by Bruce Feiler
The Sinai has actually been defined by its absence of people. Often referred to as “24,000 square miles of nothing,” the peninsula is a giant isosceles triangle wedged between Africa and Asia that has always served as something of a spillover zone for people who wanted to pass through it in order to get to someplace else. About fifty invading armies have crossed its plains since the Early Bronze Age, but few have tarried: never the prize, always the prizemaid. The name Sinai, which is thought to be derived from the Mesopotamian god of the moon, Sin, may have been transferred to the area from the Euphrates Valley by one of those armies or by a wandering Semitic tribe, not unlike Abraham’s.
Because of its proximity to places of belief—and conflict—the Sinai has also been an escape ward, a refugee park for persecuted prophets. In addition to Moses, Elijah came here, as did Mary and Joseph. Christian extremists fled here in the early years of the Church, and Empress Helena later built them a chapel, which eventually gave rise to Saint Catherine’s monastery. More recently, the Sinai has held tantalizing possibilities for persecuted Jews. In the nineteenth century, when Theodor Herzl first resurrected the idea of a Jewish homeland and ran into concern among the Turks, who controlled Palestine, he suggested the northern Sinai. Jews could make the desert bloom, Herzl suggested, with garden cities along the Mediterranean. The British liked the idea and sent an expedition in 1903. But when surveyors realized the difficulty of finding enough water—the average rainfall is forty millimeters a year, about an inch and a half—the British soured on the idea. Later Zionists tried to encourage Egypt to issue its own “Balfour Declaration” and invite Jews to settle in the area, but the plan never ignited. Had the idea worked, many of Judaism’s most hallowed rituals—from the veneration of Jerusalem to the Passover seder—might have taken on a slightly different meaning. The desert would no longer have been a necessary evil; it would have been home.
The fact that Herzl recommended the northern Sinai is not accidental. The Sinai is divided into three distinct regions, each more inhospitable than the last. The northern tier is the most classically desert, with silken dunes, breezy oases, and marshy flats. But it’s also the most temperate. Most of the bedouin population lives in this area. The vast middle, full of sandy hills and colored canyons, is known as the “Wandering Plateau,” from the biblical story of forty years in the desert. This stretch is so scarred with mines and jeep tracks that it has been likened to a canvas by Jackson Pollock. The southern zone is the most dramatic. This jagged region is an irregular tableland, with hills slowly tilting upward, erupting in a startling array of craggy red granite mountains created from the fault line of Africa’s Great Rift. As the fifteenth-century monk Felix Fabri wrote, commenting on these geographic differences:“Every day, indeed every hour, you come into a new country, of a different nature, with different conditions of atmosphere and soil, with hills of a different build and color, so that you are amazed at what you see and long for what you will see next.”
This unusual menu of terrain has provided endless grist for one of the most heated battles surrounding the Bible: What route did the Israelites take through the Sinai? Inevitably, this question presupposes two things that are unprovable—that the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt at all and that there was an Exodus—but such disputes have done little to squelch debate. Generally speaking, there are three proposed paths: northern, central, and southern. The shortest and most direct route would be along the north, on the main artery of the ancient world, the Via Maris. This road was used by Egyptian kings in their military endeavors with Asia and was likely the one used by Abraham and Joseph when they came from the Promised Land. Because this road was so popular, however, Egyptians had fortified it with outposts, which would have meant dangers for fleeing slaves. Also, there are few mountains on this road, and thus no logical place to receive the Ten Commandments. Finally, the text says specifically, “God did not lead them through the land of the Philistines, although it was nearer.” Though the use of the term Philistines is an anachronism, this passage clearly refers to the coastal plain. “The northern route can be easily discounted,” Avner said.
The central route would be the next most reasonable. If Moses first saw Mount Sinai on his way to Midian, as early passages of Exodus suggest, and if he later met Aaron on the same road on his way back from Midian, logic would suggest that the Mountain of God be somewhere in between Midian and Egypt. Since Midian was likely located in the Arabian Desert just east of present-day Eilat, the most likely location of the mountain would be on the central route. This path would also make the most sense if the Sea of Reeds was either Lake Timsah or the Bitter Lakes. But the central theory also has problems. First, the middle of the Sinai is by far the least hospitable part of the peninsula. Second, the mountains are hardly grand. Third, it’s hard to imagine it taking a month to get from the Sea of Reeds to any mountain on this road (which is what the text says it takes), considering that the distance is no greater than several hundred miles.
For sheer drama, the southern route is by far the most obvious. There are a series of oases along the Gulf of Suez, where the Israelites could have stopped on their way south, then the mountains, which present a perfect backdrop for the earthshaking events surrounding the Ten Commandments. Also, there’s more water in the south, which would make it easier to support a large population. It is colder, though, which would make it more difficult to survive. And perhaps more crippling, the southern Sinai is completely out of the way—from Midian, from the Promised Land, from everyplace but certain death.
All in all, there is no good answer. As Avner said, when I asked him where the event most likely took place, “As an archaeologist, I don’t have a scientific solution. As a man of the area, I don’t see how a campaign in the Sinai could go on for forty years. There’s no place that’s a great place.” Faced with this conundrum, we chose what’s considered the traditional route, the southern one, if for no other reason than since Empress Helena’s visit in the fourth century C.E., pilgrims have been coming to the area for 1,500 years, believing it to be the one. Since our objective was less to prove the Bible and more to witness its atmosphere and lingering appeal, we turned south toward the mountains with few second thoughts.
The last stop of our first day, down the western coast from the canal, was a series of turquoise mines. We pulled off a main road and made our way down the rocky basin of Wadi Megara, one of several dozen dried riverbeds that trickle largely north to south in the Sinai like raindrops down a foggy window. Already the area was hillier than the north, with mounds of chipped stone and flint that looked like spices from Goliath’s cabinet—cinnamon, salt, nutmeg, garlic. The only color other than beige came from the acacia trees, which lined the narrowest parts of the wadi like spinach soufflés on stilts. It occurred to me that Goliath, on his way home to cook, might never have to touch the ground; he could walk from one side of the Sinai to the other stepping only on the tops of acacias, the lily pads of the desert.
The Sinai has long been prized for its natural resources. As early as the third millennium B.C.E., even before the pyramids were built, mineral-crazed Egyptian pharaohs sent expeditions to the Sinai to mine for copper, malachite, and turquoise. Many of these stones made their way into the pharaohs’ funerary stashes—from the ground to the ground without ever being worn in public. Because of their royal connection, artists carved depictions of the pharaohs into the entrance of the mines, often as high as one hundred feet above the ground. William Flinders Petrie discovered many of these depictions and carted them off to the Cairo Museum in the early 1900s. In the early 1970s, Avner was leading an expedition in the area when one of his guides, not realizing the inscriptions had supposedly been removed, blithely pointed out an image of the pharaoh on a narrow precipice above the valley. “I almost fell down because I stopped breathing,” Avner said. “There was a complete Egyptian relief that was still there, that Petrie never discovered. It may be the earliest relief ever found.”
We climbed up a
small cliff to get a better view. The relief was actually incomplete, suggesting the Egyptians had left suddenly. “So why in our story do we have to come here?” he asked. The answer, he said, not waiting for a reply, is that it provides clues as to how history is written in the desert, a matter of seminal importance in the story of the Exodus.
Even more than the matter of where the Israelites went, the question of how many Israelites went on the Exodus has been a nagging source of curiosity. The text says clearly that the number was six hundred thousand men on foot, aside from women and children. In addition, it notes, a “mixed multitude” went with them, presumably a variety of non-Israelites who took advantage of the chaos to join the flight to freedom. Later, the text notes that a census after the first year revealed 603,550 able-bodied men, excluding Levites. A second census, forty years later, put the number at 601,730.
These numbers are clearly not accidental. But are they real? The first, perhaps most obvious problem is how the seventy people who came to Egypt with Jacob could have produced six hundred thousand men in just 430 years. According to one study, each Israelite family for four centuries would have to have eight children in order to come close to the figure of six hundred thousand, which would make the statement in Exodus 1 that the Israelites “were fruitful and increased abundantly” the understatement of the second millennium B.C.E. Even more troubling is how this male population of six hundred thousand, which with women and children would easily have reached two million, could have existed in Egypt in the first place. Based on the best guess of historians, two million people would represent at least 20 percent of Egypt, which would make their enslavement tentative at best, and the fact that they could escape without being mentioned in any official document unimaginable. This would be like having the entire population of the American South decamp for Mexico before the Civil War, and have nobody in Latin America, the United States, or Europe ever write it down.
One explanation is that the Hebrew word for thousand, elef, can also be translated as clan, which would mean that the Israelites would have taken six hundred contingents, or around six thousand men. This view has problems, too. Numbers 3 clearly says that the number of firstborn sons of the Israelites was 22,273, a tricky figure to achieve for six thousand women, even if they were “fruitful and abundant” Israelite women. Another common explanation is that the figure six hundred thousand is meant to represent the population of the united monarchy of Israel after it arrived in Canaan, in the mid–first millennium B.C.E., around the time the story was written down. This would make the figures relevant to the end of the Exodus, not the beginning. Either way, it seems safe to assume that six hundred thousand is not a historically accurate figure.
“The point is,” Avner said, “that the Israelites had a different sense of history than we do. They weren’t trying to record facts objectively. They were trying to tell a story, and let the facts support the story.” The point could be made most clearly, he said, with the mines where we were now standing. The Egyptians faced a serious threat from the local pastorals of the region. “We know this because nearby the Egyptians built a defensive wall, which they wouldn’t have needed unless they feared being taken over,” he said. “Also, at the head of each cave was a big relief of the pharaoh smashing the heads of the local people. But we have no traces from those people themselves.”
“But you know they were here?”
“Yes, because the Egyptians told us. And the moral is that people could live in the desert without leaving any remains that archaeologists today can discover. Desert people don’t build permanent buildings, they have no time or reason to carve reliefs in caves, and all their personal goods—tents, baskets, rugs—get destroyed by the sand. The Israelites could easily have been here, even though we haven’t found any evidence of them.”
“Even six hundred thousand?” He raised his eyebrows. “Whatever God will allow.”
We drove around the corner and found a windblown niche to set up camp for the night. We parked the jeep at the entrance and laid our sleeping bags around a fire. Avner pointed out that the hills were young by Sinai standards, “only four hundred million years old.” The molded sandstone appeared almost grotesque, as if someone had clenched his hands around moistened clay and squeezed out fingers of peach-colored stone. The surface was equally varied—puckered, dimpled, torn—and reminded me of weathered skin, pink with tenderness, spotted with age.
As we unpacked our belongings and began settling in for the evening, I was struck by how Avner seemed to know exactly how to act: how to shield his head from the sand; how to set up a candle in a nook to prevent it from blowing out; how to keep his exertions to a minimum. He was like a piece of furniture you continually move around a room until you put it in the one spot—there!—where it suddenly seems most at home.
As comfortable as Avner seemed in this environment, I felt uncomfortable. I certainly felt drawn to the place; I felt that tug of earth I first experienced in Turkey. And now I no longer resisted the feeling. I knew it was part of some larger realigning of my sense of place that was happening inside me. But on a more immediate level, I didn’t know how to act: where to sit, where to lie down, where to put my bags. Take my jeans off because it’s getting hot; put my sweatshirt on because it’s getting chilly. I was shocked to discover on that first evening, for example, that the biggest problem in the desert is not heat, which I naively expected, but cold. “That’s why desert goats are black,” Avner explained, “and bedouin tents, even beetles. Black absorbs heat. You can escape the sun; all you need is shade. But you can’t escape the cold.” I may have felt attached to the desert, but I was still far from feeling at home.
As the sun set, Yusuf heated up some flat bread, the bedouin precursor to matzoh, by laying it directly on the white broom logs. We tore off pieces of bread, stiff as bark, and scooped up servings of tuna, canned okra, and foil-wrapped triangles of processed cheese. Soon the wind picked up and began blowing sand against the walls, like rain sprinkling against a windowpane. Occasionally the wind would die down, leaving only the cliffs, quiet and patient. The setting seemed devoid of time, like being in the deepest stacks of a library. And the resulting sensation—part excitement, part stagnation—reminded me of an old joke I heard about what Moses said to the Egyptians as he left: “Don’t do anything until I get back.”
If possible, the allure of the place only grew as evening fell. What had been a stark white sheet of light during the day, which flattened every scene into two dimensions, slowly became a soft amber smile that rounded edges and blushed out the hills. It was at night, finally, that the third dimension appeared, when the stars filled the sky in a perfect bowl. “I once led a group from Chicago,” Avner said. “There was a thirty-year-old English teacher who looked up at the sky on her first night in the Sinai and said, ‘Wow, it’s like a planetarium!’ ”
As funny as that was, as I lay down to sleep, I realized she may have had a point. The stars were so bright, the constellations so clear, that it’s hard to imagine anyone lying here at night and not realizing that the sky, at least, was round. Maybe the sages were right. Maybe Abraham did look up at the sky and realize that it contained—in its beauty and power—the divine.
We awoke in the morning to clear blue skies above and, for the first time I could remember in the outdoors, no dew. The absence of water is not a tease here; it’s stark reality.
We ate breakfast—bread, cheese, tuna, honey—and started out for the day. Our first stop was a freestanding sandstone formation, about the size of a large jungle gym, that was covered with tiny etchings. As we got out of the jeep, Avner pointed out some artemisia growing along the ground, a white wormwood plant with leaves the color of sage and tiny yellow flowers like Venus flytraps. I liked the smell and held a sprig under my nose. By the time I stood up Avner sneezed, sneezed, and sneezed again. I suddenly realized that one consequence of the Israelites beginning the Exodus in spring is that their allergies would have been acting up. No wonder they
complained.
The etchings were of ancient writing, as well as stick-figure animals—horses, camels, ostriches—that once roamed in this area. “At one time, semischolars identified these inscriptions with the Israelites and concluded they must have come this way,” Avner said, referring to the southern route. “Now we know the writing was from much later, Nabatean, Byzantine, Greek. And in any case, that’s not the way to do scholarship: begin with what you hope happened and work backward to try and prove it.”
“But these inscriptions still seem pretty old,” I said. “How did they survive in the open air?”
“Because they’re only 1,800 years old,” he said. “And for these rocks, that’s pretty young.”
The more important point, he said, was the numerous pockets and openings that peeped through the rock like eyes on a potato. These windows, called tafuni, were caused by faint traces of humidity in the air many millennia ago that got trapped inside the rock and dissolved the stone from the inside, like a cancerous speck of water that, when it was exposed to wind, revealed an open cavity. Considering that Exodus echoes with stories in which Moses draws water from a stone, I wondered if the Israelites might have known of this phenomenon.
“The only way we know it is from using very fine instruments,” Avner said.
“But it’s not improbable that God would know that water was inside,” I said.
He looked at me, as if I were speaking in a foreign tongue. “So you’re believing in God now?” he said, half teasing.
“Isn’t that the point of coming here?”
We drove a few miles and parked the jeep for our main trek of the day, a several-hour hike up a narrow trail to the rock-hewn temple of Serabit el-Khadim, which means “Heights of the Slave.” Built in the early second millennium B.C.E., Serabit el-Khadim represents an attempt by the pharaohs to inspire and dominate the bedouin who worked in the local mines. Because of the heat and scarcity of water, the mines operated only six months a year, which seems an apt enough expression for the control the pharaohs were able to maintain over the local culture. In one corner of the ruined temple an inscription shows a Semitic worker on a donkey. (The term Semite, which applies to the descendants of Shem, one of Noah’s sons, broadly refers to groups of people from Mesopotamia or South Asia.) Since Egyptians didn’t ride donkeys, the carving is considered a clear sign that foreigners were well known in the area—either coming from Asia, or going back.
