Where God Was Born

by Bruce Feiler

  “So where should their meaning come from?”

  “From their culture. From their heritage.” He paused. “From the Bible.”

  Avner had always loved the Bible, but he always loved the land even more. The notion that the Bible may be more important than geography in building identity was a new idea, and I was struck by how his own agitation had brought us to a similar place. After our first journey, I felt a primeval connection to the desert. But when the bubble of peace from those years ruptured, I, too, went looking for new meaning. I turned first to religion, in particular to the shared ancestor, Abraham. All three monotheistic faiths claim him as their father; surely his story could provide common ground. In a new journey through the region, I discovered that while the biblical story of Abraham has a message of unity, each of the religions that grew from his line had reinterpreted the story for its own exclusive purposes. Abraham became as much a source of war as he was a seed of peace.

  Faced with this malleability, I sought refuge in the story itself. If every generation could reinterpret the narrative for its own purposes, why not us? Maybe we could find in it a message for our time. After my book on Abraham was published, I initiated a series of grassroots, interfaith conversations; within months, thousands of people around the world had taken part. And suddenly I noticed that people of all faiths were seeking wisdom in the past.

  This reaching back was the new face of religion in the West. While attendance at churches and synagogues may have declined, Americans in particular took their freedom from institutional religion and set out on their own to reengage traditional texts. This back-to-the-Bible movement included surging adult-ed courses, the pop Kabbalah fad, Bill Moyers’s popular Genesis series, novels such as The Red Tent and The Da Vinci Code, and dozens of best-selling nonfiction books by Karen Armstrong, Thomas Cahill, Elaine Pagels, and in a small way, my own.

  A new movement was afoot: Make Your Own Faith. And maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. In the same way we no longer blindly accept what our politicians tell us, our journalists, or our parents, we no longer fully accept what our religious leaders tell us. In the age of limitless information, the endless bookshelf, the Internet, we are all journalists. We are all historians. And now we are all theologians. Rather than merely accepting the past, each of us sifts through the past. We must make our own culture, our own heritage.

  Our own Bible.

  And here was my convergence with Avner. “I’m interested in strengthening our connection to the Bible,” he said, “because it’s deeper than land and will help us make peace with our neighbors.”

  “I’m interested in strengthening my connection to the Bible,” I countered, “because it’s deeper than religion and may hold clues for making peace among the faiths.”

  “Maybe after 9/11, we are forced by bigger powers to do that,” Avner said.

  I looked at him. “You never would have spoken that way before.”

  He looked at me. “Neither would you.”

  We were heading south, into a flatter, more isolated region where the foothills begin to melt into the wilderness and vineyards give way to chalky flats. The desert encroaches. This is also the area where the gentle prince David begins to morph into a wild man.

  After David’s victory over Goliath, the real battle of his early life—his showdown with King Saul—is squared. David has one advantage in this seemingly insurmountable challenge. Everyone he meets falls in love with him. This includes the men of Saul’s kingdom; the women (“Saul has slain his thousands,” they swoon, “David, his tens of thousands”); even Saul’s own son Jonathan, who “loves David as himself.” Faced with David’s growing popularity, Saul grows mad with jealousy and tries to spear his young rival. When that fails, Saul tries drawing David closer by offering first one daughter, then another in marriage. Marrying the king’s daughter was tantamount to staking a claim on the throne, and David seems to have this motivation in mind. The text says Saul’s daughter Michal “had fallen in love with David”; Michal, in fact, is the only woman in the entire Hebrew Bible who is said to love a man. David, meanwhile, refers to their nuptials as merely “becoming Your Majesty’s son-in-law.”

  But Saul lays a trap: he sets his bride’s price impossibly high, at one hundred Philistine foreskins, hoping David will be killed in the process of penis scalping. But David outmaneuvers the king again, bringing back two hundred. Finally Saul tries to slay his new son-in-law, but Michal and Jonathan arrange his escape. Jonathan’s role in protecting David is most remarkable because, as Saul’s eldest son, he has the most to lose from David’s ambition. One lesson of these early stories is that David is masterful at using the love of others to advance his own career.

  What follows is a darker, more unexpected period in David’s life. He becomes an outlaw, a traitor, and a murderer. One claim sometimes heard from biblical critics, and frequently from broader skeptics of religion, is that the Bible is simply made up, invented by the Israelites to aggrandize their history by claiming sanctification from a previously unknown god. But a close look reveals a deep strain of weakness, even criminality in the Bible’s heroes that seems contrary to what a propagandist would invent. Abraham permits his wife to philander with the pharaoh and tries to kill both of his sons; Jacob outright deceives his father to swipe the inheritance of his brother, Esau; Moses commits murder and flees to the desert.

  Even in this context, David’s behavior is shocking. In a sketchy, episodic series of events, David flees from Saul and begins to roam the untamed southern quadrant of Israel, deftly shifting alliances among city-states controlled by the Philistines, those commanded by the Judaeans, and even some leftover strongholds from Canaan. Three ongoing struggles dominate this area in the tenth century B.C.E.: between the Philistines and the Israelites; between the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah; and between the settled cities and bandits from the desert. David cleverly takes advantage of this chaos by presenting himself as the savior of each group. Fortunately for him, each group willingly accepts him because they are desperate to capitalize on his reputation as a man with extraordinary martial gifts.

  First he tricks the king of Nob (an Israelite) into thinking he’s still allied with Saul. Next he feigns madness before the king of Gath (a Philistine), letting saliva drool down his beard in a bid for asylum. Finally he bolts to the southern hills, raises a corps of four hundred bandits, and begins terrorizing the area, including his fellow tribesmen. His most significant act is a face-off with Nabal, the leader of one of the most powerful tribes in Judah. Unable to extort money from Nabal, David threatens to obliterate his town. Nabal’s wife, Abigail, holds David back, saying the Lord will serve him. Sure enough, Nabal soon drops dead and David weds Abigail, making him the most powerful layman in Judah, a short step to the king.

  Positive, perfectly timed, supposedly coincidental events like this occur frequently to David in his lightning rise to power. David may not be the most pious man in the Bible, but he’s certainly the luckiest. His ultimate act of cunning is to join forces with the Philistines in their battle with Saul. The Philistine king figures David has terrorized his own people so much that they will never accept him as a leader. “He will be my vassal forever.” This line marks a stunning admission. The authorized account of the first king of Greater Israel concedes that he collaborated with the enemy. As opposed to earlier biblical stories, like those of the patriarchs, which took place thousands of years before the Bible was recorded in the mid–first millennium B.C.E., the story of David happened in recent historical memory, so biblical writers clearly feel they can’t airbrush out all the distasteful details. All they can do is try to spin them to the hero’s advantage.

  And boy do they spin. David stands alongside the Philistines and prepares to join the people of Goliath in a war against his father-in-law Saul. On the eve of battle, the Philistine generals recall David’s reputation (“Hey, isn’t he the one who slew those tens of thousands?”) and announce they don’t
trust him. At the last moment, the king sends David south to Ziklag to wait out the battle. Even this works in David’s favor, as it gives him a convenient alibi when Saul and his three sons, including Jonathan, take their own lives in the face of overwhelming force from the Philistines, yet another well-timed happenstance that advances David’s career.

  As someone raised on the sugary milk of David, the boy king of Israel, brave, valiant, and free, I was horrified to read how bloodcurdlingly ambitious he was. His portrait reads more like that of a tin-pot dictator leading a bloody coup than that of a humble servant of God building the family of the future messiah. He’s a cross between Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan, the first Machiavellian prince. Even a cursory examination of the scholarly literature produces eye-popping assessments. The biographer Jonathan Kirsch says David is a “Robin Hood with bloodstained hands.” The scholar Steven McKenzie, in his book King David, calls him a “terrorist.” Baruch Halpern, perhaps the leading archaeologist of his generation, likens David to Hannibal Lecter and extrapolates from the evidence that he was probably a Philistine who appropriated Israel’s iconography for his advancement.

  Before I could make peace with the Bible, I had to confront a question: Was David really Goliath, an outsize mercenary bent on taking advantage of everyone and serving only himself?

  We were staring at cows. We had driven a few hours to the western edge of the Negev and a rocky, pale green cattle pasture, a rare respite of irrigation in Israel’s southern wasteland. Avner put our Jeep into four-wheel drive, plunged into a ravine, crossed a brook, then accelerated to the top of Tel Sera. Sites like this are one treat of traveling in the Middle East, grassed-over barnacles in otherwise humdrum fields and containing trapdoors into the past. With grass so rare in the region, this five-acre tell, about three stories tall, was the first I had visited that smelled like cow dung.

  Tel Sera is thought to be the biblical Ziklag, where David was sent to wait out the battle. On his arrival, the city has been sacked and all the women and children, including David’s wives, who had been living there, carted off by desert tribesmen. David and his men quickly hunt down the enemy, reclaim the women, and destroy the tribe. But instead of merely distributing the loot of battle to his soldiers, David sends some to the guards back in Ziklag, and even more to the elders of Judah all across the region. Suddenly the bandit has become a politician. By the time he marches to Hebron, the men of Judah gleefully anoint him king. The fox finally has his crown.

  I asked Avner if the type of banditry David uses during his roaming years was common.

  “Yes, especially in marginal areas like this. Notice, we’re on the border between the foothills of Judah, the coastal plain, the Negev, and the Sinai. From here you can raid all the rich areas, then retreat to the edge. This is the biblical equivalent of the Wild West.”

  “Moses is enslaved and commits murder,” I said. “David is a bandit for a time and a mass murderer. The Bible seems to portray its leaders not simply as glowing figures.”

  “We have said several times that the Bible shows David in a very human way. For believers, this means it was reality. But as a scholar, I think one reason is that the written text reflects the living tradition about these figures. You can try to portray David in the most favorable light, but everyone already knows he was a bandit, so you have to include that element in your version.”

  “There is a more revisionist view,” I said, “that the story is an elaborate apology for David. By shielding him from the murders of rivals and giving him plausible deniability over the timely dispatch of his enemies, the text is simply making excuses that are too good to be true. So that just after his exile to Ziklag, when Saul is killed by the Philistines and David sets out for Hebron to become king of Judah, this was his diabolical plan all along. Some even suggest that he was a renegade Philistine, who broke away from his own people and moved inland from the Mediterranean coast to set up his own fiefdom.”

  Avner hesitated for a moment.

  “I do agree, of course, that there are a few voices in this story and that everything was edited. So we are not talking about a solid biography of David. But I think to identify him as a Philistine is a bit too far. The Philistines were the power here, so the fact that David might spend time with them after his rupture with Saul is not unheard of. As we have seen, this was a period of shifting powers.

  “And I don’t know if it’s my own background and education,” he continued, “but I recoil at the idea that David was a Philistine. I don’t see why someone would alter the story that greatly.”

  “So whether or not you accept the idea that David is a Philistine,” I said, “you do agree that David, in the formative period of his character, is a man who will use violence, deceit, charm, murder—anything at his disposal—to gather political power around him.”

  “Absolutely. But I want to refer to what we’ve heard from a few people, including Yaya, that his behavior goes better with the values of his own time than with the values of ours. We may not like these values, we may find them immoral, but they were very common.”

  “So from the point when he kills Goliath,” I said, “to the moment he takes over in Hebron two decades later, he’s a canny, tactical, ruthless leader. We can respect his skill, but we don’t have to admire his character. You can study him, but you don’t want to have him over to dinner.”

  “Yes. I would even go so far as to say that he wouldn’t have very nice table manners.”

  . 2 .

  YOUR THRONE SHALL BE

  ESTABLISHED FOREVER

  The water pulsed. It bubbled up from underneath the stone floor in clear, green gurgles. The gentle belches from the underground spring—the source of life for biblical Jerusalem—cascaded into a small square pool, where they dissipated briefly before overflowing down a narrow staircase into the darkness. The rush of water in the tunnel below was so loud I felt as if I was staring into the gape of the Styx.

  And it smelled. The sewers of modern Jerusalem had seeped into this tunnel, merging the effluvium of present-day toilet waste with the purity of the richest spring in the Judaean hills.

  I took off my boots. I peeled off my socks, unhooked my belt, and began slipping my safari trousers to the ground. The stone felt cold beneath my feet, and I dipped my toes into the water. Whoa! Freezing. I quickly withdrew my foot as a shiver went up my calf. I was standing half naked at the mouth of a grotto few people had entered in four thousand years. Hidden for millennia beneath layers of rubble, this passageway from the Gihon spring, through dense limestone bedrock, directly into the heart of the City of David, had been reopened for a matter of only months.

  And it had already ignited a geyser of controversy.

  I was here to parse that scandal, and to consider a question that has bedeviled Bible lovers for thousands of years: How did David, a devilish renegade from the southern hills, manage to conquer the impregnable town of Jerusalem, merge within it the forces of God and state, transform it into the holiest city in the world, and morph himself into the progenitor of the messiah? As real estate speculation, few gestures have had more lasting impact than David’s conquering of Jerusalem. As an act of strategic warfare, it was masterful. As politics, it was brilliant.

  But as an act of tactics, it’s a four-millennium-old mystery. How did he do it?

  Avner handed me an orange hard hat, which I strapped on my head. I stretched a clip-on light around my forehead and turned on the beam. Side by side, Avner and I looked like a pair of Laurel and Hardy coal miners auditioning for a road show of The Full Monty. Since we would need our clothes later, Avner suggested we tuck them into my knapsack.

  “Whatever you do, don’t drink the water,” he said.

  We stepped into the current.

  In almost every way imaginable, Jerusalem is a city on the edge. It’s on the eastern edge of the central mountains. It’s on the western edge of the Syrian-African Rift. It’s on the perpetual edge of sectarian war. Though the city sits atop a serie
s of low-rising hills, both the Galilee, to the north, and Hebron, to the south, have higher mountains, which means Jerusalem rests like a saddle between the two. It’s a wet city, with an impressive thirty-two inches of rain a year, but the desert starts just on its doorstep. An hour away is the Dead Sea, where the annual rainfall is two inches.

  Modern Jerusalem is built in concentric circles. At the heart is the Old City, a three-thousand-year-old walled enclave that is less than one square mile. It contains many of the city’s most sacred sites: the Temple Mount, the Western Wall, the Dome of the Rock, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Only 40,000 inhabitants live in the four quarters of the Old City—Armenian, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian. Most of Jerusalem’s 600,000 residents live outside these walls in neighborhoods built over the last century. Two-thirds of those residents are Jews, who live largely to the west and south of the Old City; one-third are Arabs, who live largely to the north and east, though those distinctions are weakening.

  The Temple Mount occupies the far eastern edge of the Old City, on the lip of the Kidron Valley, just opposite the Mount of Olives. Immediately south of the Temple Mount, outside the medieval walls, a small promontory juts southward about half a mile. This cliff-top hamlet, about twelve acres in size, is easily overlooked, because it’s surrounded by higher peaks and more electrifying sites, but this hill is where Jerusalem began. It is called the City of David.

  Hours before plunging into the sewers, Avner and I met at the entrance to David’s city. Our plan was to explore the hillside ruins, then enter the secret web of underground water tunnels that burrow through the cliff like passageways through an ant farm. At the bottom of the cliff was the cesspool and perhaps an answer to the mystery of David’s triumph of Jerusalem. Did he sneak up through the sewer?