an Israeli-Jordanian border crossing about thirty miles north of Jericho. We had driven up from Jerusalem that morning to start the next phase of our journey, visiting sites in the Promised Land associated with Abraham, his son Isaac, and his son Jacob. Together they form the holy triumvirate of biblical forefathers, the patriarchs, from the Greek words
patria,
meaning family or clan, and
arche,
meaning ruler. The Five Books describe several forefathers who preceded these men, notably Adam and Noah, as well as many who follow. But the three patriarchs receive special distinction because it’s to them—of all humanity—whom God grants his sacred covenant of territory, and through them that the relationship between the people of Israel and the Promised Land is forged.
The story of the patriarchs takes up the final thirty-nine chapters of Genesis and covers the entire geographical spectrum of the ancient Near East, from Mesopotamia to Egypt, and back again, all within several verses. For Avner and me, this scope posed a challenge. Soon after our return from Turkey, we huddled in the living room of his home in Jerusalem and set about devising an itinerary. It was a sunny, comfortable
room, with whitewashed walls, bedouin rugs from the Sinai, and pictures of his two children, as well as the two daughters of his second wife, Edie, a Canadian who served as office manager for the Jerusalem bureau of the
New York Times
. Avner sat at the table with his computer, online Bible, countless topographical maps, dozens of archaeological texts, and the handheld GPS device, while I paced the floor.
Our most immediate problem was that with no archaeological evidence to relate
any
of the events in the Five Books to specific places, we were left to the often-contradictory claims of history, myth, legend, archaeobiology, paleozoology, and faith. There are nearly two dozen candidates for Mount Sinai, for example, and nearly half a dozen for the Red Sea. There are countless theories about which path the Israelites took through the Sinai. In addition, we faced the competing constraints of religious wars, political wars, terrorism, climate, budget, and health, as well as the desire to have fun.
Ultimately we settled on a guiding principle: Our goal was to place the biblical stories in the historical and cultural context of the ancient Near East. Time and again, rather than focus on
every
story in the text, or even every
interesting
story in the text, we decided to concentrate on stories that could be enhanced by
being in the places themselves
. The story of Jacob and his brother Esau wrestling in Rebekah’s womb, for example, while fascinating on many levels, struck us as not likely to be enriched by traveling to a specific location. The stories of Sodom and Gomorrah, by contrast, and the crossing of the Red Sea might easily take on new meanings by visiting their settings. In Judaism, the traditional process of analyzing scripture is called midrash, from the Hebrew term meaning search out or investigate; in Christianity, this process is referred to as exegesis, from the Latin word meaning the same thing. In effect, what Avner and I undertook was topographical midrash, a geographical exegesis of the Bible.
In that spirit, we decided to begin our travels in Israel with a bit of a long shot. Our destination this morning was Shechem, the first place Abraham stops in Canaan and the next place the Bible mentions after Harran. The text makes no mention of what route Abraham, his wife,
Sarah (she’s actually called Sarai at the moment, as he is still called Abram), and his nephew Lot took to Canaan. Based on road patterns in the ancient world, one of the most logical places for him to cross into the Promised Land would have been a natural ford in the Jordan River just south of the Sea of Galilee, where the Damia Bridge is located today. Though we were already
in
the Promised Land, we decided to ask if the Israeli Army would let us walk across the bridge to the Jordanian side, then walk back, seeing what Abraham might have seen. Avner explained this idea to the sergeant, who remained at attention. After hearing the explanation, the officer removed his walkie-talkie and relayed our request.
The border post was astir that morning. It was a small crossing—the Jordan here is narrow enough for a horse to jump—but tidy, decorated with cacti, olive trees, and oleanders. The gate was blue and white. Every few minutes a Palestinian truck would approach, ferrying oranges, honeydew, or polished limestone. The driver would dismount and hand over his papers, which the guards would stamp and return. Then the guards would roll open the gate, the truck would pass, and the whole process would start again. We were just becoming lulled by the routine, when suddenly we heard static on the walkie-talkie. The sergeant removed it and held it for us to hear:“I don’t care if they write a book about the Bible,” the voice said. “I don’t care if they rewrite the Bible itself. But they’re not going to do it in a military zone, and they’re
not
going to do it on my bridge.”
The sergeant replaced his walkie-talkie and shrugged. “Sorry,” he said, “only Palestinians.”
We returned to the highway and turned west toward the mountains. Shechem is located at the northern edge of the central spine of mountains that traverse much of Israel and the West Bank. Our goal today was to travel down this spine, visiting first Shechem and then Bethel, the first two places Abraham stops. The following day we would travel farther south, to the Negev, Israel’s desert region and the setting of Sodom and
Gomorrah. Avner suggested we use this time to discuss the historical background of the patriarchs’ encounters in Canaan.
As we left the Damia, the road began to climb almost immediately, from six hundred feet below sea level along the Jordan River to two thousand feet above in less than twenty miles. The terrain changed just as quickly, from bleak desert crumbs to garden-fresh greenery. Vendors began to appear, hawking tomatoes, cauliflower, and radishes bunched like roses. My ears began to pop. Deviations like this are commonplace in Israel, a country one-quarter the size of Scotland with as much geographic diversity as the British Empire at its peak. That diversity—and the strategic challenges it poses—may also be a central factor in why Abraham came here in the first place.
For much of history, the narrow strip of land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean has been a curiosity, the foyer to the world, a place to pass through but not to stay. The Egyptians called it “Kharu,” the Greeks and Romans “Palestina.” The Syrians called it “Canaan.” Whatever they called it, everyone coveted it, though none could control it. From its inception, the Fertile Crescent was structured like a modern American shopping mall, with two anchor stores on either end linked by a string of smaller, more vulnerable stores that were completely dependent on their larger neighbors for their economic well-being. In this case, Egypt and Mesopotamia were the anchors, and as they went so went Canaan.
One reason for this dependency is that even though Canaan contained some of the world’s biggest cities, these cities were never able to organize themselves into a coherent political body. Instead they were clients of the great powers, divided and conquered by their own crippling mix of mountains, valleys, coastline, and desert, as well as their lack of water. As Avner pointed out, “The Egyptians used to joke that Canaan was ‘that poor country dependent on rain.’ ” This reality sets up one of the crueler ironies in the history of the Bible. Geography prevented the development of a great empire in Canaan, but it was that lack of an empire that may have allowed God to promise the land to Abraham. In other words, the Promised Land, a place that for three
thousand years has proven notoriously difficult to control, became the Promised Land in large measure because in the preceding three thousand years no one had been able to control it either.
Besides being true to ancient geographic conditions, the biblical story is also remarkably true to current ones. The State of Israel can be roughly divided into three sections—the head and shoulders of the Galilee; the torso, made up of the central hills, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv; and the legs and feet of the Negev. The 1937 British plan to partition Palestine gave Jews only the head and shoulders, with a bit of coast. The UN mandate of 1948 added the legs and feet. The central hills, excluding Jerusalem, were originally given to the Arabs and have been fought over ever since. Jews have based their claim to the land largely on the Bible. The central spine of the country was home to most of the major episodes in the Five Books, also called the Pentateuch, from the Greek word meaning five-book work. These sites include Shechem, Bethel, Hebron, and Beer-sheba. The Palestinian claim was based largely on the fact that they were living in these areas before Jews began immigrating in large numbers in the nineteenth century. In recent years, some Palestinians have shifted their claim, saying they were also on the land before the patriarchs arrived in the nineteenth century
B.C.E.
Palestinians, they now say, are direct descendants of the Canaanites.
About an hour after we left the Damia we arrived at the checkpoint outside Nablus, the Arab name for Shechem, which was handed over to the Palestinians in the mid-1990s. As one of the first cities in the nascent state, Nablus has been a constant site of tension and, after canceling two trips to the area over safety concerns, we decided to rent a car from a Palestinian company in East Jerusalem to save ourselves from being stoned. Our car had Palestinian license plates—white instead of yellow—and several stickers with Arabic writing. They seemed to work. The Palestinian border guide was much friendlier than the Israeli had been and sat on our hood and smoked a cigarette while Avner
telephoned our escort. “The Palestinians are just so appreciative that an Israeli came to visit,” Avner said.