Walking the Bible

by Bruce Feiler

  “If you’re trying to convince me that the argument is not very convincing,” Avner said, “I agree with you. They’d be very vulnerable. Plus, it’s a very naive approach to suggest that if we find a place of water we’ll find the people. The view of the Israelites living together in a well-organized camp is also naive. It’s more likely that they lived in smaller groups all over the Sinai and the Negev.”

  The stories, in that case, were probably a compilation, a “telescope” to use Avner’s word, of a series of events that took place over a wide area and a long period of time. That doesn’t mean the stories were made up. If anything, they appear to have deep roots in the desert and deep knowledge of the geographic personality of the region. To explore that side of the story, we pulled out our Bibles to read one of the events that takes place in Kadesh-barnea.

  Following the return of the spies, Numbers 16 and 17 tell the story of another revolt, led by Korah. Commentator Gunther Plaut calls this event “the most serious rebellion that faced Moses and Aaron.” Korah, a nobleman, rouses two other men, Dathan and Abiram, along with 250 Israelite chieftains, and complains that Moses and Aaron have raised themselves above the Lord’s congregation. Moses promises that God will decide who deserves to be leaders. The next morning, Moses instructs the men to take copper fire pans and burn incense before God. Aaron also makes an offering, to give God the choice. God appears and tells Moses and Aaron, “Stand back from this community, that I may annihilate them in an instant!” Suddenly, the earth opens its mouth and swallows up all three men and their families. “They went down alive into Sheol,” the Bible says, a reference to the abode of the dead, and then God sends a fire that destroys the other 250 men.

  The following day the “whole Israelite community” rises up in anger against Moses and Aaron for bringing death to the community. God, incensed again, sends a plague to annihilate the entire population, but Moses instructs Aaron to burn incense before the Lord to expiate him. The plague is checked, but not before 14,700 people are killed, five times more than in the golden calf episode.

  In many ways, the most memorable detail of this rebellion is not the crime but the punishment. As Pseudo-Philo, the second century C.E. Greek commentator, noted, by having Korah swallowed up by the earth, God seems to be administering the ultimate punishment, the direct inverse of creating Adam out of the soil. I asked Doron if he knew any examples of people getting trapped in quicksand, as happens in a famous scene in the film Lawrence of Arabia when one of Lawrence’s bedouin companions is sucked to his death in the Sinai.

  “No,” he said. “But there is an area of dry sand on the other side of the spring where you can sink to your chest.”

  “Quicksand?”

  “Closer to a dune,” he said. “The wind brings sand and it gathers in loose mounds. If the story takes place there, it’s possible for someone to sink in the sand.”

  “But not to their death,” Avner said. “Only to their shoulders.”

  “But people were shorter then,” I joked.

  “There’s another connection,” Doron said. “Behind us you can see a big mountain, Jebel Harad. Along that ridge there is a geological fault line, one of three in the Negev. There are places you can see where the ground collapsed, leaving a huge hole. A few years back, one of these holes suddenly appeared without warning, and people started falling inside. Trucks fell inside. Geologists were very surprised. It wasn’t an earthquake;it was something else. They still don’t know what happened.”

  The fact that so many unique phenomena—collapsing holes, the maktesh, the Dead Sea, the rift—all existed in one place may be one reason the Bible includes such vivid geographical details in its stories. If nothing else, the details were sure to capture the imagination of a population curious—and perhaps concerned—about the world around them. “This may be another example,” I said, “like Sodom and Gomorrah, where biblical storytellers were aware of an occurrence and used their story to explain how it proved the power of God over nature.”

  “From my point of view, there are three possibilities about the stories in the Bible,” Doron said. It was late afternoon now and we were sitting on the edge of the sentry post with our feet dangling over the side. The bright white heat of midday had diminished. Our conversation had grown more personal. These were the moments I once avoided; now they were the ones I most craved. “First, things happened as they are told in the stories. Second, some things happened as they are told; others were made up. And third, a very, very clever man made the stories up.”

  “So which one do you believe?” I asked.

  “In some ways, it’s my personality to believe the religious way of thinking. In other ways it’s my personality to believe that somebody made it up. I don’t have a concrete opinion. And that’s the nice thing about the Bible. You can take it however you want. What really matters are the clues within the stories about how to behave.”

  “So one, two, or three, in the end they’re all the same.”

  “The basic message is the same. It’s solid truth.”

  Driving back to the campsite, I thought about Doron’s comments. Here was a man, as dry and scientific as any I had met, who viewed the Bible as offering him some higher meaning. In many ways, Doron’s attachment meant more to me now than that of the people I had met during our earlier stops in Israel. It seemed to confirm my own evolution, my embracing the story for its emotional resonance, regardless of its factuality. I could accept the story for its moral code, even as I struggled to identify its grounding in reality.

  Still, I wondered how far I could carry my own growing identification with the text. Specifically, could I carry it to the point of openly connecting myself to the God—the unforgiving God—we were reading about at this point in the narrative? How could I root my identity in such a capricious source, such a violent source? How could I embrace a presence that responded to a challenge to its authority by opening the earth and swallowing a volume of people one-tenth the size of my hometown? Was this act so ferocious—so inhuman—as to undermine my own growing respect for the humanizing force of the story? In short, did God go too far?

  Back at the campsite we were joined by Ofer for dinner. This meal was a little more elaborate than what we had been eating in the Sinai—we had tomatoes, for one, as well as chicken—but the staples were the same. Ofer began baking what he called traveler’s pita, a simple bread made without a pan; matzoh with leavening. He brought out a blob of premade dough, dug a small pit in the ground beneath his tidy, bedouin fire, and placed the dough in the pit, which he covered with dusty embers. “We’re going to eat this?” I asked.

  “In about twenty minutes,” he said.

  “And not get sand in our teeth?”

  He chuckled and continued spreading the coals, until the dough was completely out of sight. As he did, I began to see the parallels—and the differences—between him and the bedouin we had met in the Sinai. The bedouin, longtime desert dwellers, were adopting many of the traits of city folk. Ofer and the others in Ezuz were moving in the opposite direction: leaving the city behind for the desert. In some ways, they were closer to the Israelites in the Bible, trying to find in the liberation of the wilderness a richer, more meaningful life.

  “There’s a reason that all the people who want to speak with God go to the desert,” Ofer said. “It’s easier to see.”

  “But isn’t it difficult, too?” I said. “Aren’t there things you dislike about living here?”

  “At first you don’t like the fact that you can’t get what you want, when you want it,” he said. “In the settled areas people are spoiled. I was spoiled. When you live in the city you can control everything. You control the temperature, you control the food, you control the water. In the desert, you have to take things as they are. You don’t live in this area in August and have air-conditioning so you think it’s winter.”

  “So why stay?”

  “Because we don’t control everything. When you live in the bubble, you see j
ust what human beings make. When you live here you see things other people don’t. It’s difficult. Sometimes you get frustrated. You want to press a button and make things better. But you can’t. I invite you in the winter, to see a flood, and you will see that we are not masters of the world. It’s the most destructive thing I’ve ever seen, and the most beautiful.”

  “How is it beautiful?”

  “It comes out of nowhere. No signal. No warning. Just suddenly the skies open and the water starts to fall. And fall. In Avdot, just north of here, I saw water running so hard off the top of the cliff that it continued in midair for twenty meters before it fell to the ground. I almost cried. I knew all the things it was washing away. The bedouin tents, the newly planted trees, the soil. But I also knew what it would bring in the spring.”

  And therein lies the tension. The flood is beautiful but destructive. The desert is cleansing but calamitous. The people are regenerative but resistant. This struggle, I now realized, dominates the Israelites’ time in the wilderness and is the chief story line of the second half of the Five Books of Moses. In many ways, Numbers mirrors what happens in Genesis. At the beginning of the Bible, God’s task is to create humanity and he follows a vicious cycle of creation and destruction: First he gives life to Adam and Eve, then they disappoint him, and he banishes them from his garden, forcing them to start from scratch. Adam and Eve go on to spawn humanity, who also disappoint God. He destroys them and starts over with Noah.

  A similar, if more elaborate pattern takes place in the desert. God gives life to the Israelites by freeing them from slavery, then they disappoint him, and he strikes out in anger. In a seemingly intractable pattern, God performs miracles—brings water from the well, rains manna from the heavens, delivers the Ten Commandments—and the Israelites react in ungrateful ways. Repeatedly God threatens to kill them and start over with Moses, as he had with Abraham, as he had with Noah. In each case God is mollified, though not before exacting a huge price from the Israelites. He may not destroy the whole population, but he destroys scores of rebels here, hundreds there, until he reaches the bloodcurdling number of 14,700 at Korah. As Jack Miles, author of God:A Biography, has noted, if God created man in his own image, the Israelites’ behavior in this part of Numbers must be seen as a reflection of the competing qualities of creation and destruction inherent within God’s personality. It’s as if the two central players—God and his people—are trapped in a downward spiral of immolation, a phenomenon that during the Cold War was called Mutual Assured Destruction. Each unfortunate event triggers an escalated response in the other side, until neither side knows quite how to break the pattern.

  As Miles concludes: “God is not a stoic, does not teach stoicism, does not honor or encourage resignation or acceptance, and is, by and large, impossible to please. In each of these regards, Israel is made in his image.” From the outset, Miles says, a certain symmetry is apparent, as Israel complains about Moses, Moses complains about Israel, God complains about Israel, Israel complains about God, God complains about Moses, and Moses complains about God. “That such a narrative should have been preserved and elevated to the status of sacred scripture and national classic was an act of the most profound literary and moral originality.”

  This image of God and the people struggling to find a way to relate to each other is the perfect allegory for what I was going through, I now realized. I could shuck many of my citified conventions. I could embrace the openness—and the devotion—of the place. I could even become an advocate for God. But I still couldn’t cross the line to where I completely gave myself over to God. I still resisted many aspects of his character, at least as it’s defined in the Pentateuch. If obliterating humanity for no apparent reason was part of the definition, then part of me wanted to reject any nascent appreciation I might feel toward God and assign my newfound openness to something else, like a love of the desert. As quickly as I developed these feelings I could destroy them. I could become an antagonist of God.

  The Bible, in many ways, seems to anticipate this dilemma by offering up a creative way to bridge the growing chasm between the people and God. As is the case in international relations, the only way to stop a downward spiral is with enlightened leadership, and Moses, even in his most trying times, emerges as an enlightened leader. Specifically what Moses realizes is that God and Israel need each other, and that it’s his role to make sure that happens, to play peacemaker. Time and again throughout the rebellions, Moses pleads with God to forgive the people, then turns around and pleads with the people not to be so hardheaded toward God. What Moses does, in effect, is to tug each side back to the altar, reminding them of their public commitment to each other, and forging out of their reluctance an even deeper bond. On a more figurative level, what he does is loosen the stiff necks of the Israelites. The term stiff-necked is a reference to an ox that refuses to lower its neck, which it must do to be properly fitted into a yoke. What Moses does is teach the people to bow down before God, which is what God has wanted all along.

  Not surprisingly, it’s the part of the story—the role of Moses as power broker—that Ofer most identified with. “My main issue with the Bible,” he said, “is not how many Israelites were in the Exodus, but what the story means to contemporary Israelites, to people like me—and you.” Twenty minutes had passed since he first placed the dough underneath the coals, and he was now poking it with a stick to see if it was done. Convinced that it needed more time, he flipped it over and recovered it with coals.

  “Exodus is not about God, or the Israelites,” he continued. “It’s about how they learned to get along. It’s about how a group of people travels in the desert. How you can’t travel more than about ten kilometers in a day. How you have to live and work together. How you have to have leadership.” He paused for a second. “I want Moses to be the symbol of leadership for modern Israelis.”

  “And how do you achieve that?”

  “You give people the experience of going into the desert. You invite schoolchildren. You invite adults. We had a great example with this march we took last year. Avner was there. It took only nine days, and most of the people knew one another very well and loved one another. And still, how many problems we had! How many hours did we sit around discussing what to do, how to do it, how to solve the tensions among us.”

  “So what’s the principal leadership lesson of Moses?”

  “That nobody can survive alone in the desert, not even a prophet. Moses could easily have gone to the Promised Land with God, but without the people. He could easily have gone with the people, but without God. Instead he chose to go with both, and the only way to do that was to stay in the desert until both sides learned to get along. That’s why they stuck around for forty years: It took that long for the people and God to learn to live together.”

  Ten minutes later the bread was ready to eat. Ofer pulled the pita from the embers and set it on the soil. At this point it was impossible to distinguish the ashes from the bread; both were the color of dusk. He took a stick and began beating the loaf like a dirty rug. Dust flew everywhere. After a few seconds, the loaf was clean enough and he pulled off a piece, breathing steam, and handed it to me. I tossed it around my fingers for a few seconds, then put it in my mouth. There was a small coating of sand around the crust, but I no longer cared. And that’s when I realized how far I’d come during my time in the desert. I no longer craved the apple, the cookie, or the chocolate from my earliest days. I no longer needed cheese, or okra, or tuna. I didn’t even need honey. Bread was flavor enough.

  3. The Land of Milk and Honey

  Two days later I stood with my bag at the entrance to a large yellow security gate in one of the more unusual communities tucked away in the Negev. Midreshet Sdeh Boker is not so much a town as an experimental community, a living Walt Disney–like EPCOT dream, one part optical illusion, one part kibbutz, one part futurama. The community, which contains a research institute, a high school, an army camp, the largest solar dish in the Mi
ddle East, and an entire neighborhood in which every home is constructed to sci-filevel solar standards, was founded in 1963 as the region’s only high-tech village designed exclusively to study the desert and how human beings interact with it. Today Sdeh Boker serves as the epicenter of a particular Israeli dream: the desire to root the country in its biblical desert past, while preparing it for an equally prophetic desert future, one with perpetual energy, perfect tomatoes, and no sunscreen. If Moses went into the wilderness for forty years today, he’d come here first.

  Which is why I decided to visit. Having arrived at the part of the Bible in which the spies venture into the Negev to scope out their future land, I decided to step away from the second millennium B.C.E. for a few days and explore what had become of that land today. Avner and Ido dropped me off at the gate on their way back to Jerusalem, and I walked down a narrow street that in its tidiness reminded me of a 1950s sitcom—Leave It to Beaver or Father Knows Best—but whose dustiness reminded me of a Wild West ghost town in High Noon or Shane. Kids wobbled by on tricycles, followed by dogs and older siblings. A family of ibex wandered around a small garden, nibbling on the meager shrubs. After a few minutes a woman came out of her one-story home and swatted at the stubby horned animals with a broom.

  My destination was the field school, a small, cinder-block facility with classrooms and bedrooms where every Israeli student in the country is expected to come during his or her education to study the desert. “Can you think of anyplace in America where every student goes?” asked Raz, the thirty-four-year-old director who would be my host for the next few days. He was short, taut, and friendly, with deep, sun-hewn lines around his eyes that made him appear older than he was.