Where God Was Born

by Bruce Feiler

  Eighteen months later came Operation Iraqi Freedom. The fall of Saddam seemed to fling open the door to the past. I knew I must go now.

  But how? Commercial flights into Baghdad had yet to resume. Overland from Turkey involved a day through the mountains. Overland from Jordan involved ten hours through the desert, the last three through the flinty Sunni triangle. Overland from Kuwait involved traversing a wicked no-man’s-land. The photographer Gwendolen Cates and I, working with the editors of Parade magazine, who commissioned a story from us, managed to persuade U.S. Central Command to offer us coveted seats on a military shuttle. “But once you land, you don’t want to stay with us,” one sergeant advised me. “We are the targets.” Avner, as an Israeli, was not allowed to go.

  The closer the trip came, the more my stomach sickened, and the more my friends and family tried to dissuade me from going. “Why do you have to go now?” my mother said. A close friend and former spy wrote that he could no longer keep his mouth closed: the risks were simply too high. For weeks I didn’t sleep. I wandered from room to room at night, inevitably drawn back to the Internet, desperately reading news from the front: three U.S. civilians are murdered, a roadside bomb kills five, two journalists are taken hostage, a suicide bomb flattens a hotel. I took out additional insurance but told no one the category: “accidental death and dismemberment.”

  One person was unwavering in her support. While others said, “Go later, it will only get better,” my wife said, “Go now, it will only get worse.” An experienced traveler, she understood the risks, but she also understood the importance of this journey to me. “It’s who you are,” she said. “It’s why I love you.” As each day ticked by, I found myself tightening my focus on her, growing nostalgic, grasping at nascent rituals, like attempting the Sunday crossword puzzle . . . and falling pitifully short. Then one day I recognized these acts—family, history, tradition—as the building blocks of religion. We were reliving a timeless return. The gnawing pain had stripped away the slick independencies of urban life and drawn us closer. When, hours before my departure, two CNN employees were gunned down near Babylon, we lay on the floor, clinging to each other, weeping.

  But the emotion I felt was not just fear; it was also gratitude. Returning to the cradle of faith had reminded us of our own.

  “I know you will come back to me,” she said.

  “I promise.”

  Later, without telling her, I sat at her desk and wrote my wife a farewell note. “If you are reading this, then I have not come home to you,” it began. “I have not fulfilled my promise to you. I have left you, alone.” I wrote of our commitment to each other, and to engage the world. I wrote of my dreams for her. And I invoked words only she would understand: “Make life, my love.”

  Then I signed the note, hid it in a secret place, and told only one person where it was.

  The streets of Kuwait City were deserted before dawn but lit up like Las Vegas. Huge multilane highways sweep through gilded towers and shiny marble malls like grand prix lanes through Monaco. Save for the lack of liquor (and slots), Kuwait City seems like an overgrown casino, with amenities that startle and attendants who smile but deep down know that everything’s a gamble. Hurry, hurry, get what you can before your protector—Saddam, America, the royal family—collapses like a house of cards.

  Past the billboards hawking Levi’s and Cinnabon, the sky begins to widen, the palms stretch their fronds, and an amusement park rises. Behind Entertainment City is the entrance to Camp Doha, with a guard shack, a generator, and a line of garbage trucks.

  Captain Duke Duecker greeted us in a white SUV. Most of Camp Doha seems designed to minimize the tension of being so far from home while reducing the stress of being so close to war. We ate pancakes, sausage, and Kellogg’s cereal in a mess tent festooned with greenery, fresh pastry carts, and carved watermelon fruit baskets. The camp boasts high-speed Internet access, a Subway sandwich shop, and a 24/7 gym. “It’s like being in a really nice jail,” Captain Duecker said.

  A short drive away is the 721st Air Mobility Operations Group. Dozens of men were crowded into a windowless waiting area: Spanish soldiers in uniform, American missionaries in sweat suits, British contractors in jeans watching John Wayne movies on DVD, Aussie oilmen in tank tops reading Hot Biker magazine, and one man in a blue blazer and pressed white shirt studying America’s Role in Nation-Building from Germany to Iraq. The weatherworn faces, tattoos, and buzz cuts made the fraternity look like a field trip to a Soldier of Fortune convention. The twenty-three-year-old next to me, from rural Oregon, was going to Kirkuk to help drill a pipeline. “We were going to be in a military convoy, but every time the trucks cross the border they are bombed,” he said. He was staying for nine months.

  Finally, at 2:30 P.M., Captain Duecker reappeared. “Flight 51, gather your belongings. Let’s go!” He paraded us onto the tarmac and asked each of us to claim a pair of Sound Guard nonallergenic, green-and-orange earplugs, MADE IN USA. “Now I’m serious as a heart attack,” he said. “These things are packed by blind people. Sometimes there are only one in a box. Sometimes none.” Sure enough, my box had only one, and I was given a replacement.

  We walked to the aircraft, a stone gray C-130 with a U.S. flag on the tail, USAF painted under the wings, and serial number 01270 on its side. The back was open skyward, and a ramp banked toward the ground; it looked like the mouth of a giant steel alligator. Inside, the plane was dark and disorienting, like the interior of a submarine. Four rows of benches stretched back to front; ladders and red mesh dangled everywhere. Two fire extinguishers and an ax hung just over my seat. The plane had only a few windows, and those were concealed behind gear. It’s the only plane I’ve ever been in where the flight attendant wore a pistol.

  “Who’s on their first flight to Baghdad?” the attendant asked.

  A few of us raised our hands.

  “Hopefully it will be interesting but not sporty going in there,” he said. He paused for a second. “Sporty means we’re being shot at.”

  At 3:45 P.M. we taxied to the runway, a frightening vibration welled up under my feet, and minutes later we lifted into the air. The first time I flew in an airplane, my dad explained that nervous fliers either get sweaty palms from perspiration or white knuckles from gripping the seat too hard. On this trip I had both. I stared ahead and ticked away the miles. The flight was scheduled to last an hour and a half; I checked my watch three times in the first eight minutes. After a while I peered past the passenger across from me, through the sand-splattered glass, and caught a glimpse of a muddy line in the sand.

  The Tigris.

  The reason to go.

  You can’t understand religion today without understanding the prophets. Abraham may have been the first to realize there is only one God. Moses may have delivered God’s blueprint for social conduct to his chosen people. David may have unified those people into a singular political entity in God’s chosen land. But the prophets—divinely elected spokespersons who enraptured the Ancient Near East in the middle of the first millennium B.C.E.—were the first to unite the strands of monotheism in Israelite history with hints of social justice in Mesopotamian history to create a comprehensive belief system that offered the bounty of a single, universal God to all the people of the earth, no matter their class, region, or background.

  The triumph of monotheism in Western history owes more to the prophets than to any figure in the Pentateuch. The hope for reconciliation among feuding monotheists today may also hinge on these stirring, sometimes opaque, but unfailingly invigorating figures.

  The idea of prophecy has deep roots in the Bible. Abraham is labeled a prophet, as is Moses’ brother, Aaron. Their sister, Miriam, is called a prophetess. Moses himself is exalted in Deuteronomy as “the greatest prophet who ever lived.” But while these figures interact with God and sometimes intervene with him on behalf of the Israelites, they don’t embody what the word comes to mean later: They aren’t full-time messengers deciphering God’s views,
no matter how cryptic, and conveying his feelings, no matter how harsh. God specifically says of Moses in Numbers that he is not a prophet: “With him I speak mouth to mouth, plainly and not in riddles.”

  Other proto-prophets appear after the Conquest. Some, like Samuel, are called “seers.” Others, like Nathan, are God’s functionaries. The first full-scale prophets are Elijah and his disciple, Elisha, who serve as miracle workers in the battle between God and the pagan deities. Elijah eventually flees to Jordan, where he is whisked away in a fiery chariot. He is transported to heaven but does not die, which sets up his later role as the precursor to the messiah and the prototypical “Wandering Jew” of folklore, a position memorialized to this day by Jews who set a place for him at the Passover table.

  The most famous prophets arise in the centuries after Solomon in direct response to the decline in moral authority of the kings. The Hebrew name for these figures, nabi, likely comes from one of Israel’s northern neighbors, suggesting the phenomenon was well known in the region. The Hebrew word connotes not a mere predictor of the future but a proclaimer of God’s will. The prophet does not suggest what will happen; he or she dictates what must happen if the people don’t alter their ways. He is not a prognosticator; he is a poet, a social critic, a moralist. He is a man of God, with all the power, moral vision, and contradiction that implies.

  So why were prophets suddenly necessary in the first millennium B.C.E. when they hadn’t been needed earlier? One reason is the dramatic shift in the lives of the Israelites. As the wandering tribes of the desert became the settled people of the land, society became more polarized. Landowners and nobility amassed great wealth, often by oppressing the needy and forcing the lower classes into harsh labor. In contemporary parlance, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. Also, everyone was having a bit too much fun. Faced with their new urban lives, the Israelites responded as many country-come-to-towners have done, by indulging in the licentiousness of the big city—fornication, adultery, gluttony, callousness. The prophets’ history-altering breakthrough was to suggest that this carefree, heartless social condition violated God’s vision for humanity. The proper worship of God involves the proper treatment of fellow human beings. “Why should I forgive you?” Jeremiah quotes God as saying.

  Your children have forsaken me.

  They committed adultery

  And went trooping to the harlot’s house.

  They were well-fed, lusty stallions,

  Each neighing at another’s wife . . .

  As a cage is full of birds,

  So their houses are full of guile;

  That is why they have become fat and sleek;

  They pass beyond the bounds of wickedness,

  And they prosper.

  They will not judge the case of the orphan,

  Nor give a hearing to the plea of the needy.

  Shall I not punish such deed,

  Says the Lord.

  Shall I not bring retribution

  On a nation such as this?

  The fifteen prophets who have biblical books named after them come in all guises, and from all corners of society. Isaiah is an influential member of the court, Micah is a rural layman. Ezekiel is married, Jeremiah is unmarried. Haggai is old, Zechariah is young. They share hostility to wealth, iniquity, and might, and hold a deep fellowship with God. Their arrival marks a fundamental shift in the biblical narrative: away from the mighty and toward the meek. “The nations are but a drop in a bucket,” Isaiah proclaims, downplaying the idea of an Israelite state that David, Solomon, and others spent centuries trying to achieve. By diminishing the importance of monarchs, the prophets return the attention of the Bible to where it was in the first chapter of Genesis, on all humanity, rendered in God’s image.

  Prophecy reached its peak during two calamitous periods in Israelite history: the eighth century B.C.E., around the fall of the Northern Kingdom; and the late seventh century B.C.E., during the destruction of the Southern Kingdom. The first period is captured by Amos, a shepherd who linked Israel’s moral collapse with the rise of the Assyrians to the north. “I scourged you with blight and mildew,” God says through Amos. I withheld your food, I refused you rain, I sent you pestilence, yet you did not turn back to me. “Prepare to meet your God, O Israel.” Your sons and daughters shall fall by the sword, and Israel shall be exiled from its soil.

  The theme of exile permeates the most prominent prophets—Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. Jeremiah was born during the reign of Josiah, the reformist king who discovers a copy of Moses’ Law in 622 B.C.E. and tries to return the country to its godly roots. Mesopotamia is in turmoil; the Babylonians are vanquishing Assyria. The Egyptians take advantage of the power vacuum to storm the Euphrates, but the Babylonian prince, Nebuchadnezzar II, routs them at Carchemish and chases them back to the Nile. He would have conquered Egypt if his father hadn’t died in 605 B.C.E., propelling him to the throne. A new warrior prince stands astride the Fertile Crescent.

  But the new king of Judah, Jehoiakim, in an incalculable blunder, sides with Egypt. Nebuchadnezzar II shows up in person to punish Jerusalem in March 597. Jehoiakim is deported to Babylon, along with his mother, the entire court, and seven thousand men in chains. Jeremiah, meanwhile, adopts the revolutionary position that Judah had brought defeat on itself and it was God’s idea that the people lose their land. He struts around Jerusalem, a yoke about his neck, quoting God: “I herewith deliver all these lands to my servant, King Nebuchadnezzar.” My servant? God is so committed to the idea that Israel shall abide by his laws or not inhabit his land that he actually commandeers a foreign leader to destroy his holy city. Not since God wiped out thousands in Sinai has his vengeance been so unforgiving.

  Judah’s replacement king, Zedekiah, brushes off Jeremiah’s warnings and sides again with Egypt. A flabbergasted Nebuchadnezzar II attacks even harder. Jerusalem holds out for over a year, but famine prevails. This time Nebuchadnezzar leaves nothing standing. He breaches the walls, ransacks the houses, and burns the Temple. Zedekiah’s eyes are plucked out, his children are slaughtered before him, and he’s hauled in bronze fetters to the river capital of Mesopotamia. The prophet Joel, working at the same time as Jeremiah, captures the forlornness. “Numberless are those that do the Lord’s bidding,” he says, referring to the Babylonians. They rush in like warriors, scale a wall like fighters, enter windows like thieves. Before them the earth trembles and heaven shakes, sun and moon are darkened, and stars withdraw their brightness. “Joy has dried up.”

  The Bible has a surprising reaction to these events. Instead of seeing them as signs of doom, it sees them as precursors to salvation. The ability to see historical events as theological allegory is one essence of the religious mind. The Greeks may have invented history, but the Israelites popularized the idea of looking at history not as the mere playpen of the gods but as a place where the actions of every human being help direct the future. Your philandering contributed to the fall of Israel, the prophets insist; your greed helped cause the sacking of the Temple. Like most aspects of religion, this notion can be used for harm, as when some religious leaders blamed social deviance in the United States for causing September 11, but it can also be used for great solace, as it is in Babylon. Exile, the prophets proclaim, will save Israel.

  One difference between the prophets and earlier biblical heroes like Moses or Joshua is that they don’t really do anything. There is no splitting of the Red Sea, no conquering of Jericho. What they do is speak. Their power comes from words. The most common literary trope in the Prophets is the line “Thus says the Lord.” The effect of this repetition is to echo the most transformative use of language in the Bible, the story of Creation. In the opening line of Genesis, God uses words to create the universe. “When God began to create heaven and earth—the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and wind from God sweeping over the water—God said, ‘Let there be light.’ ” “God said” is the line that creates the world in Genesis.
“God says” is the line that re-creates it in the Prophets. The pattern returns: creation, destruction, re-creation.

  And in this vision of redemption, the prophets refer frequently to one biblical story as their fantasy of the type of world they will re-create: the Garden of Eden. In the prophets’ worldview, God equals fertility; the absence of God equals desolation. Israel is the garden of God’s eye; exile is desert. “Before them the land was like the Garden of Eden,” Joel says as the conquerors approach. “Behind them, a desolate waste.” The prophet’s greatest gift is that he offers comfort at this moment of desolation. Out of desperation, he tenders hope. “Have no fear, my servant Jacob,” the Lord declares through Jeremiah, invoking the name of the patriarch as the unified father of all the tribes.

  Be not dismayed, O Israel!

  I will deliver you from far away,

  Your folk from the land of captivity.

  And Jacob shall again have calm.

  Words again prove central to salvation: God will write the solution on the Israelites’ hearts. “I will make a new covenant with the House of Israel. I will put my teaching into their inmost being and inscribe it upon their hearts.”

  The prophets’ message here is stunning. Not only will salvation come from destruction but it depends on destruction. The people need pain to appreciate their blessings. “I will single out for good the Judean exiles whom I have driven out from this place,” God says in Jeremiah. “I will look upon them favorably, and I will bring them back to this land.” Exile, God says, is good, echoing once more the word he uses repeatedly during Creation: “And God saw that it was good.” God never forgets. Though he kicked man and woman out of Eden, he never deserted them. Though he cast the Israelites into slavery, he never forgot them. Though he dispatched the Israelites into Babylon, he never forsook them. He did each of these for the Israelites’ good.