Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible

by David Plotz

  I make a date with Ian Stern, an American-born Israeli in his early fifties who operates Dig for a Day, probably the biggest archaeology outreach program in the world. Every year, Stern’s dig is visited by 30,000 to 50,000 tourists—most of them American Jews. They do spadework for Stern’s academic research, get a hands-on crash course in archaeology, and explore their own history in the dirt.

  We drive an hour south from Jerusalem to the Maresha–Beit Guvrin national park, where Stern runs a huge archaeological dig. As we approach the park, even my rookie eyes can spot where an ancient town once stood. There’s a hill that doesn’t have the smooth roundish top that Mother Nature would specify. Instead, it’s squared off, like a military haircut, as a result of centuries of human building. That is Tel Maresha, the oldest site in the area, where a Judean town stood 2,800 years ago. Ian gives me a quick history of the site. Almost 3,000 years ago, Solomon’s son King Rehoboam of Judah fortified Maresha and neighboring towns as a bulwark against the Philistines. A century later, in the eighth century BC, the Assyrians conquered the region during the invasion that wiped out the ten northern “lost” tribes of Israel. And a century after that, the Babylonians conquered Maresha; probably, that conquest was doomsday for the town’s Jewish population. Maresha rebounded and reached its heyday a couple of hundred years before the birth of Christ. By then dominated by Idumeans (“Edomites” in the Bible)—although perhaps with a Jewish minority—the town opposed the Jewish Maccabean rebellion against Israel’s Hellenistic rulers. The Maccabeans won, and took their revenge. Around 112 BC, King John Hyrcanus, the nephew of Judah Maccabee, ordered the non-Jews of Maresha to convert, leave, or be killed. (Here the Old Testament intersects with the New. Among those who chose to convert were the grandparents of Herod, the king who, in the gospels, ordered the slaughter of the innocents. Herod himself was probably born at Maresha.)

  What makes Maresha extraordinary is what’s under our feet. Starting around 800 BC, Mareshans began digging into the soft limestone bedrock to quarry rock for their homes. This digging left bell-shaped underground caverns. According to Ian, who has been excavating here for twenty years, we are standing on a honeycomb: There are 170 cave systems in the area, comprising 3,000 to 5,000 underground rooms. These caverns, protected from the desert heat, proved to be perfect workshops and storage spaces—an underground city. Ian has found enormous olive presses, cisterns for water storage, and columbaria for raising turtledoves. He shows me the jaw-dropping Bell Caves, which have ceilings sixty feet high. (True cinephiles may know that Sylvester Stallone rappelled down into them during Rambo III.) When early European explorers came to Maresha, they believed the Bell Caves verified the stories about giants told in Numbers and Deuteronomy. (Now we know that the caves were dug by ordinary men, and not till hundreds of years after those biblical events supposedly would have taken place.)

  At the time of Hyrcanus’s conquest, around 112 BC, residents of Maresha dumped their possessions into their basement caves— leaving ten, twenty, or thirty feet of detritus that has not been touched since. The Dig for a Day visitors, like me, are cleaning out this ancient garbage dump. Ian and I clamber down a ladder into cave system 169. Carry ing flashlights, pickaxes, buckets, and hand shovels, we make our way to a far corner and start digging. Within a minute I see a sharp-edged rock that looks like pottery. I fish the piece out of the dirt and push on it, as instructed, to see if it crumbles. If it did, it would just be limestone. But my piece firmly resists, so I brush the dirt off till I can see smooth pottery, one side black, the other brick red.

  I hand it to Stern. He glances at it, and says, “Cooking pot. See the black part? That’s where it carbonized. Probably 2,200 years old, time of the Maccabees,” the Jewish heroes of the Hanukkah story. He tosses my shard into a plastic collection bucket. “That’s why this place is so great. It has instant gratification. There’s a biblical connection. There’s a Hanukkah connection. You can come here and dig up pottery from the time of Judah Maccabee. He fought a battle near here. Now I am not saying he ate out of that pot, but you see and hold this pottery, and he is not a fairy-tale figure anymore. He is real.”

  After fifteen minutes, I have filled three buckets with dirt and found several pieces of bone and half a dozen more pottery shards. (Pottery, Ian observes, is the plastic of the ancient world. It’s everywhere and it’s impossible to destroy.) We tote our buckets up the ladder to the surface, where we shake our diggings through a screen, discovering a few more shards, including a red piece of imported pottery, some charcoal, and a fragment of plaster. I’m embarrassed at how thrilled I am about our banal finds. I’m the first person to touch this potsherd in 100 generations! The Diggers for a Day routinely unearth genuine trea sures. They’ve uncovered an ancient marriage contract (not Jewish), coins, gold earrings, seals of kings, a circumcised phallus, and literally thousands of complete pottery vessels. (“The groups get incredibly excited when they find a whole pottery piece. I don’t tell them that we have boxes piled as high as the ceiling filled with complete pieces,” says Ian.) It’s an exciting experience, yet a confusing one. As Ian says, it does make history seem more real to me, because this pottery really was here during the time of Judah Maccabee. On the other hand, it doesn’t actually make God or the Bible more real to me—this pottery would have been here if God was helping His Chosen People, or if He was just a figment of their imagination.

  I experience this confusion even more severely when I spend a day with David Ilan, who directs the Nelson Gleuck School of Biblical Archaeology at Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. I ask him to show me a conflict between biblical archaeology and politics in modern Israel. To do that, Ilan takes me down to the City of David, an archaeological park just south of Jerusalem’s Old City. As soon as we enter the park, he walks us over to a metal grate and points down a dozen feet to a shadowy stone wall, the remains of what definitely is, or possibly might be, or is highly unlikely to be the palace of King David.

  Don’t shout this in the pews on Sunday, but when it comes to the fun parts of the Bible—from the Garden of Eden to Mount Sinai—the “facts on the ground” are scarce. Archaeologists have discovered no significant evidence for Noah’s flood, for Sodom and Gomorrah, or for Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob. They don’t believe that Jews were enslaved in Egypt, wandered in the desert, or even conquered the Promised Land. Much evidence has survived about later books—the cut-rate monarchs and latecomer generals we’ve just read about in First and Second Kings, for instance—but the most celebrated biblical heroes remain stuck in the world of myth.

  The dividing line between myth and history is King David. Essentially nothing and no one until the time of King David can be confirmed, but much that comes after him can be. David himself is a gray zone. Little evidence exists that Israel’s greatest king, the uniter of Israel, ever lived. Archaeologists have found several inscriptions that seem to refer to David, but they all date from a century after his death. Moreover, Ilan says, many scholars are skeptical about the idea that there ever was a united kingdom of Israel. The archaeological evidence suggests that the north (Israel) and the south (Judah) were separate kingdoms. Only after the northern kingdom had been destroyed did the scribes of Judah invent a history of a unified nation led by the great David. So to prove the existence of David would be a magnifi cent feat, and a blow to skeptics. It would push the true Bible all the way back to the book of Samuel, and show that even if Abraham, Moses, and Joseph are myth, at least one of the Bible’s most vivid heroes— perhaps its most vivid hero—is real. To confirm the identity of David, a man who talked to God, killed Goliath, and united Israel, would be like winning the biblical lottery.

  This is why it was astonishing and controversial when the Israeli archaeologist Eilat Mazar announced in 2005 that she had discovered what could be the palace of King David, here in the City of David. According to Mazar, the walls Ilan is showing me and the pottery shards unearthed near them indicate that a monumental building was erected here around the ten
th century BC, the time of David.

  But many archaeologists doubt that this is David’s palace. Ilan stares through the grate, looking skeptical. “I see walls,” says Ilan. “But the evidence is ambiguous. I look and I see shards and something that seems like a building that may be from the ninth or tenth century, but that is as much as I can tell you. [Mazar] found what she was looking for. You have a biblical text and an archaeologist who wants to find David’s palace, and, bang, there it is.” Ilan cites evidence that the palace dates from a century after David’s death, and emphasizes that Mazar did not find written inscriptions or more intact pottery vessels that would connect the building to the king.

  “Probably twenty percent of archeologists would say, yes, it is the palace of David. And ten percent would say, no, it definitely isn’t. And seventy percent of us would say we don’t know.”

  Whether or not the palace is the palace of David, the City of David is a wonderland of biblical archaeology. There’s an ancient house perched on the hillside beneath the (possible) palace. Ilan points to the right of the house, where there is an ancient out house. Some archaeologists excavated the sump beneath it, and learned which parasites and lice were feasting on Jerusalemites 2,500 years ago. Ilan walks me through a recent discovery, the enormous fortifi cation protecting the town spring from invaders. Its towers were built around 1600 BC—a full 600 years before David would have conquered the city.

  Putative Bible, possible Bible, and actual Bible—they’re all here. We peer down a stone shaft above the spring. Some early archaeologists, says Ilan, speculated that this hole was the site of one of the most daring battles in the Bible. According to 2 Samuel 5, David conquered Jerusalem by infiltrating a commando team into the city via a water shaft. Was this where David’s Delta Force penetrated the city? Almost certainly not, says Ilan, but it’s a fun story.

  Then he shows me a tunnel with a more solid biblical provenance. In 2 Kings 20, King Hezekiah of Judah digs a water tunnel, perhaps to help Jerusalem withstand the Assyrian siege of 701 BC. Voilà! Here’s a tunnel that bores almost 2,000 feet through solid rock, channeling water from the spring to a protected pool on the far side of the town.

  Ilan and I take a back way out of the archaeological park. It leads us into the heart of Silwan, the Arab town that surrounds the City of David. Silwan was captured by Israel in 1967, and much of the world does not recognize Israelis’ right to build or live here. The excavations in the City of David are actually funded by a right-wing, pro-settlement group that aims to take back the area for Jews and has already helped move Jewish settlers into Silwan. Not surprisingly, the pro-settlement Israelis are thrilled by the biblical findings here, believing they confirm an ancient Jewish claim to the land. The Palestinian neighbors, by contrast, see the Bible digs as purely political, an excuse to drive them from their homes.

  Nowhere is the conflict between the reality and the hope of the Bible clearer than at Jerusalem’s Bible Lands Museum, which collects artifacts from across the biblical world, from Iran in the east to Greece in the west. The museum is a hodgepodge—sculpture, prayer figurines, mummies, idols, cuneiform texts, coins—with each room related loosely to a par tic ular biblical verse. A room of ancient seals, for example, is crowned with a quotation from the story of Tamar, about how Judah gave her his seal as payment for sex. The collection is gorgeous, but there is an obvious problem: it contains almost nothing about Israelites. The Sumerians, Hittites, Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, Canaanites, and Philistines are well represented, but the people who wrote the Bible are essentially absent. The only obviously Jewish relics are postbiblical. These include coins from the period of the Roman occupation. (My favorite is one commemorating the Roman conquest of Judea and the destruction of the Second Temple. Inscribed “Judea Capta,” it shows the emperor standing triumphant, while a Jewess weeps underneath a palm tree.)

  There’s a good reason for the absence of the Israelites. The Bible notwithstanding, there was never a long-lasting or distinct Israelite civilization. For all the grandeur of the Bible, for all that it tells us of a mighty nation that destroyed Pharaoh, killed 185,000 Assyrians in a night, and exterminated every non-Jew in the Promised Land, the physical evidence suggests that Israel-Judah was a tiny, short-lived nation. It existed for a few hundred deeply troubled years, buffeted by mightier surrounding civilizations. The Bible is telling a skewed version of history. Maybe it’s something like your own autobiography. Your memoir would make you a central figure in the world, important, interesting, essential. Something similar seems to have happened with the Bible. The stories we’ve been reading exaggerate the role and the importance of Jews in the biblical world, because Jews wrote the book.

  This realization leaves me feeling oddly alienated from the Bible, as if it’s just a trick. I need some other way to look at it, and so I ask Ian Stern to take me down to Qumran, where the Dead Sea scrolls were found. The scrolls are a collection of hundreds of texts and fragments of text discovered in caves near the Dead Sea during the late 1940s and 1950s. Most scholars believe they were compiled by a strange Jewish sect known as the Essenes who lived in Qumran from the second century BC until around AD 70. The scrolls include portions of every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther and Nehemiah—the glory is a complete copy of the book of Isaiah—as well as apocrypha and the sect’s own rule books.

  The Dead Sea scrolls are by far the earliest surviving versions of biblical text, a full 1,000 years older than the next oldest Hebrew Bible. Because the scrolls were discovered at the very moment the state of Israel was born, they exert a profound pull on Israelis, helping confi rm their sense of continuity with their new land. Even secular Israelis I know—people who would eat a bacon cheeseburger on Yom Kippur— revere the Dead Sea scrolls.

  Ian and I drive ninety minutes from Jerusalem to Qumran. It’s hard to overstate how hostile the place is. It’s a godforsaken slab of rock on the northwestern shore of the world’s evilest body of water, a sulfurous sea so cruel that it gave birth to the legends of Sodom and Gomorrah. (The pillars of salt on the southern coast were thought to be Lot’s wife.) The Essenes fled Jerusalem to build their own, untouchable community here. Away from corrupt civilization, they would sanctify themselves and wait for the apocalypse to come, at which point they would rebuild a better, purified Temple in Jerusalem. The apocalypse did come, but only for them. Around the time Rome sacked the Second Temple to suppress the great revolt of Jews, its legions also obliterated the Essenes. They were wiped off the face of the Earth. But they saved their precious library, secreting parchments in cliff caves around their settlement, where the arid climate protected them for 2,000 years. The remains of Qumran have been excavated, showing a small, dense settlement, with ritual baths and a communal dining room, and, most poignantly, a scriptorium where the scrolls may have been composed.

  What’s immediately obvious from Qumran is that the Essenes—heroic because they saved the book, stirring because they remind us of the dawn of our civilization—were some very weird cats. The tourist terminology for them is “sect,” but the right word is “cult.” They followed a “teacher of righteousness” to this hellish place to wait for the end of days. They surrendered all their possessions, took vows of celibacy, and engaged in religious practices that suspiciously resemble obsessive-compulsive disorders. They took ritual baths all the time—Qumran has more bathrooms per square foot than a McMansion in Phoenix. They were freaky about urine and excrement. They did not relieve themselves on the Sabbath—at all. And they wouldn’t relieve themselves inside the city walls: they schlepped up the hill behind a big pile of rocks to do their business. This, Ian tells me, may have been a dreadful mistake. The Essenes buried their excrement in the hill above the town. When the rains came, filling the Essenes’ ritual pools, the parasites in the feces were washed down the slope into the bathwater. According to recent research, Ian says, the Essenes had a much shorter life expectancy than their neighbors, probably because their habitual washing and crazy toilet h
abits made them sick.

  The Dead Sea scrolls themselves are now housed at the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem, next door to the Bible Lands Museum. Since I’ve come to Israel to get as close as I can to the Bible, and the Dead Sea Scrolls are the first Bible, I make a visit to the shrine. Housed at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the shrine is visually arresting, a stark black slab standing next to a low white dome. I enter the round chamber beneath the dome, where I am surrounded by the cases holding the scrolls. At the center of the chamber stands an elevated platform, on which is a circular case displaying the entire scroll of Isaiah (actually, a reproduction, since the scroll is too fragile to be displayed whole). As you’ll read in the next chapter, I’m not wild about the book of Isaiah— the apocalyptic visions that endeared it to the Essenes are exactly what leave me cold—but it’s a profound experience to see the text unrolled like this. The scroll is an altar. Visitors shuffle around it, murmuring in hushed voices, those who can read Hebrew bending close to decipher the text.