Walking the Bible

by Bruce Feiler

  “So the writers knew what they were talking about,” I said.

  “Oh, they knew, deeply. They also knew that Moab and Ammon would later become rivals of Israel. This is a retroactive justification for why they were the enemy: They were conceived in incest.”

  “It’s almost as if the Bible’s a Baedeker,” I said. “It’s certainly better than my guidebooks.”

  “It’s better because of the story,” he said. “It’s very literary, yet very obvious. It’s good versus evil. Anybody who hears this story can immediately tell you which side is good. That’s the reason so many of these stories work: The moral is very clear.”

  Back in Jerusalem I lay awake that evening, dazed and enthralled by our early experiences. I had no idea that even gentle pushing on the topography of the region would yield such immediate results. I felt as if I’d entered some virtual reality game and reemerged in a parallel world four thousand years ago. In particular I was surprised by how the stories and the places seemed so intimately connected as if each carried the memory of the other deep within it. Bring them together, as we were doing, and both were enhanced.

  But for all the added texture, I still felt somewhat removed from the central figure. Who was Abraham? What motivated him? What did he look like? I went back to see Professor Biran, who invited me to accompany him on a trip.

  It was 7:00 on a Friday morning when we left Jerusalem on our way to Israel’s northern border and Biran’s ongoing excavation in the biblical city of Dan. At eighty-eight, Professor Biran sat in the passenger seat while his longtime secretary, Honey, drove. A native of Palestine who grew up along the Nile, Avraham Biran was certainly a pioneer. An archaeologist by training, he was also the first postwar governor of Jerusalem, a consul general to the United States, head of the Israeli Department of Antiquities, and, after retirement, one of the most productive excavators of his era. He was a compact man who favored a mathematician’s clothes—short-sleeved shirts and polyester pants—but also managed to be effortlessly urbane. He reminded me of Burgess Meredith as the avuncular trainer in Rocky.

  “I never liked the name Avraham,” he said. “But I like the name Abe even less. I went to Los Angeles and they asked me my name. ‘Avraham,’ I said. They had to think about it, but after a while they said, ‘Oh! Abraham. We’ll just call you ‘Abe.’ And I said, ‘Oh, no you won’t.’ ”

  Despite this ambivalence, Professor Biran had a deep affinity with his namesake. Abraham, he noted proudly, was a man of breadth—a shepherd, a warrior, a diplomat, a husband, a father, an uncle, a judge—the world’s first Renaissance man. Based on contemporaneous images, he would likely have worn a knee-length pleated wool skirt, probably brown, with a long felt shawl draped over one shoulder. To this he would have added a bronze belt and sandals. His shoulder-length hair was likely parted in the middle, and he probably had a pointed beard and no mustache. As for skills, carpentry was popular, as was minstrel music and storytelling. With Abraham in particular, we know that he was wealthy, with large herds and enough status for pharaohs and kings to negotiate with him. The fact that he came from Ur of the Chaldeans is intriguing. In antiquity, Chaldea was famous for one thing: astronomy. This explains why some suggested Abraham used his knowledge of the stars to divine that there was only one God. Josephus went further, suggesting that Abraham taught astrology to the Egyptians, who then taught it to the Greeks, which would make Abraham the father of not just western religion but also western science.

  Abraham was also a frequent traveler, meaning he probably touched countless sites in the Promised Land, including Dan. After more than three hours we neared the site, a sprawling, tree-shrouded mound of about fifty acres within shouting distance of the Lebanese mountains. These sites, called tels, are the staple of Near Eastern archaeology, layer cakes of history in which each generation built on top of the previous one. Tels are particularly common in this region, because with no rivers, cities were constructed in the few places with reliable water, in this case a spring. Originally called Laish, this site was later renamed Dan, after one of the twelve tribes, and lent its name to the vivid expression of Israelite unity, “from Dan to Beer-sheba.”

  Professor Biran explored his excavation for a while, checking to see what his graduate students had recently uncovered, while Honey showed me around the ruins, which mostly date from the first millennium B.C.E. Around noon he met us and announced he had something to show me. We hiked uphill, until the dense canopy of eucalyptus and avocado trees unfolded, revealing a brilliant blue sky. Biran was using a cane, which attracted the attention of a flock of white butterflies.

  “Now I have a question for you, my friend,” he said. “Who invented the arch?”

  I thought for a second, a series of images flickering through my mind: stones, columns, keystones, slaves. “The Egyptians?” I said.

  He looked at me, disappointed. “The Romans,” he corrected. “You learned in school that it was the Romans. That’s why I didn’t believe what I saw when I first came here. We were working two thousand years earlier than the Romans—at the time of the patriarchs.”

  We rounded a corner and from out of the trees a large mound of rubble interrupted the path. Instead of thick underbrush, the area was clear, dominated by piles of dirt and stones.

  “One thing about digging for the Bible,” Biran said. “You have to put your faith in accidental discoveries.” He was particularly interested in how ancient cities protected themselves. In Dan, his team discovered that the southern wall was held together with columns.

  “The conclusion would be that they built all ramparts in this manner,” he said. “But we weren’t satisfied with that answer.” They pushed toward the north, where they found walls built on a slope, with no columns. Next they moved west, where they found a third technique, walls supported by buttresses. Finally they pushed east. “And there we didn’t find a stone wall at all,” he said. “We found packed mud.” More important, within the mud construction was the outline of a gate.

  As he relived the experience, Biran grew more animated. He began scurrying over the edge of the cliff. With arms, legs, and cane working in impressive tandem, the years seemed to peel from his body. When his team uncovered the gate, which they left attached to the mud bank behind it, Biran insisted his draftsman draw the structure. The draftsman refused. The dig had run past its closing date; he wanted to go home. Biran insisted, and hours later the man came sprinting. “You’ve got to come look at this,” he said. When Biran reached the site, he found the traces of an arch.

  “Now this is what people come from all over the world to see,” he said. We’d arrived at the base of the structure. The pile of rubble at the top had unfurled into a three-story arch with the outline of a semicircle on top. It looked like an entrance to a coliseum, except that it wasn’t made of marble but of crumbling, loaf-sized bricks of mud. It was two thousand years older than any arch known to exist.

  “What’s remarkable about this,” he continued, “is that you can’t find a building built years ago of mud brick that’s still standing. It’s impossible.”

  He turned to face me. “And this is where Abraham comes in,” he said. “This is why I brought you here. In Genesis 14, before Sodom and Gomorrah, you read about Abraham pursuing the kings who took Lot prisoner. And the text says, ‘He came as far as Dan.’ It was called Laish then, but that doesn’t matter. My point is that the king of this place, seeing how Abraham had won a great victory, invited him to walk up these steps. This is as close to the physical steps of Abraham that you will ever get.”

  He was caught by his own statement and for a moment abandoned his academic distance. As he did, I finally caught the glimmer of humanity in the text I’d been looking for. The chapters of Genesis devoted to Abraham have two prominent themes: how God acts toward the patriarch, and how the patriarch acts toward God. In the beginning, Abraham willingly accepts God’s promise of land and descendants. He leaves Harran for Canaan without question. He arrives in Shechem, hea
rs God’s promise, and builds an altar. He does the same in Bethel. Even the famine in Canaan, which drives Abraham to Egypt, was a test of his devotion, which Abraham pursues admirably. Eventually, though, he tires of the tests and empty promises. When will he have descendants? he asks God. When will he see a physical manifestation of God’s word?

  It was through this struggle—so human, so understandable—that I first felt a connection to Abraham. Like him, readers of Abraham’s story are expected to accept the words of God as true. Here’s what God did; here’s what he said. Embracing those words is a matter of faith. For me that task was difficult. Perhaps it was my concrete nature, or my natural obeisance to science, reason, or skepticism. Maybe it was fear of entering a realm that I couldn’t control or see. But I found myself wanting more. Before I could consider what the biblical characters feel toward God, I needed to feel a connection to them. I needed something to touch, a physical manifestation of their lives.

  And here it was. Here was a way, however abstract, to touch Abraham and through him, to touch his world. Leading me up the short flight of stairs, Professor Biran took my hand and placed it against the wall, which was crumbly like stale bread. “Do you feel that?” he said. He was referring not to the texture, but to the surge of excitement.

  “Every time I come here I feel the same thing,” he said. “And I say to myself, that’s what Abraham must have felt. It’s a sense of history.”

  I withdrew my hand. A dusting of dirt came off on my fingers. “And if people say, ‘You’ve got no evidence of this. You’re making this up’?”

  “I say, You’re right. I have no evidence the Abraham walked here. I would never publish it. But in a lecture, on a tour—to you—I would say it, because people are familiar with Abraham, because it makes his story more real. And because even though I’m a scientist, I can still have faith.” He smiled, and for the first time all day there was a touch of mortality in his voice. “And because it’s my name as well. So what the hell? I want to feel part of the Bible, too.”

  2. Take Now Thy Son

  They were dancing in the streets on Sunday in one of the holiest enclaves in Israel.

  It was two days after my trip to Dan when I awoke to read in the Jerusalem Post that a festival was under way in Hebron, the first place Abraham purchases land, the burial site of his family, and home to more bloodshed in recent years than any place on the biblical route. If Shechem was bad, Hebron was worse: Avner suggested we hire a driver, then postponed two trips when shooting erupted. The opportunity to go on festival day seemed prudent (if nothing else, there would be heightened security), and after learning that Avner had other plans, I hurried to the bus station. Even without him, this seemed a good opportunity to plunge into the next section of Genesis, chapters 20 to 26, which contain some of the more memorable passages in the patriarchal narrative, including the birth of Isaac, the death of Sarah, and the gripping scene in which Abraham is asked to sacrifice their son. These chapters also introduce another ongoing theme in the Pentateuch, tension between the patriarchs and their sons.

  A police van stood waiting to escort the bus, which had bulletproof glass on the windows and chain-link fencing over the windshield. Inside, every seat was taken, mostly with ultra-Orthodox Jews. As we crossed into the West Bank, the man beside me, in his fifties with a gray beard, handed his prayer book to his wife and walked to the front. There he unfolded a smaller book from a plastic envelope, lifted the microphone, and recited a prayer. When he finished he was joined by a chorus of “Amen’s” as he returned to his seat, repackaged his book, and reclaimed his prayer book from his wife.

  “It’s the prayer for traveling,” the man beside me explained. He had traveled with his family from Brooklyn to revisit the place where he’d met his wife. She was sitting nearby, breast-feeding a baby. Her sister sat next to her with two more children. “Together we have twelve,” the man explained.

  As we drove, the man gave a tour to his eight-year-old son, Noah, pointing out the longest bridge and then the longest tunnel in Israel. “That’s Efrat,” the man said, referring to a controversial Jewish settlement.

  As we neared Hebron the tension mounted. We stopped to pick up hitchhiking soldiers, who stood in the aisles with their machine guns. We pulled to a gate, and several women in front of me craned to watch. Hebron has been a flashpoint for nearly a century. One of the few spots to have an almost continuous Jewish presence since 1540, Hebron enjoyed largely peaceful relations until 1929, when local Arabs rioted, killed sixty Jews, and wounded fifty more. Banished for decades, Jews began returning to the nearby town of Kiryat Arba after the Six-Day War in 1967. Eventually a few brazen settlers moved into the city itself to be near the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the burial home to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, along with Sarah and Isaac’s wife, Rebekah. Rachel, Jacob’s wife, died on her way to Hebron and was buried outside Jerusalem.

  In 1980, a local Jewish high school student was murdered in Hebron, and later eight more were shot from a building. Jewish settlers swarmed the neighborhood, seeking retaliation. That began a cycle of murder and revenge that only worsened after the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, which gave the Palestinians control of the city. Twenty percent was reserved for Jews, an area the size of a few city blocks. The fifty-five families who occupy the Jewish quarter today are like the core of one of those stackable Russian dolls: a Jewish enclave surrounded by an Arab city; an Arab city surrounded by the Occupied West Bank; the West Bank surrounded by the Jewish State; the Jewish State surrounded by the Arab World; the Arab World surrounded by the West. Who has the upper hand; who is more vulnerable? It’s not that the answer is complicated. There simply is no answer.

  We traveled through eight checkpoints in the next ten minutes; the watchtowers grew taller. We were descending through the Arab body of town into the Jewish heart. A boy across from me, no more than thirteen, changed the prayer tape in his Walkman and continued nodding, oblivious to the stress. Outside, at one of the checkpoints, a soldier focused the scope on his sniper’s rifle. He was wearing a helmet with a visor that shielded his face from the sun, but he appeared to be not much older than Noah, who continued answering questions from his father.

  “And do you know why we’re coming here?” the father asked.

  “Because Abraham is buried here,” the boy said, jubilantly.

  “That’s right,” his father said.

  “He’s the father of the Jews,” Noah added.

  “That’s right,” his father said. “And Isaac’s buried here, too. Do you know Isaac?”

  The boy acted puzzled for a second. “The uncle of the Jews?”

  Even around the bus depot, the streets were clogged. Arab vendors pushed forward hawking raisins, dried apricots, pink velour rugs, and every electronic gadget imaginable, from portable microphones to blenders. Hello? Hello! Shalom! Bevakahsha! Up a small hill, an even greater throng lined the plaza. Tens of thousands crammed into the mile or so in front of the tomb, an imposing, four-story limestone building on top of the burial caves that looks like a cross between an Ottoman fortress and a college gymnasium. Even a cannonball could not penetrate these walls.

  Out in front, dozens of Orthodox Jewish vendors vied for attention. One foldout table overflowed with books offering guidance from long-bearded rabbis. Another sold jigsaw puzzles with pictures of the Western Wall. Four boys wearing sandals, white shirts, and talit, traditional Jewish prayer shawls, danced on the sidewalk, here a do-si-do, there a hora, occasionally clicking their heels like square dancers. The scene looked like the opening number from Fiddler on the Roof. There were bumper stickers, blankets, places to wash, and everywhere boys holding plastic canisters, which they shook and asked for contributions for various charities. All around dozens of loudspeakers screamed slogans, prayers, and testimonials of salvation. “Are you Jewish?” someone asked, tugging at my arm. “Are you Jewish?” Another spun me around. In months of traveling around the Middle East, I was never asked that question more than during my tri
p to Hebron.

  “Are you Jewish?” a woman behind a table cried. Her station was scattered with boxes wrapped in aluminum foil and copies of a pamphlet, L’Chaim, “The Weekly Publication for Every Jewish Person, Dedicated to the Memory of Rebbitzin Chaya Mushka Schneerson.”

  When I said yes, she asked me for my favorite Hebrew letter. There are 304,000 characters in the Torah, she said, and the Lubavitch movement was making a Bible with each character assigned to a different person. She also asked for my mother’s name. “Is she Jewish?” she said, a not-so-subtle way of discerning whether I was a “true” Jew. I said yes and gave her several more names. “God bless you,” she said.

  Closer to the cave I stopped by a booth that sold photographs of Rebbe Schneerson. The man behind the table, a Frenchman named Michel, claimed to be the official photographer of the movement. I asked him why there were so many Lubavitchers in Hebron today.

  “We come here to celebrate,” he said. “We come every year. This is where our relatives are buried.”

  “How does this compare to the Western Wall?”

  “The Western Wall has less meaning for me than this. The Wall is a physical thing. These are actual people. We believe that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are not just buried here, we believe they’re still alive.” He told me the story of someone who had lost a sword, went inside a cave to look for it, and encountered Abraham.

  “The patriarchs are still alive,” I said, “or their spirit is still alive?”

  “They are alive.”

  “And what will you ask them for?”

  “Whatever we need. We ask, and they provide. Somebody wants to get married. Somebody is going to have a child. I will ask for peace. We need peace more than anything.”

  I walked up another hill and merged with several thousand people squeezed in line behind a bank of metal detectors. We were waiting to enter one of the most sacred spots in Judaism, the first place Abraham purchases a spot in the Promised Land and thus starts to claim his covenant.