by Bruce Feiler
Which Man deemed old two thousand years ago,
Match me such a marvel save in Eastern clime,
A rose-red city half as old as Time.
As it happens, Burgon had never been to Petra when he wrote these oft-quoted lines. When he finally came sixteen years later, he realized his glasses may have been miscolored and wrote abjectly in a letter to his sister, “there is nothing rosy about Petra, by any means.”
Burgon’s backsliding may have been a bit too steep. If anything, Petra seems to change color every hour of the day, a veritable sundial of shades. In midafternoon, when we arrived, the sun still careened off the top of the mountains and covered much of the central street with sharp-edged shadows, black against the yellow sand. You can see many of Petra’s surviving structures from its column-lined central street, which is located at the epicenter of a series of off-shoot canyons that peel off like petals on a morning glory. Petra never contained private homes, or at least they’ve never been found. Residents are thought to have lived in tents. The city was mostly occupied with administrative buildings, religious sites, and the tombs of nobles and kings. Petra, in that way, is remarkably similar to the pyramids: a paean to national power, a religious zone, but, in its most impressive structures, a graveyard.
We hiked up the so-called East Cliff, a raised plateau just above the central street that looms over the town like the royal box at an opera house. This area contains some of the city’s most famous structures, a half-dozen facilities known as the Royal Tombs. Each tomb is named after a prominent architectural detail—the Urn Tomb, the Silk Tomb, the Corinthian Tomb—and consists of a carved exterior masking a hollow cavity about the size of a high school classroom. The facades have been whittled out of the mountain into a series of columns, pediments, and friezes that climb as high as seven or eight stories and can only be described as faux Greek in their style and discombobulated in their effect. The Nabateans are thought to have picked up these and other techniques in their trading with powers around the Mediterranean. All in all, the tombs have the feel of classical temples put together from a kit, not assembled in precisely the right way, and affixed to the front of the mountains to satisfy a newly minted royal class, a few generations out of the desert, and not quite to the point of having set up an art school.
“So why did they care more about building tombs than building houses?” I asked Avner. We had settled on the stoop of one of the tombs, overlooking the fading light in the valley.
“The simple answer is that maybe they considered life after death their normal life. If there is an afterlife, the part of life on earth is very limited. You build pyramids if you’re Egyptian. You build nawamis if you’re a pastoral nomad.”
“So if so many Egyptian texts have to do with the afterlife,” I said, “and they built the pyramids in 2650 B.C.E.; and if the Nabateans cared so much about the afterlife and they built these enormous tombs in the second century B.C.E.: why doesn’t the Pentateuch, which was written halfway between these two times, pay more attention to the afterlife? The patriarchs are buried in Hebron, but no attention is given to how or why. Miriam, Aaron, and Moses all die in the desert and are buried with no mention of what happened to them.”
“Because the Bible deals with life—how to live a holy life, an ethical life, a spiritual life. One of the reasons the Israelites ignored Egyptian influence on death is that the purpose of life in the Pentateuch is largely to serve God, or to have a family that will serve God. There’s no mention of an afterlife. Life ceases when you die. And when you die, you stop serving God.”
“But God continues.”
“That’s right. This is a break from other Near Eastern religions. In Egypt, in Petra, the kings become deities themselves. The pyramids, these tombs, are representations of the power of those people after they die.”
“But if you’re an Israelite—”
“There’s only one God. He exists forever. So if you’re going to build a temple, you build it to God. You don’t build it to yourself.”
We climbed down from the Royal Tombs and strolled through the molded canyons toward Petra’s most famous site, the Treasury, a two-thousand-year-old architectural masterpiece that would be on any short list of the most beautiful buildings in the world. As visitor Andrew Crichton wrote in 1852, “There is scarcely a building in England of 40 years’ standing so fresh and well preserved in its architectural decoration.”
Like the tombs, the Treasury, which is believed to have been completed around the first century B.C.E., is not exactly a building, but a carved facade. Its 120-foot-high veneer has columns, pediments, and classical lions that could have come from the Parthenon. But the king’s taste was by no means limited to Athens. The Treasury, which is often shown in photographs through a jagged opening in the cliffs, also boasts a reproduction of Isis, the Egyptian goddess, and two large eagles, which represent the chief Nabatean god, Dushara.
“Again, the Nabateans, coming from the desert, had no architecture of their own,” Avner said. “Therefore they were very eclectic.”
That mix-and-match quality of Nabatean culture is responsible for one of the most notable features of the Treasury, a ten-foot urn at the structure’s highest peak whose slender pose reminded me of the statue of Freedom atop the U.S. Capitol. Local bedouin around Petra, unaware of classical history and unable to fathom why anyone would construct such a building, regarded the Treasury as the miraculous creation of the pharaoh, whom they considered the lord of black magic. According to tradition, the pharaoh went in pursuit of Moses and the Israelites after the Exodus and was so burdened by lugging his pharaonic riches and jewels that he constructed the Treasury in a stroke and deposited his loot in the urn, out of reach of human hands. Over the years, local bedouin have spent countless hours, and volumes of ammunition, shooting at the urn as if it were a piñata, trying to dislodge the hidden booty. Their only demonstrable impact has been blasting chunks from the solid stone vessel.
For us, the Treasury had a different meaning. Situated at the entrance to Petra, the Treasury stands as a kind of eternal emblem to the moment of transition when a desert people first becomes settled. As Avner noted, when he described the change the Nabateans underwent: First the tribe of shepherds became traders, then they began to see how much money they could make trading, then they began to travel for months at a time across the desert, then they realized the need to protect their trade routes, then they decided they needed a central power to organize their riches. “Sure enough, in a few years the Nabateans had a king,” he said, “and suddenly a society that was built around equal tribes, with people helping one another, now became a stratified society, with nobles, merchants, administrators, and so on. It became like an urban society. That is the same change that the Israelites went through when they came to the Holy Land.”
In making that connection—between the transition of the Nabateans in Petra and the transformation of the Israelites in the Promised Land—Avner raised one of the more intriguing, if controversial, subtexts of the final third of the Pentateuch: namely, what were the Israelites really doing during their forty years in the desert?
Answering that question requires a careful reading of Deuteronomy, the final book of the Pentateuch. A common view among biblical scholars is that the first four books of Moses constitute a narrative whole. They are written with a mix of storytelling, genealogies, laws, and poetry. Deuteronomy, by contrast, is written in a dramatically different style: It’s a homily, a personal exhortation delivered by Moses to the Israelites on the eve of their entry into the Promised Land. It begins, “These are the words that Moses addressed to all Israel on the other side of the Jordan,” and proceeds through a series of speeches in which Moses recounts the Israelites’ historic trek and prepares them for the battle to come. While the other four books have an omniscient narrator, this book clearly is in Moses’ voice, as he intimately addresses not just his contemporaries but future generations as well. As commentator Joel Rosenberg has noted, Mos
es, who once defined himself as “not a man of words,” suddenly finds his voice, and his voice is remarkably similar to God’s.
Most scholars believe that Deuteronomy is a late addition, appended after the first four books were already complete. In this view, the Torah was originally the Tetrateuch and became the Pentateuch only with the addition of the fifth book. As scholar William Hallo has written, “Deuteronomy occupies a unique position in the Hebrew Bible. More nearly than any other biblical book, it can lay claim to having been a book in its own right before it was incorporated into the canon.”
If true—and most scholars agree that it is—why was the book added at all? Why not end with Numbers, with the Israelites having finished their trek through the region and prepared to go across the Jordan? This question divides scholars. Some view the speeches in Deuteronomy as a sermon on collective responsibility, others as an elaborate renewal of the covenant, still more as a prophetic foreshadowing of the troubles the Israelites will face in the future. What scholars do agree on is that the central objective of the text is to unify the Israelites in their allegiance to God. As the Hebrew name for the book, mishne tora, indicates, Deuteronomy is a “copy of the Torah,” a retelling of the law. Accordingly, Moses reviews the Israelites’ trek through the wilderness, recapitulates the laws, and generally reminds the Israelites of their responsibilities as a people. In effect, he leads a public reeducation of his people, a mass seminar on the desert floor.
This colloquium is necessary because the population of Israelites preparing to march into the Promised Land has little, if any, knowledge of its own history. None (with the exception of Joshua and Caleb) was present during the Exodus. That population had entirely died off, as God had willed after the rebellion over the spies. Instead, Moses is faced with a band of disparate tribes, each one made up entirely of people born in the wilderness. To put this into perspective, a twenty-year-old Israelite on the eve of the conquest would have been born to, say, a twenty-year-old Israelite who was born in the Kadesh-barnea, who in turn was born to, say, a twenty-year-old slave who escaped during the Exodus. That slave, a descendant of one of Jacob’s sons, would have been born at least 430 years after the founder of his tribe, who in turn would have been born four generations after Abraham. Based on the Bible’s own calendar, it’s not unreasonable to assume that the average Israelite listening to Moses’ speech in Jordan would have been nearly eight hundred years removed from the start of the story, as much time as from today to the reign of Richard the Lion-Hearted. A little review was certainly in order.
It’s precisely the nature of that review that makes what the Israelites went through in Jordan analogous to what the Nabateans went through in Jordan. In both cases, a desert people undergoes a transition and starts to become a settled people. The Nabateans, however, never quite made it. They were overrun by the Romans in 106 C.E. and slinked back into obscurity. Why did they fail? “Not enough time,” Avner said. “They only had four hundred years. When the Romans came they were not yet ripe.” The Israelites, however, ultimately were more successful. They conquered the Promised Land, lived there for five hundred years, were kicked out briefly by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E., returned for another five hundred years, were kicked out in 70 C.E. for almost two thousand years, but returned again in the twentieth century. Why did the Israelites prevail?
“Again, time was a factor,” Avner said. “They had long periods of time to develop when nobody interrupted them.”
“So if you and I were bedouin now,” I said, “and we wanted to transform ourselves into an urban people, what should we do first, and what second?”
“Sorry to be somewhat realistic,” Avner said, “but the first thing is an economy. Next, you need an identity. The Nabateans did the first, but they didn’t have time to do the second. They didn’t even get around to building houses. They were still living in tents.”
“The Israelites did number two first,” I said, “they developed an identity. And later they developed an economy, but not until after they conquered the land.”
“And that’s the whole point of the Bible!” Avner said. “It’s about building the spiritual unity of the people. That’s what they were doing in the desert all those years.”
“And that’s why they needed Deuteronomy.”
“Right. They may not have had the land, but they still transformed themselves into a nation. Moses was telling the people their past, building history into the character of the nation—the DNA you might call it—so that when they conquered the Promised Land, their spiritual unity was already in place.”
Now, late in the afternoon, the small viewing area in front of the Treasury was deserted. A bedouin shopkeeper was packing up his kettle; the sun had mostly disappeared. We were bedraggled, having gotten up at 4 A.M., spent eight hours on a camel, and then walked through the ruins. We still had to navigate the mile-long Siq, the twisting, narrow gorge that’s the only way in or out of the city that doesn’t require going over the mountains. This is the way most visitors arrive in the city. Sort of like the tail on the tadpole of Petra, the Siq seems like a living organism, twisting one way, then the other. Usually no more than three feet wide, the path, with walls as high as five hundred feet, occasionally widens into a pocket of open air, then narrows again. It was first formed by an earthquake and later deepened by the waters of Wadi Musa. The Nabateans transported water through the Siq through the use of a terra-cotta pipe, which is still visible today.
By far the most magical spot in the Siq is near the end (which for us was near the beginning, since we were coming from inside). After a short walk, we turned to face a dramatic split in the gorge, like a bolt of lightning through the rock. In between the cliffs, the red face of the Treasury appears, like the eager grin of civilization peering through a crack in the desert. The effect is sort of like Jack Nicholson leering through the splintered door in The Shining. Instead of fear, though, the reaction one gets is one of awe, tinged with apprehension. Is this civilization triumphing over the desert, or is it the other way around?
“It’s like Saint Catherine’s,” Avner said. “When you stand here and look at the Treasury, it’s all square lines and order, but it’s in a wilderness that is all about disorder. Some people find it alarming. I find it beautiful.”
“So what was it like the first time you came?” I asked.
“I cried,” he said. “I knew every millimeter of the place from my studies. Where to go, what to see. I knew it by heart. I came in 1995. Edie”—his Canadian-born wife—“could have come years before with her passport, but she said, ‘I’m waiting for you.’ And she cried also. Because Petra was, for Israelis, a miracle. Many people had been killed trying to come here over the years. The bedouin would shoot them. We were so close all those years, but we couldn’t even see it. And it had so much to say.”
“So what does it say to you now?”
“Now I see it as a place of peace. It has to do with mankind. People built this thing. People built Petra. The Nabatean trail goes from Saudi Arabia through Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian Territories. If we can restore this trail”—as Avner, Rami, and a few others were trying to do, opening it up to cross-border traffic—“we can show that some things in the Middle East are not about religion.”
“That leads me to a question I’ve been waiting to ask you since we started,” I said.
“Okaaaay?” Avner said, expectant. We were still staring at the Treasury. The sky had been growing gradually darker in the last half hour, but suddenly the sun must have set, because the blue sliver of sky quickly turned white, then yellow, orange, and peach. It was like watching a bowl of melting Life Savers. And finally, when we didn’t think the colors could get any richer, the whole Siq was illuminated in a most pleasant blush the color of rose.
“So why did you come on this trip with me?”
Avner considered the question for a second. His blue eyes twinkled as his lips crept into a grin. His face was burnt with the sun of our morning ri
de. His hair, unwashed for days like mine, squiggled in a hundred directions. He had that tattered-teddy-bear contentment I had noticed on our first meeting.
“I think you mentioned it once,” Avner said. “When I told you I left the Sinai and had to fight to give it back to Egypt, you said, ‘You chose to be a prophet and not an archaeologist.’ Now that’s a big word, ‘prophet,’ but being an archaeologist can be very narrow. I love archaeology. I love to excavate. Of course,” he added, “I hate to publish.” We both laughed. “But I really love archaeology.
“And yet,” he continued, “it’s not the only way to engage the ancient world. What I want to do is reach people—to connect the present to the past. I’d hate to be limited to one, very professional, but very narrow-minded way of doing that. I find it much more interesting, for example, and maybe much more important, to try and get the Palestinians and Jordanians and Egyptians and Israelis to cooperate.”
“So despite what happened last night in that tent, you believe it can be done?”
“Yes, I do. Last night was not as big a shock to me as to you, because I got that shock years ago. But as I said yesterday, there are other bridges, smaller bridges. More human ones.” He paused and seemed to grow almost wistful. “And I guess that’s why I decided to come with you,” he said. “If you take people, outsiders, and take them on a trip like we have done, you educate them—not just about the Bible, not just about God. But about tolerance. You link them with other people, and in the end, you open their minds. There’s an old saying in the Middle East: With a trail, the best way to keep it alive is to walk on it, because every time you walk on it, you create it again.”
For a second neither of us spoke. I thought back on our first meeting at the coffee shop in Jerusalem, and how extraordinarily fortunate I had been to meet him. “I don’t think you’re crazy at all,” he had said when I told him of my idea. “I think it sounds exciting.” Perhaps in our own way, we had helped keep the trail alive.
