Walking the Bible

by Bruce Feiler

  “Many people come here with idealistic views of what it is to be a monk,” Father Justin continued. “It was only after we had gotten to know each other that he was willing to discuss my becoming a member. Even then I had to tell him my whole history and they had to vote. It was a happy moment when they told me I would be allowed to stay.”

  And now that he lived here, what did he feel about scholars who suggested the events in the Bible, specifically the events at Mount Sinai, may not have happened?

  “A lot of people say that what’s important is that it happened, not where it happened,” Father Justin said. “We base our confirmation on two things: One is the living tradition. Moses lived in the area for forty years. It’s recorded in the Scriptures that he told the people around him what happened and they passed it down from generation to generation. The second thing is research. In the nineteenth century, when they first deciphered hieroglyphics, the French and British did all sorts of archaeology and many, many scholars came to the conclusion that this is the only place that fits every description we have of Mount Sinai in the Bible.”

  But these days many people question that, I said.

  Father Justin was unmoved. “Archaeologists may challenge the connection today,” he said. “But you have to remember, history has shown repeatedly that scholars get consumed by fads and that subsequent generations have different fads.” In the corner Avner started to nod. “Living here you become intensely aware of the history of the area. You see how many times the church came close to being destroyed, how many times the weather was horrendous, how many times it came close to being abandoned because it was so difficult to bring supplies here. There’s been an amazing continuity that defies all human explanation. So the only explanation is that it’s a place that has been especially protected by God.

  “There’s one story,” he continued, his eyes brightening. “Centuries ago, when the monastery was in extreme isolation, it was very difficult to bring supplies here. One time the monastery was infested with flies, ants, and fleas, in such numbers that they destroyed the supply of corn. The number of monks had dwindled to just a handful and they were starving to death. Figuring there was no way to survive, they decided to hold a last service on the mountain and then abandon the place. As they were coming down, the Virgin Mary appeared to them and persuaded them of her protection. Once on the ground a caravan appeared on the horizon. ‘Who brought these supplies?’ they asked the members of the caravan. And the people said, ‘This older man appeared and told us to take these supplies to the monastery. Then he disappeared.’ When they finally entered the church at Saint Catherine’s, one of the little boys who was on the caravan saw the depiction of the prophet Moses and screamed, ‘That’s the man that appeared. He’s the one who sent us.’ ”

  Father Justin crossed his hands on his lap. Though he was of a different generation, a different nationality, and a different religion from Avraham Biran, he had an avuncular tone and a kind tutorial disposition that reminded me of his fellow teacher. The scientist and the theologian, separated by outlook, but brought together in a common quest to understand and explain the same story—and to keep it alive by passing it on.

  “There’s one more thing I want to ask you,” I said. It was almost sunset now, and the next morning we would begin our ascent up the mountain. But one paradox about Saint Catherine’s still puzzled me. It was the same paradox that had hovered over our quest from the beginning. Was retracing this route something that the Bible itself demanded, or requested? If anything, the opposite seemed true. Exodus, for example, clearly states that Mount Sinai was so sacred—and so highly combustible—that no one was allowed to climb it, no less touch it, look at it, or sleep on it.

  “That’s right,” Father Justin said. “In the story, when the Israelites first came into contact with the mountain, they marked the whole area off. There was thunder and lightning and thick black clouds. Even the animals were not allowed to go up the mountain. And that’s when they heard the sound of trumpets, as if the mountain was on fire. Everyone was terrified. And the people said to Moses, ‘If we go up we will surely die, so you go up and speak to God for us.’ ”

  “If that’s the case, then how do we justify walking up the mountain today?” I asked.

  Again he was serenely confident, even brotherly. “In ancient times,” he explained, “a monk would be at the top of the path and he would hear a person’s confession to make sure that he was spiritually prepared to be at the sacred place. That’s how we justify it. You come to the monastery. You purify yourself. And then you ascend.”

  “And once you arrive at the top?”

  For the first time all afternoon he smiled. He knew what happened to people when they walked in the footsteps of the Bible. “You don’t have to prepare for that,” Father Justin said. “As the Bible says, ‘This is holy ground.’ When you get there, your heart will be beating and your head will be light. Just shut your eyes and listen closely. God will tell you what to do.”

  3. The God - Trodden Mountain

  If I learned anything during my time in the desert it was this: Places have the power to transform—people, nations, even ideas. The Bible understands this implicitly. The story of the Five Books of Moses is the story of the people, the land, and God, and their relationship to one another. Take out the land, and you lose the grounding element in the equation. God could have offered Abraham dominion over any place; he offered him dominion over the land of Israel. The place, in this instance, was inextricable from the people. God could have led the fleeing Israelites directly from Egypt to the Promised Land; instead he led them for forty years in the desert. The place, in this case, was necessary for their development as a nation. And above all, God could have given the Israelites the Ten Commandments wherever he wanted. He chose Mount Sinai. The place, we can conclude, must be vital to the event. And what is that connection? That question was foremost on my mind as I awoke from my second night in the monastery, met Avner at the entrance, and prepared to climb the mountain that lorded over us all.

  One possible answer was already becoming clear: A desert is a spiritual enough place; a desert mountain is downright inspiring. Avner Goren was an untested graduate student in 1967 when Avraham Biran asked him to serve as the chief archaeologist of the Sinai. By the time he left fifteen years later, Avner had been transformed into a diplomat, a man of stature. He was a member of the Israeli delegation that negotiated control of the Sinai with the Egyptians. He had received enough gifts from local residents to begin Israel’s first-ever museum of bedouin culture. Israeli television aired a documentary on his children called The Blond Bedouin of the Sinai. The place, in effect, had elevated him.

  That transformation was apparent from the moment we arrived in the small village of Saint Catherine’s, where Avner was like a father showing his son the old house where he grew up. “This road wasn’t there,” he would say. “That building is new. The entire neighborhood has been redone!” I had never seen him more emotional, or engaged, than when we were around the mountain.

  Yet for all his nostalgia, he never showed regret. If anything, he was proud that Israel had returned the Sinai in 1982. As he explained during our walk toward the camel-resting area alongside the monastery, “I was among those who always said, ‘Guys, we can talk a lot, but one day the Egyptians will get it back. We have to be prepared for that.’ The others said, ‘What are you talking about? This will stay in our hands.’ ” Eventually, as part of the Camp David Accords, Israel agreed to give back the peninsula. “A few weeks later Sadat approached us and asked us to let him celebrate one of the holy days of Islam at the mountain,” Avner said. “According to the agreement, the Saint Catherine’s area should have been given back two months after the feast. But it was his own personal request, and he was so beloved among Israelis for having stepped into the new world of peace, that the government agreed. And I agreed, too, even though for me personally it was one of the hardest things I ever faced in my life.”

&nb
sp; “What was hard?” I said.

  “Withdrawing from here. Leaving the mountain as my home.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I sent my family ahead. But I stayed behind, and the day before Sadat came, a half a day after the Egyptians took control, I waited for a few hours, then started to drive home.”

  “And what did you do in those few hours?”

  He stopped and looked up at the summit. “I cried.” Then he caught himself and looked back at me. “But I want to emphasize, that was on a personal level. I do think, even now, that things should be done for peace. Because the Sinai was taken in war, and the war was fought to try to find some way of living together.”

  Jebel Musa in the morning is like a tiger at dawn, a cat curled up in the shadows, its coat the color of pumpkin pie, its demeanor a misleading message: tame. As we arrived at the small plateau where climbers prep for the hike to come, the mountain seemed almost inert, waiting. At 7,455 feet, it’s not a particularly tall mountain: half as high as the tallest mountain in the Colorado Rockies; roughly as tall as the highest peak in the Appalachians. But it is impressive, completely dominating the landscape around it like a mother elephant dwarfing her babies. A mixture of red and gray granite fused together in an imposing, almost threatening mass, Mount Moses rises straight from the ground and softens slightly at the top like a drip castle. Though not as angular as Mount Ararat, nor as tall as nearby Mount Katarina, it still seems like a particularly imposing backdrop, waiting for some particularly majestic drama to take place in front of it. As American visitor John Lloyd Stephens wrote in 1836, “Among all the stupendous works of Nature, not a place can be selected more fitting for the exhibition of Almighty power.”

  There are two basic ways to climb the mountain. The direct route is the Path of Our Lord Moses, or Steps of Repentance, a near-vertical climb of 3,750 steps hewn out of the rock by a penitent monk. It takes an hour and a half to climb up, nearly twice that to climb down. The longer, easier route is via a serpentine camel path that goes up the east side of the mountain and joins the stairs about two-thirds of the way up. Both paths then converge on an additional 750-step ascent to the summit.

  As a former resident (and perpetual romantic), Avner didn’t like taking either path. He suggested that we hire three camels—one for each of us, and one for our bags and lunch—start out on the camel path, but quickly veer off when we reached the rear of the mountain. We’d spend the day visiting early Christian holy sites in a secluded part of the mountain once populated by hermits, have lunch in a centuries-old orchard believed to be the place where the Ten Commandments were given, then climb up the early Byzantine trail, which has been abandoned for decades, before arriving at the peak by sunset.

  The scene in the small resting area was chaotic, a Middle Eastern bazaar, with fifty or so camels and their handlers angling for the services of what, at the moment, was barely a handful of climbers. Avner had prearranged a ride with a friend and we stepped off to the side and began assigning our gear. Camels—or in this case, one-humped dromedaries (Camelus dromedarius)—are curious-looking creatures, around eight feet tall to the tops of their heads, with sandy-colored hair and large, shaggy humps that look like marshmallows covered with toasted coconut. In general, looking at a camel reminded me of looking at a clown, with everything rather misproportioned, the too-tall legs, the bony knees, the molded jowls. Clowns design their costumes to accentuate their oddities; camels seem to come that way naturally. The observer’s eye goes directly toward the hump, the loopy neck, the long, hooked nose that looks like a bunch of bananas, arching down to the stem. This sense of the absurd is only enhanced by the saddles, large padded thrones made from a grab bag of anything squooshy: foam, blankets, plastic garbage bags, old T-shirts, bedouin rugs, pom-poms, rubber welcome mats. If you find it in the desert, you find it on a camel.

  The reason for all this effort—and iconography—is simple. Riding a camel is to life in the desert what riding a bike is to childhood: a rite of passage, a way of life, a source of freedom, a pain in the butt. Almost anyone who spends time in the desert is forced to confront, in one way or another, the tyranny of the camel, the only mammal capable of surviving without water for as much as two weeks in the summer, and two months in winter. Camels don’t store water in their humps, as once thought, but in their tissues and cells. They conserve water by constantly increasing their body temperature to match the climate (as much as twelve degrees Fahrenheit), thereby eliminating the need to use water to cool themselves down. In fact, camels “store” no extra water at all, drinking only what they require to live. Humans, by contrast, must maintain a steady body temperature. When we get hot, we use water as a coolant, evaporating water via perspiration and making our bodies thirsty for more.

  Camels have other idiosyncrasies that make them uniquely suited to desert life. Their humps are filled with as much as eighty pounds of fat, which enables them to live without food for long periods of time. They have broad feet that permit them to walk in the sand without sinking, and tight nostrils they can seal off from blowing sand. Their eyes are particularly well adapted, with thick bone visors on their foreheads that block the sun and an extra eyelid that moves from side to side like a windshield wiper to remove sand from their eyeballs. In a sandstorm, camels can actually close this third eyelid and see through it. As further protection, camels also have extremely long eyelashes. I also have long eyelashes, which at the moment I swung atop my camel I hoped would be taken as confirmation that I, too, was somehow genetically aligned with the desert—or at least kin enough not to be unceremoniously flung off.

  One reason for my concern is that camels are notoriously nasty, the earliest exemplars of road rage. “Stay away from camels,” more than one friend advised. Camels are known to hiss, spit, vomit, shake, and, on occasion, go suddenly berserk. T. E. Lawrence, in his famous book The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, wrote that Arabs of means “rode none but she-camels,” since they were smoother under the saddle than males, as well as being better tempered and less noisy. Also, they were patient and would endure to march long after they were worn out, indeed until they tottered with exhaustion and fell in their tracks and died: whereas the coarser males grew angry, flung themselves down when tired, and from sheer rage would die there unnecessarily.” Emil Ludwig, in his book on the Nile, describes how the skeletons of so many dead camels mark the desert like milestones. “Their shadowy, bleached bones, quickly cleansed of flesh by sun and vultures alike, are the cleanliest remains of organic life, and, if they stood upright, would look like some carefully prepared model in a museum, the Platonic ideal of a camel.”

  But for sheer directness, nothing beats the story of a friend of mine, who received a postcard from a friend of hers visiting Egypt. On the front was a picture of a camel; on the back was a single sentence:“Whoa doesn’t mean stop to a camel.”

  By nine we were on our way up the mountain. The handlers, teenage boys with red-and-white-checked kaffiyehs and sandals, walked in front of the animals, occasionally swatting them with short sticks wrapped in duct tape. The pack camel went first, followed by me, then Avner. The path was about five feet wide, lined along the edges with red granite boulders about the size of bread loaves. The sand on the trail was also red, the color of ground-up flowerpots, and seemed particularly suited to the gentle gait of the camels, who put one pad in front of the other in a rocking, metronomic rhythm. If anything, the animals seemed almost lulled by the routine. They didn’t look around but stared straight ahead, plodding forward like blank-faced Teamsters. They even had their own CB code—a mix of clicks, gargles, and hisses—that they used to communicate with their brethren. No oasis for six hundred miles; no rest stop for forty years.

  Sitting on the camel did prove uncomfortable. Despite all the padding, the twin prongs of the wooden saddle—one in front, one in back—still managed to break clear, pressing against my back and groin. Even resting one leg over the neck of the camel, as the bedouin do, only uncovered a n
ew set of citified muscles for the saddle to grate. I felt a bit like a plum being squeezed by a pair of chopsticks. In no time the ride reminded me of one of the worst days of my childhood: spent on a donkey descending the Grand Canyon. The donkey wanted me on his back even less than I wanted to be there. It was a struggle of attrition, which both of us lost.

  In a way, the scenery also reminded me of the Grand Canyon, with its palette of rusts and browns, its stratified layers of rock, its complete isolation. The one difference, of course, is that we were going up, not down. Indeed, within half an hour we were high enough on the mountain, and far enough away from the monastery, that the scenery lost all sense of proportion. The sun, by now high into the sky, beat down relentlessly. There was no vegetation visible for miles. The rocks were sharply jagged in places, like scales on a crocodile, and in other places more gently rolling. The tops of the mountains, which had seemed so imposing at dawn, took on a sad, droopy feeling, like melting dinosaurs. With the winding path, the camel, and the steep vertical climb, the scene took on the feel of one of those Chinese scroll paintings, which always include a hut, a bridge, or a path, to stress that nature is more fully realized when a human being pauses to consider it.

  The higher we went, the more solitary the atmosphere seemed. A wheatear alighted on a boulder. A flock of doves took off from a ridge. The path grew steeper, the camel a tad more ornery. The air began to pinch my nose. Perhaps it was the bucking of the animal, perhaps the heat, perhaps the fact that we were climbing Mount Moses, but I felt a renewed appreciation—and awe—at the changes the Israelites had undergone during their journey, beginning in Mesopotamia, arcing down through the Fertile Crescent, descending deep into the Nile, and emerging to face an unknown mountain. Not since they passed Syria, almost five hundred years before the Exodus, would the Israelites have faced such imposing peaks. And whatever route they may have taken, this terrain would have been ideal as a place of revelation. Come face-to-face with the high mountains of southern Sinai, and whatever one’s orientation, one pauses with anticipation. The Bible says that when the Israelites beheld Mount Sinai they “trembled.” At the moment I could understand why.