Walking the Bible

by Bruce Feiler

  And what Yehuda Avni had been doing for years. “So,” I said to Yehuda after a while, waking him from his reverie. “Are you a patriarch?”

  “Everyone’s a patriarch,” he said. “I have the same respect for somebody who lives in the middle of Haifa and has a shop, or is a carpenter or a craftsman. He came to work as an immigrant from Poland or Russia or Morocco, and established himself, raised a family. Israel is full of people like me, who started with nothing and have created something.”

  “But that’s the story: going forth, leaving your clan, going out and taking a rocky land, and making it home—”

  “And never finishing,” he said, completing my sentence. “Right now I have a list of two, three pages of items that need to be done. I’m like Erskine Caldwell, God’s Little Acre. This is my little acre. My mission is to make it as beautiful as possible.” He clasped his hands together in a ball. “Israel is like an onion,” he said. “You can start unpeeling. You begin with the battles that were fought here in 1948. Peel back another layer, you have the Crusader era, the Byzantine era, the Talmudic era, the Roman era. You have the Israelites, the Canaanites. You’re not just looking at rock and stone, you’re looking at flesh and blood.”

  “So what’s at the heart of the onion?” I said.

  “It’s people, living on the land, creating, dying. Being. Life is very banal when all is said and done.”

  “Why is that banal? Why isn’t that beautiful?”

  “Banal can also be beautiful. You’re born, you grow up, you marry, raise children, have a family, love. You die, they continue. And along that line you live. I get up every morning and enjoy looking at the Sea of Galilee. I enjoy talking to people. I enjoy my work. Perhaps that’s not banal after all. That’s God’s little dream.”

  1. On the Banks of the Nile

  El Al Flight 443 touched down in Cairo after dark. The plane taxied to a stop on the tarmac and the door opened onto a slab of thick black air. Stepping onto the stairs, I felt the familiar slap of desert, like staring into a hair dryer. But unlike Jerusalem, here the air contained something else. Here, there was the smell of water.

  The distance between Jerusalem and Cairo is almost impossible to measure. By foot it should take about a month, by camel two weeks, by bus a day. But for most of history, such conventional means rarely worked. Abraham made it fairly easily, as did Mary and Joseph when they fled Bethlehem with the baby Jesus to escape the wrath of Herod. But Moses, going the other way, took forty years, and still fell short. Napoleon got bogged down in the dunes, as did the English army a century later. During the first thirty years of the Israeli state, the 250 miles from one city to the other was wider than any desert, and more impenetrable.

  Even the advent of air travel, which has reduced the trip to an hour, has done little to reduce the distance. The first time I arrived, a year earlier, the flight landed on the other side of midnight and I disembarked into a huddle of dark-bearded men and gun-toting soldiers. Generations of anxiety instantly came bubbling up in my throat like bile. Inside the terminal I faced a dizzying clamor of dim red lights and outstretched hands. I went to change money for a visa, but when I signed the traveler’s check the clerk insisted it wasn’t valid. “But you just approved it,” I said. “Sorry,” he said. I started to raise my voice, and he reluctantly slid over the money.

  Outside the airport that night, hordes of leather-coated taxi drivers came surging. Bartering with one produced catcalls from the others, and later poundings on his hood when they thought I had prevailed in the negotiations. An hour later, after twenty minutes spent driving around Giza looking for my hotel, I was ready to pound the hood myself. My frustration only grew when I arrived in my room, with its stained red carpet, dripping faucet, and avocado glow from the fluorescent lamp. I felt helpless, an emotion that worsened in the days to come when something I ate quietly gutted my stomach and left me intimate with Cairo’s tradition of seatless toilets. It was as if some childhood prejudice against Egypt had spread to my body, Tutankhamen’s revenge.

  But something else happened on that trip. After gulping down my disorientation, I ventured into the lobby to inquire about guides and the attendant spent fifteen minutes unfolding tattered pieces of paper until he found the name of a guide who spoke English. I went outside for a walk, initially ignoring some teenagers who were heckling me, until I realized that they were merely offering a smoke and trying to ask me a question, “Do you know Michael Jordan?” And by the following night I felt so comfortable that I said good-bye to my guide and boarded a public Volkswagen minibus in the direction of Giza. When I asked for the right stop, the fifteen people in the van joined in the conversation and eventually persuaded the driver to change his course. Half of the riders disembarked early to walk me to my destination. “The biggest surprise about the Middle East,” I declared to friends, “is how friendly the Arabs are.” Tutankhamen’s allure.

  That allure lingered so long that for the Egyptian leg of our trip I welcomed Avner’s suggestion that I contact a friend of his who runs excursions down the Nile and go ahead for a few days. One shadow hanging over this trip was the issue of how easy it would be to travel around the country following several attacks on tourists by Muslim extremists anxious to destabilize the government by driving away foreign currency. An intelligence officer in Israel had warned, “Don’t go to Luxor.” I was going to Luxor, as well as to Aswan, both of them in the Nile Valley. At the moment the only way to visit these places was with police protection, which meant going in groups, which meant being met at the Cairo airport by a man with my name on a sign. I felt somewhat guilty for arriving in Egypt to investigate the enslavement of the Israelites with such conspicuous modern amenities. But given my previous arrival experience, and considering my relief at finding two working lights and a bottle of water in my hotel, I felt liberated, even though I was still several steps away from that storied part of the Bible.

  Waking up in Egypt reminded me quickly that I was back in the Third World: You can’t drink the water, but you still must eat. The Egyptian breakfast is not quite as plentiful as the Israeli, but it has a similar feel. Plates of white and yellow cheeses, bowls of steamed plums, and lots of creamy things with spices that look like crawly insects sprawled on top. Arabs like their spices still on the stem—oregano, coriander, fennel, cumin. I practically had to chew through a crown of thorns to find my way to a broiled tomato: Take that, English imperialism.

  Traveling from Lower Egypt, which is the north of the country, to Upper Egypt, which is the south, was once as forbidding as traveling from Egypt to Palestine. The two lands were bitter enemies, with Upper Egypt typically symbolized by the vulture goddess and Lower Egypt by the cobra. The first time the two were unified, around 3100 B.C.E., is considered the beginning of Egyptian history. Thomas Mann, in his reimagining of the Joseph tale, had Joseph dragged by caravan for a month to Lower Egypt, then another nine days by barge to Upper. “The empty boat was characteristic of the country,” Mann wrote, “for it was the clumsiest freighter to be found anywhere in Memphis; with a belly hold built for cargo space, latticed wooden weather-boards, a cabin consisting only of a mat-covered shelter, and a tiny but very heavy rudder fastened perpendicular to a pole at the stern.” In the nineteenth century one could go by railcar, in the twentieth century by automobile. What modern technology rendered painless, though, terrorism rendered void. Since the uprisings, Middle Egypt has been off-limits to foreigners and Upper Egypt accessible only by plane, which I planned to take at 6:15 A.M., not four hours after I fell asleep.

  The flight itself spanned pillows of arid desert, interrupted by plunging multicolored canyons. The soil, in the early morning light, seemed like giant chunks of raw chocolate. But then, suddenly, the terrain shifted. The soil began to blacken. A vivid green grass sprouted up like hair on one of those Chia pets. Palm trees leapt from the ground, an army of squirming artichokes. The vision of this ribbon of green from a landscape of brown was jolting, sort of like seeing di
ll weed sprinkled on a candy bar. But then the mind begins to kick in. This is the mother of life, the father of civilization. This is metaphor itself.

  The Nile.

  Another man with a sign met me at the Luxor airport and we drove to our first stop, the temple of Dendera, where I would meet up with the group. Though part of me wondered whether visiting Upper Egypt, which doesn’t appear by name in the Bible, would help my search, Avner assured me it would. “Egyptian history is even more important to the Bible than Mesopotamian,” he said. “Plus, these are the greatest monuments of the ancient world! You can’t understand the Bible without understanding them.” The scenery was lush, like some leafy vision of a rain forest. The vegetation covered every inch of the ground, like a salad bar, with date palms, sugarcane, onions, and clover. But the green wasn’t everywhere. Up above, lording over the strip, were the eastern hills of the Sahara, burnt as toast. And down below, like the world’s biggest gutter, was the river itself, black, brown, olive. Life.

  The Nile is to rivers what the Bible is to books. Covering one-sixth of the earth’s circumference, the river flows 4,180 miles, almost twice as long as the Mississippi, and longer than the Tigris, the Euphrates, and the Colorado Rivers combined. The river has two branches. The White Nile, the longer, begins in central Africa, feeds into Lake Victoria, then steams north through the Sudan. The Blue Nile begins in the Ethiopian highlands and joins the White in Khartoum, where together they roll 1,600 miles to the Mediterranean, which ancient Egyptians called the “Great Green.” The river, naturally, inspires awe in everyone who sees it. Herodotus called Egypt the “gift of the Nile.” Napoleon said Egypt contained, “in the Nile, the spirit of the good, and in the desert, the spirit of evil.” But for purple grandeur, no one beats the English historian Emil Ludwig, who wrote in his 1936 epic, The Nile:

  Its basin contains the biggest lake of the eastern hemisphere, the highest mountains, the biggest city of its continent. Its banks are peopled by the richest bird life of the northern hemisphere, by nearly every animal species known to Paradise, by vegetation ranging from Alpine flora and the tropical forest, through swamp, steppe, and desert to the richest arable land on earth. It feeds hundreds of different races, men of the mountain and men of the marsh, Arabs, Christians, and cannibals, pygmies and giants. The struggles of these men for power and wealth, for faith and custom, for the supremacy of colour, can be traced farther back here than anywhere else in the history of mankind—for six thousand years.

  As with the Tigris and Euphrates, the key to the river’s power was its floods. For nine months a year, 20 percent of the river’s volume comes from the White Nile, 80 percent from the Blue. From August to November, though, monsoon rains in the Ethiopian highlands cause the Blue Nile to swell and provide 95 percent of the waters of the annual inundation. Ancient priests said that Isis, mourning every summer for her brother Osiris, shed tears into the river, making it flood. Later, Muslim tradition held that the flood began with a divine drop every June 17. Though the inundation was regular (until the Aswan High Dam tamed the river in 1968), it varied in height from year to year. As a result, the pharaohs developed their own version of Groundhog Day. On the first day of the flood the priests would open a Nilometer, a marble well that measured the height of the water and was decorated with two copper eagles, one male, one female. If the female eagle “screamed” first, a minor flood was predicted. If the male eagle screamed first, a great flood was predicted, and the pharaoh immediately raised the price of corn.

  The extraordinary virility of the flood comes from its silt, a black alluvial deposit so rich in nutrients that as recently as the 1960s, before the dam trapped most of the silt, the land could yield two crops in a single year. Ancient Egyptians called the flooded territory Black Land, as opposed to the Red Land of the desert, and never built temples in the ribbon of fertility. The silt’s potency comes from its wide menu of ingredients. The Blue Nile brings volcanic ash and residue from bush fires; the White Nile adds vegetable and plant debris from its swamps. Nile silt has magnetic powers, from its high degree of iron oxide, and even contains gold, though not enough to be profitably panned. Altogether, the silt’s fertilizing power has been calculated at $85.36 an acre. (By way of comparison, it costs an average of $5.43 today to fertilize an acre of soybeans.) Like manna, Nile silt is all things to all people.

  Perhaps the best expression of this universality came when I arrived on the river that afternoon and started speaking with some of the local workers on board the ship. I asked what they thought of the Nile. One said it was a trunk, another an arm, another a backbone. Mohammed, a shopkeeper, said it was “the only thing we have.”

  “What about your girlfriend,” I asked, “or your mother?”

  “I think it’s bigger than those,” he said. “I only see my mother once every four months.”

  “You’re saying the Nile’s more important than your mother?”

  “The river doesn’t ask for money.”

  Our first stop after leaving the airport that morning was the city of Qena and the temple compound of Dendera. Situated at the top of a congested stretch of the Nile Valley, fifty miles north of Luxor, Qena has long been something of a frontier. In the nineteenth century it was home to vice, as Cairo strongman Mohammed Ali exiled prostitutes and belly dancers here. Recently it’s been home to fundamentalism. In 1992, Qena was the site of the first attack on tourists, when militants ambushed a tour bus, killing, among others, a fourteen-year-old boy. The government responded by razing a nearby village.

  Security was tight as we approached, and reminded me of Hebron. Dendera is one of dozens of temples dangled along this serpentine span of the river like charms on a bracelet. The thousands of tombs and scores of pharaonic monuments make the Nile Valley the largest open-air museum in the world. As such, it continues to attract tourists, despite the terror. The group I was meeting was composed largely of retirees from Manchester, England. Their guide was a well-dressed twenty-six-year-old Cairene named Basem, who had a master’s degree in Egyptology, spoke the Queen’s English, and, had it been cooler, probably would have worn a tweed blazer with elbow patches. As it was, he was the only person wearing long sleeves. “I feel it’s a great duty to teach people about the history of Egypt,” he said. “I love to say good things about my country. Generally speaking, about the Middle East, the world has very bad images.”

  He led the group inside the gates and stopped in the open plaza. Compared to the flat, matzohlike ruins of Israel, the monuments of Egypt are remarkably intact. They’re plump, multilayered biscuits of antiquity, full of flavor. One reason is sand. When archaeologists started searching the Nile Valley in the nineteenth century, the temples were largely underground, covered by centuries of Saharan sand blown from the west. When they removed the dunes, not only the buildings were preserved but also the hieroglyphics, and sometimes even the paint.

  Dendera is a sterling example of preservation, mostly because it was built late, around 125 B.C.E. It’s a reconstruction of an earlier temple dedicated to Hathor, the cow goddess known for her milk-giving fertility, and was designed to emulate its predecessors in an attempt to legitimize Egypt’s then-foreign rulers. The building’s trademark is a relief of the most famous of those carpetbaggers, Cleopatra, the last pharaoh from the line of Greek-born Ptolemys. Her chubby-cheeked face is far removed from what she really looked like, Basem noted—beak nose, high cheekbones, prominent chin—but far closer to the image created by Elizabeth Taylor.

  Because they’re so well preserved, Egyptian temples are virtual textbooks of ancient religion, three-dimensional scrolls. Each temple was built in the image of the cosmos. Egyptian creation stories show similarities to Mesopotamian stories, and thus to Genesis. In the beginning were the Great Waters, full of serpents and frogs, and the Great Egg. The Egg split into two, out of which arose Amen-Re, the god of light, who in turn created a pantheon of gods who controlled the sun, moon, land, plants, animals, and humans. Each temple was constructed a
s a reverse expression of this story, a moving from the human world to the divine. First one passes through a doorway showing the pharaoh making offerings to the gods. Next comes an outer hall, or hypostyle hall, whose forest of columns was designed to evoke a papyrus thicket. In Dendera, these columns require three sets of arms to encircle them. Beyond this room lie a series of vestibules and ultimately the sanctuary, with images of the deity. The sanctuary was said to rest on the original hill of creation. In deference, floors got higher and ceilings got lower the closer they got to the holy of holies. As Basem pointed out, this gradual elevation meant that each temple was like a pyramid on its side.

  After exploring the site for a while, I ventured up a set of stairs to the rooftop sanctuary, where every New Year’s Eve Hathor’s statue was carried to await dawn. Touched by the rays of her father, the sun god Amen-Re, Hathor’s soul would be revitalized for the coming year. While I was admiring the view of the Nile, Basem walked up next to me. I asked him what interested him most about ancient Egypt. Was it the river, the religion, the buildings?

  “The people,” he said. “The people are the ones who made these things. Certainly the river made civilization possible, but it was the people who tamed the river and utilized its resources. Personally speaking, when I take groups to the temples, I usually talk about the pharaoh, I talk about the gods, because the people want to know that. But in my own private reading I prefer to read about how the people were living. How a farmer used to wake up, go to the fields, go to the temple once a year for the festival.”

  “So do you think they’re like you?” I said.

  “This country has been invaded many times,” he said. “The Persians came here in 336 B.C.E. Then the Greeks arrived, and the Romans. The Romans left, the Arabs came. Then we got the French, the Turks, the English. We’re all a mixture. Part of me is from Saudi Arabia and another part from Turkey.”