Walking the Bible

by Bruce Feiler

  Since this is the Middle East, however, the verdant pastures quickly give way to dust-infested towns crowded with onion stands and pita vendors. Ma’daba, located about fifty miles southeast of the capital, is one such city. Once part of the kingdom of Moab, Ma’daba is mentioned in Numbers 21 as a place the Israelites destroyed on their bloody trip north. The city continued to be a pawn for the next millennium, switching from Israelite hands back to Moabite, from Hellenistic to Nabatean. By the first millennium C.E., Christianity took hold, leaving the city its richest legacy: dozens of Byzantine mosaics.

  We parked and entered the modest Saint George’s Church, a whitewashed Greek Orthodox facility with several brass lanterns dripping from the ceiling and a few wooden icons hanging from the walls. The church reminded me of Saint Catherine’s, but was smaller and less ornate. In 1976, a worshiper noticed that one of the icons, depicting the Virgin Mary, had suddenly grown a third hand, which was blue, and which had been invisible to congregants only minutes earlier. The protuberance was declared to be a miracle, and soon drew visitors from around the world.

  The real attraction in Saint George’s, however, is its mosaic map, dating from the sixth century C.E., which is considered one of the oldest existing depictions of the Holy Land. Spread out on the floor in incomplete patches that collectively are about the size and shape of the stain that would result from spilling a gallon of paint on the floor, the mosaic represents only a fragment of the original, which stretched fifteen feet by forty-five feet and included over two million tiles. Uncovered when the church was reconstructed in 1884, the map depicts over 150 biblical sites across the Near East, from Egypt to Lebanon.

  Oriented to the east, as if the viewer is standing in the Mediterranean looking toward the Jordan River, the map is focused around Jerusalem, labeled the “center of the world” and portrayed in vivid red, yellow, brown, and white tiles. The map is so precise that it depicts the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in three dimensions, as if done by Picasso in his cubist phase. Jericho, the “city of palms,” is surrounded by palms, and Hebron shows the Cave of the Patriarchs. There are even a few playful asides. At the mouth of the Dead Sea, one fish from the Jordan swims eagerly toward the sea, while another swims even more eagerly away from the sea, apparently desperate to flee the salt.

  I was struck by the number of places we had visited that were represented on the map, including Nablus, Goshen, Gaza, the Sinai, the Negev, even Edom and Moab. “We didn’t have to make our trip,” I joked to Avner. “We could have just come here.”

  “In fact, this was probably put here originally to help guide pilgrims,” he said.

  As we were leaving, we ran into a bookish-looking American man in his forties, dressed in a khaki shirt and straw hat, who we guessed was an archaeologist. He was, as well as a pastor. Doug Clark was a thin, fair-haired native of Washington State who had been coming to Jordan for twenty-five years in his capacity as a professor of biblical studies and archaeology at the School of Theology at Walla Walla College. A passionate excavator of ancient sites and an ordained Seventh-Day Adventist pastor, Doug seemed to embody all the tensions—between science and religion, between history and faith—that characterized so many conversations along our route. As we sat in a pew, I asked how he reconciled his work as an archaeologist with his beliefs.

  “I guess I have come to terms personally with the Bible, a book which is precious to me,” he said, “so that I don’t have to lock in every story as being factual. My own sense of Scripture is that I believe some kind of divine activity is behind the Bible, but I don’t assume that every detail in the story is true. It can’t be. But I don’t believe the details are important. I believe the lessons are important.”

  “So as a person of the Bible, do you wish you never encountered archaeology?”

  “I remember the first time I came to Jordan to dig,” he said. “It was 1973, and this man, who must have been sixty and had nothing to do with archaeology, said to me, ‘Be very careful about archaeology.’ I have applied that a number of times since. I think that if one is honest with the archaeological data, one will confront issues and have a crisis of faith. And I had my crisis of faith.

  “But”—and his voice lifted here—“I think anyone who has a wish to be faithful and honest will have a crisis of faith. Still, I think that crisis has made my faith stronger. It’s just no longer rooted in the same way. I’m not dependent on factuality in everything. I can look back and say, ‘Okay, so it didn’t happen that way. So there weren’t two million people in the Exodus.’ But I still have a sense that historically, archaeologically, we can see the larger elements of the story.”

  “So has coming here enhanced your faith?”

  “It’s been very much an enhancement,” he said. “I grew up in a tradition in which the earth was only six thousand years old, but I was working in a site today that’s 250,000 years old. So on the one hand I continue to grow in my awareness of the facts, and I’m enamored by that. On the other hand, to visit places like Ma’daba, or Nebo, is a devotional experience. I continue to be touched by the fact that somehow God chose to interact with human beings in this place. I don’t know how he chose it, but he did.

  “Take Mount Nebo,” he continued. “Three days ago I got an e-mail from one of my friends at home; her daughter had been murdered. So I went to Mount Nebo the next day. I just sat there. I wanted to think about the Promised Land. I wanted to look at Jericho. And when you think about Moses on that spot, about God choosing to make a connection with human beings there, about the Israelites on the verge of achieving their destiny—that, for me, is worship.”

  By the time we made it back to our jeep and turned eastward it was late afternoon and the sun was starting to fade. Instead of the glorious reds and pinks of Petra, dusk was mostly grayish here, the color of concrete. The road slowly climbed through a series of villages. We were moving westward through the Jordanian mountains, which reached their peaks and then collapsed into the Rift Valley, meaning, as a geographical matter, that the mountains were far steeper on their western side than their eastern. We were in a temperate zone, and in what seemed a fitting ode to a place of ending, the terrain had many of the topographical elements we had seen across our route: the medieval thatched roofs and wooden carts of eastern Turkey; the pine trees and sage bushes of the Jerusalem hills; the craggy rocks and sandy soil of the Negev. And, as in the Sinai, everywhere the sense of drama: big boulders, big mountains, big sky.

  Eventually we climbed our way to the series of peaks collectively referred to as Mount Nebo, the single most important biblical site in Jordan and, after Ararat and Sinai, the third emblematic mountain of the Pentateuch. In Deuteronomy 32, after Moses delivers a passionate speech to the Israelites, God tells him, “Ascend these heights of Abarim,” the biblical name for the Jordan hills, “to Mount Nebo, which is in the land of Moab facing Jericho, and view the land of Canaan which I am giving the Israelites as their holding. You shall die on the mountain that you are about to ascend, and shall be gathered to your kin, as your brother Aaron died on Mount Hor and was gathered to his kin.” God reminds Moses of the reason, saying it’s because “you broke faith with Me among the Israelite people,” at the waters of Meribath-kadesh, then adds:“You may view the land from a distance, but you shall not enter it.”

  Like Mount Ararat, the mountain now called Nebo has a natural claim to its identity: At 2,540 feet, it’s the tallest in the area, though it’s only a third as tall as Jebel Musa and an eighth as tall as Ararat. The mountain actually consists of a number of peaks, the two tallest being Siyagah and el Mukhayyat. Though Siyagah is slightly lower, it’s also flatter, and holy buildings have existed on it since the first millennium B.C.E. The first Christian building was erected in 394 C.E. and was later expanded to include a church and a monastery, which was abandoned in 1564. In 1933, the ruined site was purchased by the Franciscans, who excavated and restored the basilica and monastery, both of which still function today.

  T
he front gate to the Franciscan facility was closed when we arrived, so we walked along the southern side and rang the private bell of the proprietor. A crotchety Italian man in his seventies opened the door. “Garbo” was the caretaker hired by the Franciscans, and we’d been given his name by an archaeologist in Amman. We explained what we were doing and asked if he would let us spend the last night of our journey on Mount Nebo, so we could see sunrise from the spot where Moses is said to have died. Garbo grumbled a few minutes as he mulled our request. He asked if we had a letter from the chief archaeologist of Mount Nebo; we didn’t. He asked if we were Catholic. Finally, citing regulations, he politely turned us down, but said that if we returned at 5 A.M. he would personally open the gate for us. He gestured to the neighboring peak, el Mukhayyat, and implied that we should sleep there. He knew it was illegal to spend the night on the mountain. Mahmoud also knew it was illegal, and advised against it. Even Avner’s wife, Edie, knew it was illegal. Before we left she had said she might not be willing to bail us out if we got arrested. “I’ve got better things to do with my money,” she said.

  We stayed anyway. We drove on the dirt road that circled the bald peak of el Mukhayyat until we found a gravelly area flat enough to sleep on. We doubled back to one of the villages, bought a few bags of provisions—bread, cheese, tuna, honey, even orange juice—as well as two bedouin mattresses wrapped in purple flowery fabric. Back at the site, we gathered dried branches of wormwood and sagebrush in case we wanted a fire. We bid good-bye to Mahmoud, who agreed to pick us up at the monastery around 8 A.M., and settled into our jerry-built home.

  Nebo is located on a geological seam. Behind us were the central mountains of Jordan, followed by the eastern desert, then the vast deserts of Saudi Arabia and Iraq, like two coattails that never end. In front of us was the precipitous drop-off of the Rift Valley, followed by the Judean hills of central Israel. From our vantage point, we had a complete, 180-degree panorama of the misty infinity of the biblical Promised Land. At this hour, with the sun already set, the dark screen of dust settling over the horizon had the density of steel wool. To the left was the Dead Sea; to the right the huddled lights of Jericho. Jerusalem, in between, was invisible. Nothing seemed to be moving, but there were sounds of life: donkeys braying, motorbikes sputtering, wind blowing, birds chirping.

  We grew nostalgic. Almost two years had passed since I first met Avner, and we began recalling various events. Remember finding those quail eggs in the Sinai? Can you believe they have e-mail at Saint Catherine’s? Do you think Parachute really found Noah’s ark? A second telling, our own private Deuteronomy.

  As we talked, we drifted into a discussion of what we’d learned. Perhaps the most striking thing we gleaned from retracing the Five Books of Moses was not all that different from what had originally propelled me on this trip: The Bible is not an abstraction in the Middle East, nor even just a book; it’s a living, breathing entity, undiminished by the passage of time. If anything, the Bible has been elevated to that rare stature of being indefinitely immediate. That’s a principal reason few people ultimately care when the Bible was written; the text is forever applicable. It’s always now.

  This ability of the Bible to continually reinvent itself is matched only by its ability to make itself relevant to anyone who encounters it. Probably the most surprising thing about our trip is that in every place we went—“three continents, five countries, four war zones,” I used to joke—we asked everybody basically the same question:“What does the Bible mean to you?” And everybody had an answer. Every single person had a way to relate to the story, whether it was a Kurdish freedom fighter in Dogubayazit, a Jewish settler on the West Bank, a Muslim archaeologist in Cairo, a bedouin shepherd in the Sinai, a Palestinian ambassador in Amman. In all of our travels, I never entered a room in which someone didn’t have a story, a theory, or a question about the text. An eight-year-old Jerusalemite wondered whether the reeds I brought back from Egypt were papyrus or bulrushes (they were bulrushes). A fiftysomething lawyer asked whether Petra could be the place Lot fled after leaving Sodom (unlikely). A forty-year-old priest wanted to know if the desert can truly be a spiritual place (absolutely).

  This chameleon-like quality is what makes the Bible so vital. It’s an organism so universal it has the ability to engage its human interlocutors in whatever form they desire—geological, ecological, zoological, philological, psychological, astrological, theological, illogical. It can even regenerate itself in locations where it’s been dead for years, or even centuries, as happened when Byzantine travelers first came to the Sinai in the fourth century C.E., or when large numbers of Jews arrived in Israel in the twentieth century. Put tautologically:The Bible lives because it never dies. As a rabbi friend of mine said, it’s like a fungus that can live underground for long periods then pop up and thrive wherever it appears.

  Though my friend quickly regretted his remark, he actually made a significant point. Easily the most impressive thing I learned during my trip was that the Bible’s ability to be relevant to contemporary life was by no means guaranteed. If anything, over the last two hundred years it has undergone the most concentrated and ruthless academic scrutiny that any written work has ever faced. This scientific interrogation, from every conceivable corner—archaeology, history, physics, metaphysics, linguistics, anthropology—was designed, in many cases, to undermine the Bible, to destroy its credibility. But in every case (at least the ones involving historical events, after the primeval stories of Creation), the Bible not only withstood the inquisition but came out stronger, with its integrity intact, and its nuances more on display. This doesn’t mean that the stories are true, but it does mean that they’re true to their era. The Bible lives today not because it’s untouchable but precisely because it has been touched—it has been challenged—and it remains undefeated.

  This remarkable ability of the Bible to thrive, even in a world dominated by skepticism and science, came home to me during a meeting I had just before leaving for Jordan. I went to see Israel Hershkovitz, a professor of anatomy and anthropology at Tel Aviv University, who was Avner’s deputy in the Sinai and now studies ancient skeletons. I was hoping to find out once and for all whether the attachment to the land I first felt in Turkey might be in my DNA or whether it was more likely in my mind. Israel was a warm, messy-haired man like Avner, who invited me into his laboratory, which was lined from floor to ceiling with hundreds of skulls from the ancient world, like some creepy vision out of Darwin’s, or maybe Frankenstein’s, laboratory. Seated in front of his collection, Israel looked like one of those experts who appear on National Geographic specials nodding gravely.

  He conceded that certain aspects of the story were inconsistent with current knowledge: that humans could live to be six hundred years old, that the world was created 5,700 years ago, that all humans were descended from one couple. He viewed these as narrative devices. “If you take a group of people, and the group is very large, the only way to keep the people together, working toward the same goal, is to say, ‘We all came from the same forefathers.’ ”

  But otherwise, he was a devotee of the Bible. He read it every day to his daughter, he said, and believed it captured larger truths about the ancient world: foremost among them, the power of the desert. “It makes sense to me that the desert is where most of the great religions were born,” he said. “More than any other place, it gives you time for thinking about spiritual things.”

  “But is there a physiological reason for that connection?” I asked. I then outlined for him the somewhat eccentric idea I had been developing. If, as scientists say, human beings first evolved in Africa, and if, as he confirmed, they spread out to the rest of the world over the land bridge of the Middle East, and if, as he mentioned, the three monotheistic religions that sprung from that bridge all have at their heart the story of human beings finding God in the desert, is it possible that humans somehow developed in themselves a physical attachment to the deserts of the Middle East, their earliest h
ome?

  “In a way, yes,” Israel said. “Because if we take ourselves back eleven thousand years or so, men were basically hunter-gatherers. Then we had the agricultural revolution, and at that point there was a split. Most people became farmers and developed a food-producing economy. About ninety percent did that. But about ten percent didn’t, they were pushed aside. They developed a lifestyle that was in between the nomadic lives of their ancestors and the settled lives of the farmers.”

  “So some people can have an attachment to the desert but not everyone has to have it?”

  “Absolutely. We know now that genes have the ability to store ancestral memories. And these can survive for hundreds of years. The Jewish people, for example, are very stubborn. To keep up with their religion for all those years in exile, first in Babylon, then in the diaspora, reminds me of a very special people: the bedouin. You give up a lot, you live in marginal areas, you don’t enjoy all the benefits of life. But you preserve your identity.”

  “So to bring this to a personal level, when I come to this part of the world and have a personal reaction, ‘This is where I feel at home,’ is it possible that I’m discovering something that was already within me?”

  “I think so. Everybody discovers sooner or later where they fit into the spectrum. I always say to Avner, if Sadat had not come to Jerusalem and made peace, I would probably have stayed in Sinai with Avner for the rest of our lives. It was quite a hard life. It’s not like you could go to a restaurant, or watch a movie. We were basically by ourselves. But we were happy.”

  I asked him where God fit into his formulation.