Walking the Bible

by Bruce Feiler

  Today Hatzor sprawls across two hundred acres in Upper Galilee like a giant, bottle-shaped mesa. On a sunny afternoon, a few tourists wandered the remains. They struggled to link the stubby walls with the grand account of Joshua. They weren’t alone. During Yadin’s tenure, the composer Leonard Bernstein visited Hatzor. He was viewing some Canaanite ruins uncovered by Avner’s mentor, Trude Dhotan, when a call came from the upper tel, “We’ve found Solomon’s Gate!” Bernstein was thrilled. “This is magnificent!” he announced. “I’ll write an oratorio, I’ll write a symphony, I’ll write an opera.” He hopped in a jeep and went hurrying to the spot. Five minutes later he returned, dejected. What he had imagined was a soaring gate, no doubt adorned with trumpets and flags, turned out to be little more than a few stones in the ground. “He was devastated,” Trude recalled. “He never wrote an oratorio, a symphony, or an opera.”

  Avner and I explored the site, as he pointed out features typical of Canaanite cities—the small homes with courtyards, the giant palace with plaster walls. Eventually we arrived at Solomon’s Gate, which on the surface was not so impressive, until Avner noted that the design was the same as one in Megiddo. According to the book of Kings, which follows the Pentateuch, Solomon built such walls in Jerusalem, Gezer, Megiddo, and Hatzor. “What we have here is a clear piece of archaeological evidence that supports the text,” Avner said. “But you have to be able to read the stones.”

  “Everybody in Israel seems to be able to read them,” I said.

  “That’s true. A kid here will know what a tel is, that stones mean people.”

  “And that’s the point: Stones mean people. Few around the world understand that connection.”

  We hiked down to the lower tel, which was unexcavated and covered in grass. On top of a small hill we retrieved our Bibles. A grasshopper leapt onto my lap. Though the text never says Jacob was in Hatzor, it does suggest he came close. On his way to Harran, after hearing of his brother’s threat, Jacob comes upon a “certain place.” The place was probably on the Patriarchs’ Road and thus near Hatzor. Taking one of the stones of the place, he puts it under his head and lies down to sleep. He has a dream in which he sees a ladder, with “angels of God” going up and down on it. God appears and renews his covenant, promising to give Jacob the land promised to his father and grandfather.

  Later, on his way back from Harran with Leah, Rachel, and their children, Jacob again settles near here. He flees Harran under tense conditions with his father-in-law, Laban. Jacob believes Laban has cheated him, so he decides to leave without saying good-bye; Rachel, in retaliation, steals her father’s idols. Laban pursues them, but he and Jacob reconcile. Jacob then faces an even greater threat: his brother, who is coming to meet him with four hundred men. Jacob sends his servants with extravagant gifts for Esau, including two hundred she-goats and twenty he-goats, two hundred ewes and twenty rams, forty cows and ten bulls, twenty she-asses and ten he-asses.

  That night he sends his family across the Jabbok River in what is today Jordan, and remains alone on the other side. A man wrestles with him overnight, and when the man sees that he has not won, he “wrenches Jacob’s hip at its socket, so that the socket of his hip was strained.” The two become entangled again, and the man says, “Let me go, for dawn is breaking,” to which Jacob replies, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.”“What is your name?” the man asks, and Jacob tells him. The man then announces, “Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with beings divine and human and have prevailed.” The man departs, and Jacob names the place “Peniel,” which literally means “face of God,” but which the text says means, “I have seen a divine being face to face, yet my life has been preserved.” The text then adds, “The children of Israel to this day do not eat the thigh muscle that is on the socket of the hip, since Jacob’s hip socket was wrenched at the thigh muscle.” No animal is given for this dictum.

  Looking up, Jacob sees Esau approaching. Jacob bows seven times before his brother, who then comes running to greet him. The two embrace and weep. Jacob introduces his family and Esau asks why they are bowing down. “To gain my lord’s favor,” Jacob says. But “I have enough,” Esau says. “Let what you have remain yours.” But Jacob insists, “for to see your face is like seeing the face of God,” and Esau accepts a small present. Esau then returns to Edom and Jacob travels to Shechem, just south of Hatzor, and settles with his family.

  So why stop here and not farther south, like Beer-sheba or Gerar? I asked Avner.

  “Why not?” he said. “It’s better land, more room for grazing. The text says Jacob is a ‘people’ now, no longer a family.”

  Once in Shechem, what follows is the final contact between the patriarchs and the Canaanites, a last chance for the “people” to test its strength. Dinah, Jacob’s daughter with Leah, is raped by a local dignitary named Shechem, the son of the city’s chief (and no apparent relation to the town). Shechem wants to marry Dinah and offers her family rights to settle the land. “Intermarry with us,” Shechem’s father proposes to Jacob’s sons. “Give your daughters to us, and take our daughters for yourselves. You will dwell among us, and the land will be open before you.” This is a mark of the family’s status, and Jacob’s sons pretend to agree, but only if the residents agree to be circumcised, to “become like us.” The residents concur, but two of Jacob’s sons—Simeon and Levi—change their mind and plunder the town, abducting the women, children, and wealth. Jacob is furious. “You have brought trouble on me,” he tells his sons, “making me odious among the inhabitants of the land.” Fearing retaliation, he leads the family away.

  “But why run away?” I said. “The patriarchs’ clan is clearly the strongest it’s been. The Canaanites are so respectful they want to intermarry. They even agree to be circumcised. Why not go ahead and fulfill the covenant?”

  “Because there’s something missing,” Avner said. “The brothers are not the ones to bestow circumcision. Circumcision is a covenant between man and God. Jacob’s sons are trying to circumvent that.”

  “So they’re not ready.”

  “They may be stronger than ever. They can stand up to the biggest cities in Canaan now. They may even be more clever than the Canaanites. But they haven’t yet received the laws—the Ten Commandments and others—that will make them servants of God. The conquest must wait. They’ve got to go into bondage.”

  We left Hatzor and drove a few miles south to Vered Ha-Galil, our final stop in Israel. Vered Ha-Galil is a legendary ranch overlooking the Sea of Galilee started in 1961 by Yehuda Avni, a Chicago transplant whose original name was Edward Schneider. We had run into Yehuda on our way to Hatzor during a pancake breakfast (his wife knew Avner’s mother), and he invited us to return for an afternoon horseback ride.

  Yehuda greeted us at the door and led us to the porch with a pitcher of lemonade. He was a weather-worn man with a longshoreman’s hands, and when he said his uncle had been a milkman on the West Side of Chicago it seemed fitting. He developed his love of horses by helping his uncle deliver bottled milk from a horse-drawn wagon. As a boy, he would sit in religious school pretending to read the Talmud, with a copy of a Zane Grey novel tucked inside. “Every now and then the rebbe would catch me and give me a few whacks,” he said.

  After a while, Avner opted to make some phone calls and Yehuda and I walked to the stables. Vered Ha-Galil is a rarity, a private farm not associated with a kibbutz. In addition to the horses and a few cabins for tourists, Yehuda and his family grow oranges, olives, and litchis. A leafy informality prevails, with haystacks on the road and Dolly Parton on the stereo. Once we mounted our horses and stepped onto the trail, the panorama of history opened before us. Up above was a Crusader fortress. Down below the Mount of Beatitudes, where Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount. Directly in front was the highway. “When Abraham chased the kings to Dan,” Yehuda said. “He came on that road. Every great power in history passed through here.”

  We started down a h
ill and up another. Our horses’ hooves clicked on the limestone and lava. A hawk swirled overhead. Yehuda, then still known as Edward, left Chicago in 1943 to join the 82nd Airborne in France. Two years later his company liberated a Nazi concentration camp in Germany. “Those still alive were like skeletons,” he said. “I spoke Yiddish, and I asked somebody his name. He was afraid. ‘Are you Jewish?’ he asked. Then he touched me, and touched my rifle. He called his people. ‘Look, there’s a Jew standing here, and he has a gun!’ The whole group crowded around me, just touching me. They were crying. I was crying. It was an unforgettable moment.”

  After the war, Yehuda moved to Geneva, enrolled in the university, and lived with an Italian girlfriend. One day she announced she was going to a meeting of the Zionist movement. “I wasn’t the least bit interested in the meeting,” he said, “but of course I was interested in her.” At the meeting a Swiss officer described his experience in the Israeli War of Independence and declared the need for volunteers. Yehuda, seeking an adventure, volunteered, and a month later boarded a boat for Haifa. The day before he landed, the war ended. Yehuda decided that he would stay two weeks and return.

  “I got off the boat and started walking down the main street, Har Herzl. I walked down the south side of the street, then the north side, and I had this strange feeling. It’s not a matter of a revelation, but I said to myself, ‘Look, here you are in a country where you don’t know a soul, you have no friends or relatives, and yet you feel completely at home, like you’ve never felt anyplace else.’ That walk, from one side of the street to the other, was decisive. I had made up my mind that this was the country where I was going to live.”

  “So what was the feeling?” I said.

  “Later I was told that Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, wrote that deep inside, somewhere, someplace, every Jew has a niche in which he knows that Israel is his land. It just felt self-obvious, like it was in my DNA.”

  “Your DNA!?” I was shocked—and fascinated—to hear a reference that reminded me of the feeling I had in Turkey.

  “We Jews are divided into three categories,” he said. “The Cohanim, who are the priests; the Levites, the servants of the Temple; and the masses. Scientists recently did DNA tests on the Cohanim. They found that for generations the Cohanim have passed down the same Y-chromosome from father to son. The chain goes back three thousand years. Now that says something. As a tribe we Jews have various characteristics. The fact that I’m a farmer and ride horses, the same way my forefathers were farmers and rode donkeys, makes sense.”

  “So who’s the father of this strand?”

  “It goes back to the Bible, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. There are many things we can’t be proud of as a people. But the fact is, we’re closely identified with this piece of land. And as far as I’m concerned, just being here, being able to play some part, is again helping this land come to flower. When I came here this was rock and thistle. Over the years I’ve helped transform it.”

  A few minutes later we arrived at our destination, a fourteenth-century way station built by Mamluk warlords from Egypt, and Yehuda dismounted. We tied our horses to an oak tree and stepped inside the two-story caravansary—a motel for passing caravans—built around a courtyard. It reminded me of a hotel where Avner and I ate dinner in Diyarbakir, right down to the alternating layers of white limestone and black basalt. Yehuda had a dream to turn the facility, abandoned in 1900, into a hotel. “All I need is $750,000,” he said.

  He’d done it before. After that day in Haifa, Yehuda helped set up a kibbutz in the Negev, got married, then started a rose farm in another planned community. Eventually he decided to break away from organized settlements and set out on a six-month walking tour looking for land. “It was just like the early Israelites,” he said. “The fertile areas were already occupied and the only open spaces were the rocky ones. One day I was walking with a surveyor and we came upon a hill. We waded through thistles up to our waists. We both looked out; there were no trees or anything. I said, ‘This is it.’ He said, ‘This is it.’ And that was it.” He called the ranch “The Rose of Galilee.”

  I asked him if archaeology had played a role in fostering the connection between people like him and the land.

  “I can answer you very easily,” he said. “Follow me.” He led the way back through the courtyard and up a short, steep hill. A few speckled horses from a kibbutz were grazing on top. A monarch butterfly alighted on a cow’s skull. On top of the hill was a well, covered by a stone dome. “Instead of the word ‘archaeology,’ use the term ‘family history,’ ” Yehuda said. “I used to bring my children here. This is Joseph’s well. It’s a place of pilgrimage. Muslims believe this is where Joseph was thrown into a well by his brothers. Contemporary scholars don’t agree; they say it happened further south. But everyone agrees that Joseph was here, and therefore Jacob.” He tossed a rock into the well, which was about fifty feet deep.

  “Over there,” he continued, pointing to his house, “we found a farm from 200 B.C.E. The man who lived there had a winepress, which we excavated. He probably made wine for the community of Chorazin. Later the winepress was verified by Yigal Yadin.”

  “Yadin?” I said. “Who called him?”

  “He used to stop by the ranch. We got to know each other, and afterward I used to help in Hatzor. He was very passionate, intense. In order to be a successful archaeologist you have to be more than an excavator; you have to be able to promote. He was really good at that.”

  “It sounds like you’re an amateur archaeologist.”

  “I’m an amateur historian,” he said. “Back in the early sixties I had a worker, Sait. We used to sit on the press and have our lunch, and we would muse, ‘Who was this man who lived here? How many wives did he have? How many children?’ After a few days Sait came back and said, ‘Yehuda, your problem is solved. I talked to the elders of the village. They said to do this: If you want to know who the original owner was, you have to come up here and sleep overnight, using as a pillow one of the stones from his house. And at that point the original owner will come to you in a dream and identify himself.’ ” Yehuda smiled at the similarity with Jacob. “But don’t ask me, I haven’t done it yet.”

  “What? You haven’t done it yet?!?”

  “Yet. But I believe in subliminal consciousness. You pick up shreds here, shreds there. Then all the shreds come together and you have a picture.”

  “So do you feel connected to that man?”

  “Sure. I’m a continuation. He was here then and I’m here now. And my children and grandchildren are connected also. I assume that in another couple hundred years there’ll also be some sort of relations of mine here. It’s a happy situation.”

  As he was speaking he had turned away from me and was looking out over the horizon, where the white sun was dipping into an orange film. And I realized for the first time why we had really come on this ride. I realized without even asking what Yehuda Avni had in common with Avraham Biran, what he shared with Gabi Barkay and Avraham Malamat, what connected him to Fern Dobuler and David Wilder. They were all pioneers. They were founders. They were taking a land that once was hostile—partly occupied and partly abandoned—and slowly making it their own. And they were doing so for completely different reasons that all had one thing in common: a voice inside them told them this land was home. For some the voice was God. For others it was history. For all it was the Bible. And this, I realized, was the legacy of Genesis: this place, the land of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the home of David, Solomon, and Jesus, would forever be associated with beginnings, with making fresh starts. With Creation.

  And perhaps, even more, with legacy.

  Before coming to Israel, I thought of the place in terms of its twentieth-century achievement—carving a country out of the desert, making a home in a hostile world. I knew, of course, that Jesus had walked in the Promised Land. I knew that David and Solomon had built in Jerusalem. I knew, abstractly, that the patriarchs had passed here. But I do
n’t think I had ever fully imagined the place as the foundry out of which the Bible was forged, as a literary landscape as rich and bountiful as Shakespeare’s England, Flaubert’s France, or Joyce’s Ireland. If anything, what I discovered was that the wars of the past one hundred years, the tensions of the last one thousand years, were made more bearable—and more meaningful—by the events of four thousand years ago. And what I also discovered is that those events are arguably more alive today than at any time since their first telling. The past not only enriches the present here; it is the present.

  One reason, curiously, is academia. All of the scholarly research about the Bible I dabbled in at the beginning of this process—the history, the archaeology, the literary analysis—far from deadening the stories, as I briefly feared, had actually helped make them more alive. It did this by giving the stories more context, more color, and, oddly, more credibility, first by attacking them, then by allowing them to revive. The fact that I met so many scholars who not only confirmed the accuracy of the Bible but also reinforced its beauty—its sheer power to bring these professional skeptics to unexpected emotional depths—freed me to shuck off my own intellectual misgivings and follow a similar route. Not only could I walk in Abraham’s footsteps, I could walk in Avraham Biran’s, as well. I could follow Gabi Barkay’s lead, and Avner Goren’s, too. I could find, for myself, a new, more personal way into the text—my own re-creation, as it were—which, I now realized, is exactly what I’d been doing all along.