Walking the Bible

by Bruce Feiler

  The unusual details of the manna story have inspired curiosity since the first days of the Bible. Early rabbis said manna was created between the sixth day of Creation and the first Sabbath. Anyone who ate manna gained the strength of angels, interpreters said, and had no need for bowel movements, since the flaky substance was entirely dissolved into their bodies. Even better, no one ever tired of manna, the commentators agreed, since manna had the ability to adapt to each person who ate it. “One had only to desire a certain dish,” wrote one commentator, “and no sooner had he thought of it than manna had the flavor of the dish he desired.” To little children, he said, it tasted like milk; to strong youths like bread; to the old men like honey; to the sick like barley steeped in oil and honey. On the Sabbath, the manna saved from the previous day “sparkled more than usual” and tasted even better. One can almost hear the commentators say, “It tasted just like chicken.”

  While rabbis speculated on the taste of the manna, others focused on what manna actually was. Some commentators said it must be snow, others said hail, ice, or dew. When Byzantine travelers started visiting the Sinai in the fourth century, they realized there may be a natural inspiration for the manna. Tamarisk trees grow in many oases around the Sinai. In spring, two types of plant lice—Trabutina mannipara E. and Najacoccus serpentinus—infest the stems of tamarisk branches. They suck in the sap of the trees, which is rich in carbohydrates, and excrete the surplus onto the twigs in the form of white, resinous globules. As the text says of manna, these excretions are sweet, edible, and crystallize rapidly in the sun. If they’re not harvested in the morning, they quickly dry up or, worse, get devoured by ants. Either way, they quickly disappear.

  According to estimates, the Sinai creates about five hundred pounds of tamarisk manna a year. The droplets, which the bedouin call mann rimth, from the translation of manna in the Koran, have been a cash crop in the Sinai since the fifteenth century, when a German visitor reported that local monks “gather, preserve, and sell manna” to passing pilgrims. In the nineteenth century, Konstantin von Tischendorf, a Bible scholar, was able to eat the “excrescences like glittering pearls.” The thickish lumps were clammy, he said, and had “the same powerful scent emitted by the shrub. I tasted it, and the flavor, as far as I could find a suitable comparison, greatly resembles honey.” In the twentieth century, manna was harvested commercially and exported to the West, where it was sold under the brand name Mannite and marketed to what one observer calls “pious gourmets.”

  These tamarisk excretions are almost surely the inspiration for the manna in the Bible, and suggest, once again, that biblical storytellers had intimate knowledge of the Sinai, most likely passed down through oral tradition. But if manna has such easily identifiable natural roots, does that undermine the role of God in the story?

  Not necessarily. As we were lounging in the faint shade of one of the tamarisks, a bedouin man in a flowing cotton laborer’s gown came strolling over to our carpet. Avner leapt up and embraced the man fervently, kissing him three times on alternating cheeks and holding his hands. Khaled had worked with Avner when he lived in the Sinai and the two men hadn’t seen each other for a number of years. They spent a few minutes holding hands, catching up. Khaled was in his forties, but looked twenty years older. He had a white kaffiyeh around his head and a prominent gold tooth. Despite the heat, he wore black jeans underneath his robe and a gray sweatshirt that said “Winner Casual Wear.” Eventually Avner told him about our discussion of the tamarisk trees and asked him what time of year the manna appears.

  “Only when the apricots are ripe,” he said. “In June.”

  I asked him what it looked like.

  “Like small cotton balls,” he said. “In the morning they’re liquid, but as the sun comes out, they become fluffy, like fur. By noontime they’re dead. They just disappear, melt.”

  “So how do you collect them?”

  He reached down and grabbed some small pieces of granite and a handful of sand. “The manna covers the ground in early morning,” he said. “You pick it up, then let the wind take away the dirt.” He opened his fingers to let the sand blow away, leaving only the rocks. “The wind sorts it out,” he said.

  “So what does it taste like?”

  “It’s very sweet, sweeter than honey,” he said. “There’s even a special blessing, since it’s mentioned in the Bible and the Koran.”

  “And do you feel connected to those ancient people when you eat it?”

  He squirmed momentarily, as if trying to find the right emotion. “It’s spiritual to eat it,” he said. “It’s not like bread or meat. It’s kind of a surprise. Some years you have it; some years you don’t. And you never know which one it’s going to be. It’s not like a flower that you know to expect. It’s like a person with no children who suddenly becomes pregnant. It’s like an idea that comes out of the back of your head and not the front.” He stopped for a second and ran his fingers across his teeth. “It’s a blessing.”

  Dusk was descending by the time we returned to the jeep and proceeded southeast for the slow climb to the monastery at the base of Jebel Musa, the second-highest peak in the Sinai. The mountains no longer gently shadowed the road, they now completely overwhelmed it with a range of peaks over seven thousand feet. No longer gray, the mountains were a rich, reddish granite, the color of sweet potatoes. Dense, almost burdened by their bulk, they looked like mounds of slightly rancid hamburger meat waiting to be molded into loaves. With the sun catching the sparkle in every fold of the rock, I felt as if we were driving inside a rust-colored geode.

  The southern mountains are the oldest part of the Sinai, having broken from Egypt during the formation of the Great Rift Valley. As Avner explained, the soil in the Sinai gets older the farther south it goes, with limestone and sand on the surface near the Mediterranean, sandstone on the surface in the middle, and exposed granite in the south. In effect, the Sinai is like a giant slice of apple pie where the crust, to the north, is flat, the dough bulges in the middle with a small amount of filling, and finally the wedge spills over in the south with oversized chunks of fruit. If the Israelites did come this way, they must have felt as if the ground was preparing them for something special. Especially for a population that had grown up in the terminal lowland of the Nile Delta, the Sinai would have been a tease. First they would have come upon the dunes of the north, which themselves would have felt large for flatlanders. Then they would have arrived at the central hills, which at two thousand feet must have seemed daunting. And finally they would have faced the southern mountains, a formidable seven thousand feet high, which must have made even the “stiff-necked” Israelites crane with awe—and fear.

  And what better emotion to describe this place. All through our journey, I had been fascinated by the ability of the places we were seeing to evoke sentiments conveyed in the text: from the capricious fertility of the Tigris and Euphrates, to the scorched destitution of Sodom, to the menacing power of the Nile Valley. It’s as if the changing dimensions of the landscape were somehow reflected in the sweeping range of emotions in the narrative—the Bible as psychological atlas.

  This gamut of topographical—and psychological—extremes was starting to have an effect on me, as well. I come from a flat, sandy place, with pine trees, live oaks, azaleas, and daffodils; temperate winters, sunny springs, swampy summers. I realized I had never spent much time in places with exaggerated geography—high mountains, hollow valleys, dense rain forests, desert. The Middle East was by far the most severe place I had ever been in; and within that, the Sinai was the harshest stretch. And inevitably, perhaps, for someone so identified with place, I found these extreme landscapes stirring in me more extreme emotions. It’s as if the act of mapping the land was forcing me to remap my own internal geography, suddenly taking into account a broader range of feelings than I had ever previously explored—deeper canyons of confidence, perhaps, but also wider expanses of uncertainty and higher elevations of need.

  The emot
ion I felt upon reaching these levels was not all that different from the emotion I felt upon being in extreme positions at other times in my life, whether it was pulling myself up a rope as a child, climbing a mountain as a teenager, or scuba diving as an adult: fear. Fear that I might lose control. Fear that I might fail. Fear that I might disappoint myself. When your god is self-reliance, and you let yourself down, there is nowhere else to turn.

  This reaction, I was coming to see, is the first lesson of the desert: By feeling uneasy and unsure, by fearing that you’re out of your depth and therefore might falter, by feeling small, and alone, you begin—slowly, reluctantly, maybe even for the first time in your life—to consider turning somewhere else. At first that somewhere else is someone else: a Moses, an Aaron, an Avner. But ultimately, maybe even inevitably, that someone else is something else. For the secret lesson of remapping yourself, as I was just finding, is that you eventually grow wary of the flat and easy, the commonplace and self-reliant. You begin to crave the depth, the height, the extremes. You begin even to crave the fear.

  A little after seven we reached one of the few four-way intersections in the Sinai, where roads come from the north, south, east, and west, converging at the entrance to the high mountains. The air was noticeably cooler, and as we stopped to pull out our sweaters, Avner suggested we take in the scene. We were minutes away from Saint Catherine’s, the small village at the base of Jebel Musa that took its name from the monastery. The red in the landscape had disappeared with the sun, so the mountains were mostly shadows in the sky. Everything was still. “When I first came here, in 1967, I was in shock with the beauty,” Avner said. “I could have lived anywhere in the Sinai, but once I saw this, I knew this is where I wanted to live.”

  He talked about some of the battles he and his team of archaeologists faced in trying to open up the region to exploration, but also in trying to maintain its isolation. “For a long time we fought very strongly, and with some success, not to turn this region into a place that was built, to keep only a minimum touch with the outside world. But we did the one thing that almost destroyed the place: We introduced it to the world. Before 1970, the mountain was almost unknown in the world. It was unchanged since the Middle Ages.”

  “And what was that like?”

  He went back to the car and returned with a small brown book he had brought from home. The book was Egeria’s Travels, the account of a fourth-century Byzantine nun who ventured through the Near East visiting biblical sites. He opened to the part where she describes coming upon Jebel Musa, which had just been identified as being Mount Sinai.

  We made our way across the head of the valley and approached the Mount of God. It looks like a single mountain as you are going round it, but when you actually go into it, there are really several peaks, all of them called the Mountain of God. And the principal one, the summit on which the Bible tells us that God’s glory came down, is in the middle. I never thought I had seen mountains as high as those around it, but the one in the middle was the highest, so much so that when we were on top, all the other peaks looked like little hillocks far below us. And another remarkable thing, even though the central mountain, Sinai proper, is higher than the others, you cannot see it until you arrive at the very foot of it. It must have been planned by God.

  We returned to the car and drove down the narrow road to the base of the mountain and the small brick guard shack that protects the monastery. I grabbed my backpack and sleeping bag and we walked up the dirt path to the door of the compound, a crowded sixth-century complex about the size of a city block that contains a church, a mosque, a library, cloisters for housing the eighteen or so monks, a well where Moses is said to have met the daughters of Jethro, and the monastery’s botanical jewel, the purported burning bush itself. Though it was only 8 P.M., the entrance was pitch dark by the time we arrived. An almond tree bloomed in the courtyard. One orange lightbulb was the sole source of light. Our plan was to ask the monks if I could spend a night in the monastery, a rare privilege normally extended only to pilgrims on a holy visit. Avner would stay with friends in the village.

  We knocked on the wooden door and an elderly monk with a Santa Claus beard appeared. We introduced ourselves and made our request. The man examined me for what seemed like minutes. Finally he spoke. “Are you Greek Orthodox?” he asked in stern, broken English.

  “Uhh . . . no,” I said.

  “Are you Catholic?” He raised his eyebrows.

  At this point my inclination was to say, “Actually, can we discuss this? I’ve been traveling through the desert, thinking about . . .” But I caught myself. “No, sir,” I said. “I’m Jewish.”

  “Well, then . . .”

  He disappeared inside the door and I looked at Avner as if to say, “Did I give the right answer?” Avner chuckled. “Here it’s better to be Jewish than Catholic,” he said.

  Moments later the monk appeared again in the doorway. “You are invited to stay in the monastery,” he said. “Go see Father Paulo. He’ll show you to your room.”

  2. On Holy Ground

  I bolted upright the first time I heard the bells—a sound so loud it yanked me from sleep. I held my ears when I realized the clamor was just outside my door. And when the ringing showed no signs of stopping, I stuck my head back under the covers for a few minutes of muffled relief: a carillon fifteen centuries old; a wake-up call older than the clock.

  A few minutes later the chimes finally did stop and I emerged from my cocoon. I looked at my watch: 4:25. The room was whitewashed, with a bed, a desk, and a chair. A reproduction of an eighth-century crucifix hung on the wall, alongside a small painting of Saint Catherine, the Egyptian martyr. Before I came to the mountains various people had warned me—“Staying in Saint Catherine’s was the longest night of my life,”“the coldest night of my life.” As a result, I had brought enough equipment for Everest: sleeping bag, gloves, hat, scarf, toilet paper, turtle-neck, extra socks. “Would you like a sleeping pill?” Avner had asked. But the room was quite accommodating, with two sheets, a bean pillow, three blankets, and a comforter. There was also a portable heater in the cupboard, a switch for hot water, a toilet, and even, for cleanliness-conscious Muslims or prissy Europeans, a bidet. This was the Ritz for pilgrims, a hermitage with a view.

  I slid on my boots without touching the floor and splashed water on my face. The morning service started in five minutes, and I didn’t want to be late. Outside, the courtyard was still dark. A rosefinch hopped quietly on the banister; even the birds didn’t speak at this hour. I was stationed on the third floor of the dormitory, a dark wooden building with slabs of plaster that was Tudor not just in appearance. Shakespeare could have slept here. Across the square was another three-story building that looked almost Moorish, with stone arches and candles flickering in the rooms. In between was a jungle of structures with assorted ecclesiastical purposes—a refectory, a handful of chapels, a library, even a mosque, built in the twelfth century to appease marauding Muslims. With its contrasting styles, angled walls, and competing rooflines, the monastery had the appearance of one of those milk-carton cities children make in school, then leave in the attic to collect dust and nostalgia and when discovered a generation later seem more charming than ever.

  The previous night, after checking into my room, I sat on the banister and admired the timelessness. The place seemed almost haunted, with cats scampering across the eaves, skeleton keys dangling against brass doorknobs, and doors opening, creaking, then slamming shut. A monk chanted evening prayers. It was impossible not to think of The Name of the Rose, with its intrigue and manipulations; death in the abbey of the Lord. But even in this stew of allure, I felt remarkably safe. The black cat that ran across my path made me smile, not quiver. With its church and mosque and bedouin well, Saint Catherine’s touches all bases, even superstition. By 9 P.M. there was a not a person in sight.

  Before going to bed I decided to go for a stroll and visit the burning bush. The bush, which grows alongside the ch
apel, is a rare mountain bramble akin to the raspberry that monks say is the actual shrub in which Moses first heard the words of God. I went from the third-floor perch where I was sitting, down across the roof of another building to a set of stairs that led to the base of the chapel. At the stairs a deep darkness seemed to reach out from below and I realized I was scared, that little boy afraid to go into the attic. Across the alley was a crypt with the bones of every monk who ever lived in Saint Catherine’s, including a heaping mound of hundreds of hollow-eyed skulls that spill onto the floor like dry cereal from a box. How many creepy images could this place conjure up? I wondered. How many childhood anxieties? I opted to go back for my flashlight. I climbed back to my room, embarrassed, and in my nervousness started to unlock the door adjacent to mine. This made me even more nervous. Was I disturbing some hermit from Greece? By now my hand was shaking. It was less than an hour since Avner had left me alone and I’d managed to work myself into a state.

  I retrieved my flashlight and retraced my steps, cursing the creaky floors that seemed to broadcast my every move. I tried an alternate route, climbing down a wooden staircase behind the chapel, but found myself in a dead end, with dark clothes on a line, smoke curling out of a chimney, and a locked wooden gate that squealed but wouldn’t open. I backed away, tiptoed through an alley, and found the same stone steps as before. Even with the light they seemed bottomless. I hurried down and tried not to look in any window. On the ground level I exhaled and rounded a corner. A cat was digging in the flower bed like a squirrel. He looked up at me and meowed. I jumped, despite myself, then stopped to feel my heart. How silly.