Where God Was Born Read online

  WHERE GOD

  WAS BORN

  WHERE GOD

  WAS BORN

  A JOURNEY BY LAND TO

  THE ROOTS OF RELIGION

  BRUCE FEILER

  For Linda

  who gives me the courage to go forth

  and the reason to come home

  He has shown you, O man, what is good,

  And what the Lord requires of you:

  Only to do justice

  And to love goodness,

  And to walk humbly with your God.

  —MICAH 6:8

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Be Strong and Very Courageous

  BOOK I

  Land

  1 Man of Blood

  2 Your Throne Shall Be Established Forever

  3 The House of the Lord

  BOOK II

  Exile

  1 In the Garden of Eden

  2 Come, Let Us Build Us a City

  3 By the Rivers of Babylon

  4 City of Peace

  5 A Future with Hope

  BOOK III

  Diaspora

  1 Let There Be Light

  2 His Anointed One

  3 A Crown of Beauty

  Conclusion

  With Gladness and Joy

  O Give Thanks

  Words of Peace and Truth

  Index

  About the Author

  Books by Bruce Feiler

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  BE STRONG AND VERY

  COURAGEOUS

  I feel the tension before I know its source. My legs begin to quiver, then shake. Soon my whole body is quaking with vibration, or is it fear? Up above, the whir begins to build into a thudding bass beat. Cold air blows through the cracks and up my spine. I’m shivering. My feet are trembling. “Are you ready?” The sound in my ears is crackling, and a bit wicked. I nod. Within seconds the shaking becomes overwhelming, the thumping dense, and the pull so strong it seems ready to suck my head off. I feel as if I’m in a full-body migraine. And then, just as suddenly, quiet. The sound dissolves, my body relaxes. I’m in the air, in a war. I’m at peace.

  The helicopter pauses for a second, then accelerates into a gentle glide. Down below, the landing pad disappears, and rows of orange and avocado trees poke up toward the sky. I see the hairs on a donkey’s ears. Our nose is tipped, we’re flying, yet we’re not moving very quickly. Lifting off in a helicopter is like drifting off to sleep: You leave one realm and shift into another; the features seem dreamily unfamiliar; you want to touch what you see, but you can’t.

  We bank toward the Mediterranean. Voices in my headphones interrupt: “This is the Air Force. Identify yourself! Do you have permission to be here?” Boaz, the pilot, smiles. He’s anticipated this. He’s flown in every war the State of Israel has fought for the previous thirty years. When I asked him what his most dangerous mission was, he thought for a second, then replied, “I once flew seven and a half hours from Israel into enemy territory on a secret mission.” I raised my eyebrows; that’s halfway to Iran, or Libya.

  “Were you part of the mission that destroyed the nuclear plant in Iraq?”

  He smiled. “Let’s just say I was in the Middle East.”

  Boaz replied to air traffic control with a mixture of authority and evasion. We did have permission, garnered over the preceding six months, from three government agencies. The night before a suicide bomber had killed seven soldiers in Tel Aviv, and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) rescinded its green light. Boaz had to scramble to find a general to overturn the decision. This morning, after we boarded the McDonnell Douglas MD-500, storm clouds descended, limiting visibility above one thousand feet. We were forced to cancel. An hour later, visibility lifted. “There are always risks with flying,” Boaz said. We dashed to the landing pad.

  Weather was the least of our risks. War was raging—between the Israelis and the Palestinians, between a fragile coalition and Iraq, between the pluralist West and Islamic extremism. Ripples were reverberating around the globe—in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Kenya, Morocco, Indonesia, and, yes, the United States. The Cradle of Civilization—the tiny, fertile crescent of land that stretches from Mesopotamia to North Africa—had once more seized control of the world’s destiny, and the future of civilization seemed to be at stake.

  The bloody clash of faith and politics that filled front pages at the beginning of the new millennium seemed surprising, coming at the end of a century that had appeared to mark the end of God as a force in world affairs. Hadn’t Nietzsche declared at the end of the previous century (1882) that God was dead? Hadn’t science, capitalism, and the World Wide Web rendered faith a quaint hangover from the past?

  As a Jew raised in the American South, I grew up in a world where religion was a regular part of my life but not exactly a central one. Politics mattered more to me than faith; and depending on what I was doing during years as an itinerant journalist, clowning, country music, or Third World travel became my surrogate religion. Who needed to count commandments when you could count countries visited?

  Fifteen years into a life on the road, I realized something was missing from my backpack. There were conflicts in the world, and I had questions that my guidebooks couldn’t address. To my surprise, the book that kept calling out to me had been sitting by my bed all along. The calling wasn’t religious exactly; it was historical, archaeological, cultural. It was a need to explore the world—even the parts of it that seemed scary, like devotion. I had an idea: What if I retraced the Bible through the desert and read the stories along the way?

  For a year I trekked across the Middle East, from Turkey to Jordan, and explored the first five books of the Bible. I visited Mount Ararat, crossed the Red Sea, climbed Mount Sinai. That year in the desert changed me forever. I had gone seeking adventure and came back craving meaning. In particular, I came back struggling to understand the uncertain role of God in my life. The world was prosperous and at peace; pulpits were filled with hoorahs of confidence; yet I felt the gnawing tug of doubt.

  I didn’t know God completely, and I doubted those who did.

  And then came the conflagration—planes into buildings, armies into distant countries, security walls around peaceful towns, genocide, jihad, crusade in the news. The world that had been at peace was now at war over God. This change seemed startling. Wasn’t history supposed to be ending? Wasn’t democratic capitalism supposed to lead us all to heaven?

  History wasn’t ending, of course; it was finally coming home. The collision of politics, geography, and faith has dominated nearly every story in the Middle East since the birth of writing—from the epic of Gilgamesh to the fatwas of Ayatollah Khomeini. It also dominates the greatest story ever told. Jews and Christians who smugly console themselves that Islam is the only violent religion are willfully ignoring their past. Nowhere is the struggle between faith and violence described more vividly, and with more stomach-turning details of ruthlessness, than in the Hebrew Bible.

  Yet nowhere is this conflict conveyed with more humanity and hope.

  And so, I thought, what better way to confront my doubts about religion and consider the future of faith than to travel to the land where God was born? And, again, what better guide to read along the way than the text that defines identity for half the world’s believers?

  I would journey to the flash points in the new world war over God—Israel, Iraq, and Iran—and bring along my Bible. And I would begin my quest with the second half of the Hebrew Bible, at the moment when the children of Israel, sprung from Adam and Eve, descended from Abraham, and freed by Moses, face their harshest challenge. “Conquer the Promised Land,” God sa
ys to Joshua, Moses’ successor, at the start of the books of the Prophets. A former spy, Joshua is one of only two Israelites (the other is Caleb) whom God deems righteous enough to survive the forty years in the desert. “Destroy the pagans who live on the land,” God commands. “Seize the future for yourselves—and for me.”

  After twenty minutes we approached an isolated landing strip just north of Ben Gurion International Airport. A silvery mist hung low over the Mediterranean, a few miles to the west. Shallow waves unfolded onto the narrow beaches. Palm trees, like artichokes on sticks, bent in all directions. As we hovered, a man strode out of a small building onto the black tarmac. He directed Boaz to his preferred spot, and as the blades spun, he bent and scampered toward the door.

  Yoram Yair is that rare individual known only by his nickname. For months afterward, when I told Israelis (and Palestinians) I had gone on a military tour of the Israelite conquest of the Promised Land with one of the most decorated generals in the history of the country, a man who had been the first Israeli to penetrate the Sinai during the Six-Day War, the last to hold the Golan Heights during the Syrian offensive of the Yom Kippur War, and the one who led an amphibious landing closest to Beirut during the Lebanon War, they all said, “Yaya? What’s he like?”

  A rock. As he boarded the helicopter and greeted us all crisply yet warmly, he evinced an unimpeachable stableness and sureness of gesture—firm handshake, steady stare, was that a twinkle?—that made us instantly trust him. My friend and longtime travel companion Avner Goren, the archaeologist and explorer, who was nearing sixty and occupied the fourth seat, said Yaya reminded him of his father, with a set of idioms and associations that belonged to the generation of epic founders of Israel. “He’s part of the fundamental soil of the country.”

  Yaya was wearing white boaters, navy khakis, and a pink and green Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned to his chest. He had a silver Brylcreemed pompadour that, despite the wind, came to a perfect nest above his forehead, causing me to spend the next few hours wondering how he kept it in place in a foxhole. Altogether, with his leathery skin and matte of gray chest hair, he reminded me of my uncle Bubba walking the strip on Miami Beach.

  “I will try to be very modest, but maybe there are another five generals in the world today, alive, who have similar combat experience,” Yaya said. “Unfortunately for normal human beings, but fortunately for a military person, I fought in four wars, and in each of those wars, I was in a commanding position. You can’t see it, but my body is full of shrapnel.”

  Boaz reminded Yaya that he had once rescued the general on an aborted mission in Lebanon. A soldier had been shot as they evacuated. But Yaya’s most difficult episode? Commanding the tank that penetrated the Sinai at the start of the Six-Day War. The unit behind his was hit and destroyed, as was the unit behind that one. “I was about a mile inside the Egyptian stronghold, taking fire from everyone. We were hit by an antitank gun. I asked everybody to jump; luckily I fell outside. My deputy fell inside and was killed. And then we were surrounded by Egyptians, and I thought, This is the end.”

  “You were held prisoner?”

  “No way, are you crazy? I didn’t let them capture me. For about thirty minutes I was all alone until our battalion finally reached my place.”

  Yaya told these stories with no sense of bravado, only duty. This was his job: leading men into war.

  “So during these times,” I said, “did you ever turn to the Bible for inspiration?”

  “Ever since I was a child,” he said, “I liked very much the Bible—the story, the heritage, the connection to the land. When I was a young officer, whenever we trained, I always asked one of the soldiers to prepare something about the place. Every Israeli commander will tell you that part of our mission is education. Not just about weapons systems but about values and ethics.

  “And I’ll tell you,” he continued. “The best thing about the Bible is what it teaches about community. Take Moses: When he leads the Israelites out of Egypt, he does what all good leaders should do, first he sets a goal. Then he builds tactics. But before they leave, he asks his people to do a difficult thing: to put blood on the doorposts. Is this for God? Nonsense. God doesn’t need signs. Moses does this because he wants the people to develop a strong identity.”

  I had sought a warrior to take me on my tour. Had I found something more?

  “And what about Joshua?” I said. “What does his story tell you about values?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Let’s go,” he said. “I’ll show you.”

  Boaz moved the collective control shaft up and to his right, and the helicopter again lifted into the air. He leaned on the pedals and pivoted the control stick between his legs. In a moment, we were catamaraning over the central mountains. For such a narrow country (eighty-five miles at its widest), Israel has stunning topographical range, from the flat fertility of the coastal plain, through the rocky isolation of the central hills, to the desert gulch in the east. We were heading toward its most distinctive feature, a geological shelf that runs along the eastern border, dropping with ear-popping alacrity into the lowest gullet in the world, the Syrian-African Rift. To conquer the Promised Land, the Israelites, who end their forty-year trek through the desert bivouacked on Mount Nebo in Jordan, must first cross this lifeless trap.

  Avner, Yaya, and I pulled out our Bibles. The biblical narrative has a clear geopolitical arc. The story begins in Mesopotamia, on the imperial shores of the Tigris and Euphrates, with the earliest scenes of Genesis—the Garden of Eden, the Tower of Babel, and the advent of Abraham, four thousand years ago. Leaving his father’s house, Abraham travels to the land God promises him, Canaan, the fragile coalition of isolated cities squeezed between superpowers, Mesopotamia to the north and Egypt to the south. But the patriarchs—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—are a small family of pastoral nomads in no position to claim their destiny. With Jacob’s son Joseph the family decamps to Egypt, where they live for four centuries, quietly growing in stature.

  By the thirteenth century B.C.E., the Israelites have multiplied to such numbers that they threaten the pharaoh, who enslaves them and begins killing off newborn males. This precipitates the Exodus, the defining event of the Pentateuch, the Bible’s first five books, in which Moses leads millions of Israelites from the most civilized country on earth and parades them into the desert. Instead of heading directly to the Promised Land, a journey of no more than two weeks, Moses first inculcates the Israelites with the values of God. They resist, building idols and demanding a return to slavery. Four decades pass before the Israelites accept their destiny and become a unified nation, ready to fight for the land God promised their forefather eight hundred years earlier.

  “So how different was the world that Joshua faced,” I asked Avner, “from the one Abraham came to eight centuries earlier?”

  He sat forward. Nearly seven years had passed since I first met Avner and the two of us began retracing the Bible, with one eye on archaeology, another on politics, and a third one, unexpectedly, on ourselves. Avner had been bruised by the violence of the intervening years, which ate away at his profession, his pioneering bridge building with Muslims, and his dreams for a greater region in touch with its universal gifts to humanity: frankincense; the alphabet; civilization; an eternal, invisible God. His gray hair still squiggled from his weatherworn face; his turquoise eyes still stopped time (and women). Newly remarried, with a young daughter, he had more energy than I’d seen in years. But he no longer accepted easy optimism, looking instead for the darker currents and hidden themes in the scorched soil of the region.

  “When Abraham came, it was the age of empires,” he said. “The world was divided into big powers: Egypt, the biggest, to the south, then the Mesopotamians to the north. It was a bipolar world, and the land in the middle was weak. Canaan wasn’t even a state; it was city-states.

  “At the start of the thirteenth century B.C.E.,” he continued, “the world began to change. Twelve hundred B.C.E. was a landmark in h
istory.” First, Egypt and the reigning Mesopotamians, the Hittites, clashed in Syria, coming to a virtual draw. Soon after, the empires began to decline, leaving a vacuum in Canaan. This social breakdown opened the door to new powers from the West, namely the Myceneans, the Greek-speaking empire that built Thebes and Troy and provided the backdrop for the Iliad and the Odyssey. Also, a mysterious population called the Sea Peoples began a full assault on the coastal plain. Scholars disagree about whether these Viking-like bands were from the Aegean, Anatolia, or some combination, but the result is the same: a new western front in the struggle for Canaan.

  “So if the world before was bipolar,” I asked Avner, “would you say this world was nonpolar?”

  “I would say it was chaos.”

  “But why bother? This land is not that big. It’s not that fertile.”

  “If you’re in Egypt, it’s the only way to get to Syria. If you’re in Mesopotamia, it’s the only way to get to Africa. If you’re in the Mediterranean, it’s the only way to get to Asia. It may not be the living room, but it’s a corridor, and a very important corridor at that.”

  “Israel, the world’s greatest hallway.”

  Learning about this chaos reminded me anew how brilliantly attuned the Bible is to the geopolitical realities of its time. It may not be history as we have come to expect it—an objective retelling of events—but it is steeped in rich, historical detail. This richness also highlights an intriguing possibility: If the Sea Peoples are invading a suddenly weakened Canaan from the west, why can’t another previously unknown power invade the same land from the east?

  The Book of Joshua begins the second major section of biblical books, the Prophets, which follow the five books of the Torah, Genesis through Deuteronomy. The story opens with God addressing Joshua, Moses’ aide who has risen to leader of the tribes. “My servant Moses is dead. Prepare to cross the Jordan, together with all this people, into the land that I am giving to the Israelites.” Be “strong and very courageous,” God says. Joshua sends two spies to reconnoiter Jericho. A harlot hides them in her home, and they promise to protect her during the invasion if she ties a crimson cord to her window, a vivid echo of the bloody doorposts in Exodus.