Walking the Bible

by Bruce Feiler

  This air of authenticity is one reason the story has persevered. All through our drive to Sanliurfa, we saw living details—sheep, shepherds, dust, robes. It became like a game of “I Spy.” There’s a donkey:“Abraham’s transportation!” After a while we became so preoccupied that we didn’t even notice when Sait went speeding through a roundabout and suddenly got motioned over by the police. Instantly, our worst fears returned. An officer in a crisp blue uniform came to the window and asked Sait to step outside. As he did, Avner and I hid our equipment and placed a sign from the tourist authority on the dashboard. The officer was joined by another. A green army jeep sped up, followed by a motorcycle. We got out of the car. Suddenly there were five different officials, each wearing a different uniform, prodding our car, our passports, our GPS device. The men seemed like unshaven boys playing grown-up in a quiet war. “It’s almost a police state,” Avner whispered.

  Finally a car pulled up and a plainclothes officer in a black suit spoke to the men in the reverse order in which they had arrived. He examined the situation, the car, us. He spoke with Sait. And then, just as quickly as the tension had mounted, he defused it. He shook our hands and gestured for us to proceed. Before we did, Sait began clearing the backseat of our bags and maps and in plopped a teenage boy. Our penance was to give him a ride. “Probably the son of the cop,” Avner mused.

  But he turned out to be more than that. Yusuf, eighteen, was studying to be an English teacher. Though he was dressed in ratty jeans and a scruffy T-shirt, his hair was neatly combed over his ears. He offered to take us on a tour—part of the scam?—but insisted he didn’t want to be paid. He directed us toward the center of town.

  Sanliurfa, like many frontier towns, has an eclectic history. In the Byzantine era it was the center of the cult of Nestorius, a bishop who questioned the divinity of Christ. As late as 578 a local governor was caught performing a sacrifice to Zeus. In recent years it’s been a hotbed of Muslim fundamentalism. For us it had a different meaning. While the Bible says Abraham was born in Ur, Islamic legend suggests he was born here.

  Leaving our car, Yusuf led us to a park at the base of the twelfth-century citadel that dominates the crowded city. It was early evening by the time we arrived, and dozens of strollers were enjoying a respite from the heat. We approached a door carved into the limestone mountain. Above the door was a sign: “This is the cave where Prophet Abraham was born. Please take your shoes off and go straight to the carpet.” We ducked inside where the lime green carpet filled a space about the size of a large elevator. Next door was another room for women. We stared down at the cavern, which was filled with water and a few tossed coins. “People come here from all over the country to collect holy water for their hometowns,” Yusuf said.

  Outside we continued to a nearby pond, which was lined on one side by a mosque, and on the other by a graceful colonnade. We began to discuss Abraham. Since the Bible is completely silent on his early life, scores of legends popped up over the centuries. According to Jewish lore, on the night Abraham was born, a great star passed through the sky, devouring four smaller stars. Advisers told King Nimrod that the sign meant the newly born son of Terah would one day conquer Nimrod’s kingdom and change its religion. The king tried to purchase the boy, but Terah substituted the son of a slave and sent Abraham and his mother, Emtelai, into hiding.

  According to accounts gathered in Jewish texts from the early first millennium C.E., even as a boy, Abraham was able to divine from the stars that there was only one God. Since the stars came out at night and disappeared during the day, the boy reasoned, they could not have created the world, as tradition held. Instead, there must be an invisible, single God above them. This view put Abraham at odds with his father, who legend held was an idol-maker. When Abraham smashed his father’s idols, Terah turned his son over to the king. Abraham appeared before Nimrod in a vast throne room. The boy approached the throne and began shaking it so hard that all the idols in the room came smashing to the ground. Nimrod ordered that the boy be thrown into a fiery furnace. An immense pile was lit. Abraham was stripped naked, bound, and thrown into the fire. His ropes burned, but he did not.

  In Jewish tradition, these stories take place in the Tigris-Euphrates basin. Muslims, however, altered the story so that Abraham was not born in Ur, in the southeast of Mesopotamia, but in Sanliurfa, in the northwest, closer to Harran. As Yusuf explained, in the Muslim version, when Nimrod flings Abraham into the fire, God intervenes at the last minute, turning the flames into water and the firewood into carp. The carp swimming in the pond in Sanliurfa today are said to be descendants of the originals and anyone caught eating them will go blind—a fate that supposedly befell two soldiers as recently as 1989.

  “So why do you think this happened here?” I asked Yusuf. Some twinkling lights blinked on around the pool, lending it a carousel-like atmosphere.

  “Because this was a very important city in the ancient world. Like Babylon, here many roads came together. It was a junction, a holy place.”

  “Is it still holy today?” I asked.

  He thought for a second. “I don’t like to talk politics,” he said.

  The following day was our last in Turkey, and we planned to visit Harran, the setting of the pivotal scene in which God first speaks to Abraham. We drove south out of Sanliurfa into the dustiest part of the country, on a road so straight it seemed to have purpose. Adobe houses spotted the fields. Even the army barracks had roofs of mud. On the horizon a small bank of hills appeared, beyond which the Rift Valley extended to Africa. “Drop some water here, it would probably make its way to the Dead Sea,” Avner said.

  As we sped along, I began to feel a certain pull from the landscape, and I realized that this trip had begun to affect me some place deep in my body. It wasn’t my head, or my heart. It wasn’t even my feet. It was someplace so new to me that I couldn’t locate it at first, or give it a name. It was a feeling of gravity. A feeling that I wanted to take off all my clothes and lie facedown on the soil. At once I recalled my grandmother’s funeral and the gulping ache I felt when they tossed a handful of soil on her coffin:“From ashes to ashes, from dust to dust.” Not until this car ride, staring at this soil, did I fully understand what that phrase meant. Adam had been made from dust; his name is derived from the word adama, earth. “For dust you are,” God says to Adam, “and to dust you shall return.” Here was the source of that soil, I realized, and at that moment I had to resist the temptation to leap out and touch it.

  So where did this feeling come from? For most of my life, my religious identity was not connected to a particular place, and certainly not to any place in the Bible. As a fifth-generation American Jew from the South, I had a strong attachment to Judaism, but one based on family, community, ethics, public service; not spirituality or mysticism. And not on any deep-seated attachment to the Promised Land. Instead, I was attached to the South, and like many Jewish southerners, I struggled between a religion that gave me a sense of identity and a place that made me feel at home.

  I accepted this dichotomy because like many people my age I was not particularly defined by spiritual quests, or the search for higher meaning. I can be moralistic (I used to teach junior high school). I can be earnest (I briefly enrolled in a master’s program in peace studies). I have a high tolerance for public displays of devotion—and faith (I like country music). But I have never been particularly devout myself. This attitude was partly generational. I came of age at a time largely devoid of anguish and hardship; I never witnessed a war; few of my friends had suffered from personal tragedy. Instead, the hallmarks of my life were the emblems of America at the peak of its prosperity: opportunity, possibility, reinvention. Mine was the generation that could have it all. Our ethos was built on the belief that we could control everything: our bodies, our minds, our bank accounts. Got a problem? Change channels, switch jobs, take a pill, go to the gym. Our bibles were our Day-Timers. Our god was self-reliance.

  For me this sense of boundless
freedom was bolstered by a desire to travel. I always believed that I was able to venture so far afield in my life because I had a strong sense of family and a stronger sense of place. I wasn’t looking for a new way of life, or a new place to call home. I have a home, which I happily carry around within me, and which inevitably lures me back from afar. I was like one of those bungee cords you pull out from a suitcase that briefly attaches to something else and then, when its task is complete, snaps back into place.

  Now, for the first time, the bungee cord seemed to be catching in another place. What happened that afternoon in Turkey was that some ill-defined part of me, some homeless portion of my consciousness that I hadn’t even realized was looking for a home, suddenly found a place where it felt comfortable and surged forward to put down anchor. Here was a piece of ancient land—completely alien, yet completely familiar—that seemed to draw me to it in a way I never thought possible outside my hometown. It’s as if my internal zip code were being recalibrated, as if my genes were being jiggled and respun.

  Once I recognized this feeling I recoiled at the implications: I was not a different person, I said to myself. I was not being remade. I just felt myself loosening a bit—sort of like you do to a pair of shoelaces before climbing a mountain—then tightening up for a better grip with the ground. This feeling triggered a question that would stick with me for the remainder of our travels. Was I imagining this connection because of a lifetime of biblical associations, or was this ground somehow part of me already? Was I reacting to a spirit that existed in the place, or did that spirit exist within me? Was it in my DNA?

  We arrived in Harran in midafternoon and were immediately besieged by another teenage boy anxious to give us a tour. We demurred. “But I know the famous archaeologist Abunar,” he said.

  “I am Abunar!” Avner said, using the Arabic pronunciation of his name. The boy slunk off, embarrassed. “I probably met his father sometime,” Avner said.

  We proceeded up the hill to one of the ghastliest places I’ve ever been. A panorama of isolation appeared, with a village and ancient ruins buried underneath a coating of dirt the color of sour milk. One of the world’s earliest settled communities, Harran has been mostly abandoned since the Crusades. T. E. Lawrence discovered an eighth-century mosque here, and its broken pillars and tower are still frozen in time, like a shipwreck under water. Even the village itself seems arrested in its development. Half the homes have beehive roofs, circular domes made of mud that serve as a flue to remove heat in the summer. A few satellite dishes did little to lessen the feeling of desolation.

  We walked around for a few hours before climbing to the top of the ruin and pulling out our Bibles. After Abraham arrives in Harran, God—unexpected and unannounced—suddenly starts speaking to him, saying, “Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house, to the land that I will show you.” It’s one of the most famous passages in the Bible, and the one I read during my Bar Mitzvah. “I will make of you a great nation,” God says, “and I will bless you; I will make your name great.”

  Though there were no walls around, the words still seemed to echo a bit. It was late afternoon by now. The sun, off to the west in Syria, set the dust on fire, with plumes kicking up behind a herd of goats. “Why are those words so famous?” I asked.

  “Because they’re the beginning of everything,” Avner said. “Of monotheism, of creating the Jewish people. Leaving this place is leaving behind the old faith, the old pattern of life, the fertility—for a new start.”

  “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.”

  1. In the Land of Canaan

  The 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.