by Bruce Feiler
Considering the drama the Israelites had already faced by this point—crossing the Red Sea, receiving the Ten Commandments, implementing the laws—it seems surprising to read at the beginning of Numbers that they have been in the desert for only little more than a year. Specifically, on the twentieth day of the second month of the second year since the Exodus, a cloud that God has been using to shelter the Israelites lifts from the Tabernacle, and the population sets out on its journey from Mount Sinai. The group marches according to tribes. There are twelve tribes in all. Ten of them—Asher, Dan, Naphtali, Issachar, Judah, Zebulun, Gad, Reuben, Simeon, and Benjamin—are sons of Jacob. The final two—Manasseh and Ephraim—are sons of Joseph. (The descendants of Jacob’s other son, Levi, serve as priests.) The tribes carry the Tabernacle, which contains the Ark of the Covenant. Whenever the Ark sets out, Moses proclaims, “Advance, O Lord! May Your enemies be scattered, and may Your foes flee before You!”
No sooner do the Israelites begin their travels than they begin to complain—to Moses, to God, to anyone who will listen. This act of grousing begins a distinct cycle in the Book of Numbers, generally called the rebellion narratives, in which the Israelites proceed through a series of attempted coups d’état—six or seven, depending on how you count—that will dominate, and ultimately lengthen, their trek to the Promised Land. In the first of these incidents, no reason is given for the Israelites’ grumbling. Nonetheless, God becomes incensed and sends a fire that ravages the outskirts of the camp. The people cry out to Moses, who prays to God for peace. The fire retreats. “That place was called Taberah,” the Bible says, from the Hebrew word for burn, “because a fire of the Lord had broken out against them.”
“Now look around,” Avner said. He pointed to a few of the cliffs on this upper shelf above the valley, which were coated with what looked like a wash of India ink. The debris at the base of these cliffs looked especially dark. “Early visitors said this must be Taberah,” he said.
“This place does look like a pretty burnt landscape,” I said.
In no time the Israelites find another reason to complain: They’re hungry. The “riffraff ” in their midst feel a gluttonous craving, crying, “If only we had meat to eat!” They remember the fish they ate in Egypt, along with the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, and garlic. “Now our gullets are shriveled,” they shriek. “Nothing but this manna to look to!” Moses, feeling the plight of his people, appeals to God, saying, “Why have You dealt ill with Your servant, and why have I not enjoyed Your favor, that You have laid the burden of all this people upon me?” Where can he get meat for his people, Moses asks. God appears to relent, instructing Moses to gather seventy elders and to tell the people that the next day they shall eat meat; but God gets angry. “You shall eat not one day,” God says, nor two, five, ten, or twenty, “but a whole month, until it comes out of your nostrils and becomes loathsome to you. For you have rejected the Lord, who is among you.” Moses questions God’s ability to provide enough meat for the entire six hundred thousand men, but God retorts, “Is there a limit to the Lord’s power?”
God summons a wind, sweeping quail from the sea, and strewing them over the camp, until they cover an area that’s a day’s walk in either direction and two cubits deep, or about three feet. The people gather quail for two days, until each gathers ten homers, an amount estimated at between fifty and one hundred bushels. God is outraged by their gluttony. “The meat was still between their teeth, not yet chewed, when the anger of the Lord blazed forth against the people and the Lord struck the people with a very severe plague. That place was named Kibroth-hattaavah”—the Graves of Craving—“because the people who had the craving were buried there.”
The phenomenon of the quail, Avner noted, like manna, has a curious natural correlative in the Sinai that suggests the story may have roots in reality. Huge flocks of quail, Coturnix coturnix, migrate every autumn from Europe to Central Africa and return in the spring. The birds are often so exhausted by this flight that they drop, near-dead, in the hundreds along the northern coastline of Egypt and the Sinai. Diners at sidewalk cafés in Egyptian coastal towns like Alexandria and Port Said occasionally report being “invaded” by quail, and bedouin in the Sinai report that the quail occasionally land so thick on the ground there is no room for more, unless they alight on others’ backs. Avner told of seeing bedouin setting up elaborate nets over the shore to catch the falling birds before they could get waterlogged. Given this phenomenon, some scientists have suggested that the death of the Israelites after eating the quail can be attributed to a rare ornithological disease the birds carried after ingesting a poisonous fungus in the Nile Valley.
Regardless, it seems safe to assume that biblical storytellers knew about this occurrence—either because they passed through the northern Sinai, or because they lived in the Delta for hundreds of years and witnessed it there. “It did come every year,” Avner said. Still, the birds rarely reach this far south, he noted. “If you believe the quail are based in reality, you really shouldn’t believe that Jebel Musa is Mount Sinai.”
“Not necessarily,” I said. At this point, I was less inclined to accept a sterile, naturalistic explanation for every event, particularly when it threatened to undermine the meaning of the story. I was more interested in how the writers took possibly factual occurrences and shaped them with spiritual objectives. To overlook those objectives was to overlook the stories’ undeniable source of power. As a practical matter, Avner may not have changed, but I had, in effect, slid around him and was now having conversations from a new point of view. While I didn’t necessarily believe every story, I had become, in essence, a defender of the story, particularly its moral imperative. I had become an advocate of God.
In the case of the quail, that meant going back to the Bible and noticing that the text implies that the deluge wasn’t entirely natural, and that God played a pivotal role. “The story says God summoned a wind,” I said, reading now from the page, “ ‘swept the quails from the sea, and strewed them over the camp.’ If the Israelites were in the north, where the quail fall anyway, the wind would not have been needed. Divine intervention is key to the story.”
“Okay,” Avner said. “Plus, this top layer of rock does look like charcoal here, and it doesn’t up north.”
“If you didn’t know it was igneous rock, you might think it’s burnt rock.”
“Burnt by God.”
We packed up our Bibles and set out through the sand for the Written Stone. The ground was coarser here and sparkled less than the floor of the valley. The sun was starting to set. In the distance were some small bedouin huts. We walked about fifteen minutes when suddenly a small stream of people came pouring out of the huts—first children, then teenagers, finally some older women with toddlers on their hips. “Abunar!” they shouted. “Abunar! Abunar!” It was the call I had seen numerous times before—in the desert, in oases, in villages. Once a car passed us on the road going seventy-five miles per hour, came screeching to a stop, then turned around and chased us for several miles—just so one of the people in the truck could give Avner a kiss hello. Even twenty years after he left, in an open election for president of the Sinai, Avner would win hands down. The reason, I was coming to see, was that he respected the bedouin, gave them work, dignified their culture, and, simply, listened. And he did it with a grace that few before, and certainly fewer after him, had shown. Avner didn’t need to pretend he was one of them, as Lawrence had done. He simply became a part of their world.
Within seconds of greeting us, the women insisted we stop for tea, and we walked the short distance to their small huddle of homes. Having invited us, however, the women promptly disappeared out of custom, and we proceeded toward the fire, where a small handful of men, ranging in age from forty to seventy-five, were gathered in evening senate. Their faces were rich with weather and age, with skin the color of cordovan, and whiskers that sprouted black and white in thinning mustaches or faint goatees. None had more than a few teeth.
We shook hands, kissed on the cheeks, and sat down. Dusk enveloped us.
Though desert gatherings like this happen spontaneously, they still have a strict choreography, as nuanced as a Japanese tea ceremony. The oldest man in the group, with black sunglasses held together by a rubber band, picked up a few glasses that were slightly larger than shot glasses, though more ornate, the shape of morning lilies. He tucked the glasses in between the fingers of his left hand, plucked the teakettle from the fire with his right hand, and poured a small bit of tea into one of the glasses. After replacing the kettle, he rubbed his callused fingers around the rim of one glass to clean it, then poured the backwash tea into successive glasses, repeating his ablution like an elaborate fountain-cum-dishwasher that in its ability to keep the glasses apart and not spill the tea seemed akin to baton twirling. When he finished, the man splashed the used tea onto the sand and handed me an empty glass. “Don’t pass it,” Avner whispered. I held it just above the sand and waited for the others to receive theirs, at which point the man reclaimed the kettle from the fire and began to pour the tea, starting with me and moving in the same direction as he had distributed the glasses. The kettle was made of brass, lined with tin, and was dented in various places. It was also entirely covered in soot, the color of perpetual use.
When each of us had his serving, the old man replaced the kettle on the fire, mumbled a brief blessing, and we drew the glasses to our lips, sipping the piping hot liquid, which had the consistency, and taste, of maple bouillon. Molten manna would not be sweeter. Since no one could tolerate more than a few sips at a time—either for the heat or for the sweetness, I could never tell—the older man buried his glass a half inch in the sand and the rest of us followed. For twenty minutes no one spoke. Instead we just watched, and listened to, the fire. It was the most economical fire I had ever seen, with two wormwood logs the size of hot dog buns, flaked with white charcoal like dandruff, and barely concealing a searing red core that instead of emanating heat seemed to draw us closer, as if drawing heat from us. If most fires seem confident, this one seemed tentative, as if to ask, “Will I make it through the night? Do you have enough wood for me?”
The answer, of course, was not really. Wood, like most resources in the desert, is almost impossible to find.
The life of the bedouin in the modern Middle East—in the Sinai, the Negev, and Arabia—is a study in what it means to exist in the breach between urban and desert environments, and may be as close as contemporary observers come to understanding what the Israelites must have experienced during their two generations in the wilderness. The bedouin—who number about sixty thousand in the Sinai, one hundred thousand in Israel, and more in Saudi Arabia—are pure Arabs, descended from tribes of the Hejaz, the western region of the Arabian peninsula along the Red Sea. Traditionally, they move in tribal groups, search for grazing areas in the desert for their animals, and settle around oases. They’re not pure nomads, who wander continually without pattern. Instead they’re pastoralists, who move into the desert following the spring rains, when there is more vegetation for their goats, then drift back into settled areas in autumn, when they must rely on stable sources of water.
As Emanuel Marx, Israel’s leading expert on bedouin life, explained to me, the bedouin are entirely dependent on settled areas for trade, income, and many of the staples of their daily life, especially the grains that make up the bulk of their diet. If anything, they are urban satellites, he said, more accurately viewed as tangents of city life than residents of the wild. In some cases they sell their meat and wool to the cities in return for provisions. In other cases they actually work in economies that link the desert to the settled areas, such as tourism. “You think that these are people living in the desert, which they aren’t,” he said. “You think that these people are only raising animals, which they don’t. You think that these are people who are self-sufficient, but they’re not.”
Because of their intimate relationship with the land, the bedouin view of the desert is much different from ours. “What they call the desert,” Professor Marx said, “is a place where resources are in different places. You walk in one place. You graze in another place. You raise date palms in a third. They think of the desert as a place they can always fall back on. It has a lot of range, and a lot of resources.”
“So the Western notion of the desert as emptiness would seem to them . . .”
“They would consider it very strange,” he said. “Even the Hebrew term midbar, which is translated as wilderness, is derived from the word for grazing. So in bedouin terms, the desert is a land where you graze animals. If you translate it as savanna, it would make much more sense.”
“So you’re saying that the bedouin term for desert is closer to the English word savanna?”
“In terms of inner meaning, yes.”
“But when I think of a savanna I think of a grassy plain. Certainly none of the places we’re talking about—the Sinai, the Negev—is a grassy plain.”
“We also call savannas places where there are trees, spread widely over an area. In this part of the world, that’s a desert.” This cozy feeling toward the desert exists, in part, because the bedouin have developed extraordinarily sophisticated ways of thriving in that environment. In effect, the bedouin have learned to read the desert. Hares and foxes lead them to water; jackals and hyena lead them to higher ground. They also know how to whittle the environment into daily tools. Goatskins make good canteens; hyrax skins make good curdling bags; almond, castor, and quince wood make good camel saddles. Desert plants also produce powerful medicine. Boiled lavender tends to eye infections; wild mint balms earaches; wormwood broth is good for headaches. Perhaps the most elaborate desert cure is that for rheumatism, which the bedouin address by cooking the meat of hyenas. The full treatment involves enclosing the patient in a tent in which hyena meat and bones are burned. The patient drinks the broth of the meat, covers himself in blankets until he sweats profusely, then emerges twenty-four hours later, able “to climb mountains with ease.”
Perhaps more important, the bedouin respond to the harshness of desert conditions with a fulsome tradition of hospitality. As one bedouin saying goes, “Had I known that you would honor me by walking this way, I should have strewn the path between your house and mine with mint and rose petals.” The bedouin philosophy of hospitality is simple: host first, ask questions later. This custom is reflected in several places in the Bible, notably in Genesis just before the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, when Abraham invites the three unknown visitors into his tent and asks his wife to welcome them with provisions. Not until later does he realize they are emissaries from God.
Bedouin hospitality customarily lasts for three days (which today are sometimes simulated with three glasses of tea). The first stage is called salaam, or greeting; the second ta’aam, or eating; the third kelaam, or speaking. Though this welcome mat is laid out without condition or prejudice, before the rising of the morning star on the fourth day hosts help their guests prepare for departure. Tarriers who linger beyond the drying of the dew are “as welcome as the spotted snake.” Such openness, inevitably, comes at a cost, particularly with precious resources. When our hosts that afternoon insisted we stay for dinner, Avner would agree only if they promised not to slaughter a lamb, a traditional but costly expression of respect. The men insisted, Avner remained firm, and fifteen minutes of peacock preening later, they finally agreed to his request. Dinner was a large platter of rice, with mushrooms and vegetables, which we plucked with flatbread, using only our right hands. “You eat like bedu!” the men cheered.
And sleep like them, too. By the time we finished dinner the familiar chill of the desert had returned, and we all had reclined somewhat in our places, drinking our bottomless glass of tea. The circle had expanded somewhat, with several more men and some boys joining us for dinner, as well as Yusuf, our driver. The women remained out of sight. Nearby, a few camels were eating barley out of sacks around their necks. Eventually, when we made noise
s about driving a few miles away to a campsite, one of the men, Ahmed, insisted we stay with him. Again a brief Kabuki followed, but this time Avner agreed. We said good night to the others, walked the short distance to Ahmed’s home, and began to unload our bags. As we did, Ahmed went inside to inform his wife.
For generations, bedouin lived exclusively in goat-hair tents, called beit shaar, or “house of hair,” which they took with them as they migrated from location to location. Women have traditionally been responsible for the tents, their weaving, striking, packing, and erecting. In bedouin divorces, the husband keeps the animals, the wife keeps the tent. In recent years, some bedouin have been taking the money they receive from work as migrant laborers or in the tourist trade and begun building modest homes. Ahmed’s home was a prime example of this shift toward more permanent habitation. It was small, about the size of a two-car garage, but well constructed, using unpainted concrete blocks and tin roofing. Half the house was taken up by an open-roofed living area that had only sand for a floor, and the other half taken up by a small kitchen area and two raised bedrooms, one for the man and his wife, the other for their five children. This area had a cement floor and a tin roof.
After rooting out the kids and sending them to a neighbor’s, Ahmed sat with us on the step to his bedroom and discussed his masterwork, now just two years old. He was a slight man, wearing flip-flops and a thin white robe. He wore one white kaffiyeh around his head, and another around his neck, as a scarf. I asked him how he had chosen this spot.
“I had a house next to my father, in another area,” he said. “About ten years ago there was a strong flash flood and the whole valley flooded to the level of two meters. Lucky for us, it came during the daytime and no one was home, or they would have been washed away. If it had come at night, we would have died.”
