Where God Was Born Read online

  The ties between Joshua and Moses are etched even deeper as three days later the former lieutenant leads the Israelites to the shores of the Jordan, the river that extends from Lake Huleh in the north through the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea. When the priests bearing the Ark reach the river, the waters divide in the same manner as the Red Sea and “all Israel crosse[s] over on dry land.” Once again, the Israelites begin a new phase in their history with God showing his manifest control over nature and his intimate involvement in everyday events.

  After about fifteen minutes in the air, we reached the Rift Valley. From the helicopter, the cleft seemed particularly barren, a frightening gash of charred, chalky sediments, the color of a wasp’s nest. The Jordan, depleted from overirrigation, was barely visible, a narrow wrinkle as thin as a pencil line. Not a mile to the west, the Judaean hills begin, gentle slopes covered in gray grooves as if a million earthworms had edged through the sand. From above, the hills look like sleeping armadillos.

  “Do you see that?” Yaya shouted. “That’s the ancient city.” He pointed to the tell, a ten-acre site nestled within the modern city. Human beings have lived here for ten thousand years. The Israelites also stop here first, whereupon God asks Joshua to circumcise all the men, since none has received this holy mark.

  “Now why is this the first thing he does?” Yaya asked. “Because he needs to turn his men into fighters. The key to war is making everyone cohesive. In this ceremony, everyone has to commit himself. Remember, they have no antibiotic. And this touches a very sensitive area for every man. Even the Bible says they have to wait a few days for everyone to recover. Yet every man does it. This is the fundamental moment of building community.”

  Afterward, they turn their attention to war. Jericho is blockaded. For six days, forty thousand Israelites march around the walls, led by seven priests, each blowing a trumpet, followed by the Ark. On the seventh day they circle the city seven times. On the final leg, as the priests blow their horns, Joshua cries, “Shout! For the Lord has given you the city.” The city and everything in it, especially the silver and gold, are to be reserved for the Lord, Joshua says. With trumpets blaring, the people raise a mighty shout and the walls come tumbling down. The Israelites rush in, killing everything in sight, “man and woman, young and old, ox and sheep and ass.” The only people spared are the harlot, her parents, and her brothers.

  “So what do you think?” I asked Yaya.

  “The first thing you have to see about Joshua is that his background is typical of our way of bringing up leaders. In the Israeli Army, unlike the American or European ones, you cannot go straight to the academy and become an officer. You have to go through the ranks. First you join as a private, and only if you are a successful foot soldier will you be sent to the squad leader course, and only if you are a successful squad leader will you be sent to officer school. Joshua did the same thing, so when he became a leader, he knew exactly what to do.”

  “And what about his tactics?”

  “Brilliant. In war, you always try to make use of different kinds of tricks. I know everybody talks about miracles—and I don’t want to take anything away from God—but capturing Jericho, in my opinion, is the first example in history of psychological warfare.”

  “Really?”

  “Because what they do is surround the city for seven days. Now try to imagine you are defending the city. Everyone in Jericho is nervous; they are expecting attack. They wake up every morning and see the Israelites walking around with their trumpets. And they think any minute they will attack: ‘Now they will! Now they will!’ But nothing happens. The next morning, the same feeling. People are going crazy!

  “Imagine if every day they take you to the hospital. ‘Now we are going to operate.’ You see the doctors, the nurses, you are scared to death. And suddenly they take you back to your room. No explanation. They don’t even say, ‘Not today.’ The next morning, the same thing. You are going crazy. ‘Cut me! Kill me! Do whatever you want, but I can’t take this back-and-forth.’ That’s what happens. Seven days. The Israelites defeat a totally protected city.”

  We turned north up the valley toward Shechem, a hotbed of contention then as now. To the west, we could see the next target for the Israelites’ attack, Ai. After Jericho, Joshua moves northward in an attempt to defeat the weaker towns along the central spine of mountains. Feeling cocky, his spies declare they need only a small garrison to conquer Ai. But the men are quickly routed, which God attributes to the Israelites having kept forbidden booty during the attack on Jericho. Yaya was equally unforgiving: “Don’t underestimate your enemy: That’s the first rule of war.”

  Joshua then dispatches thirty thousand men to hide behind Ai. He leads the rest to the city walls, before fleeing in apparent retreat. The men from Ai follow hotly, leaving the city unprotected and easy prey for the waiting troops, who quickly conquer it. Yaya described this as a textbook ambush. It’s what follows, though, that is momentous. Joshua marches all the Israelites—men, women, and children—north to Shechem, a place of emotional significance because Abraham first stopped here when he came to the Promised Land.

  “You see that valley,” Yaya called out. We were over the central mountains, where down below a clear boulevard was visible between two ridges. “You can see why Joshua took this path. The people walked in the middle, and he put troops on either ridge to protect them.”

  Once Shechem is captured, Joshua gathers the Israelites around the Ark, with half facing a mountain of blessing and half a mountain of cursing. Joshua then reads everyone the Laws of Moses. This moment represents the first time in Israelite history when the written Torah plays a central role. “There was not a word of all that Moses had commanded that Joshua failed to read in the presence of the entire assembly of Israel, including the women and children and strangers.”

  Yaya was awestruck. “Try to imagine how advanced that was,” he said. “Women and children were not counted back then. Women got the right to vote only a hundred years ago. This is three thousand years ago!”

  As he spoke, a burst of shouting interrupted our conversation. The Air Force was furious we were approaching Shechem, modern-day Nablus, one of the bloodiest cities in the region. “You don’t have permission to be here,” the voice insisted. “Turn back. Now!” A small band of ultra-Orthodox Jews had recently blockaded themselves in Joseph’s Tomb and been firebombed by Palestinians. “We’re not going over the city,” Boaz replied, turning to me and winking. The voice did not let up. Directly under us, Yaya pointed out the Balata Refugee Camp, from which dozens of suicide bombers had been dispatched. It looked like an intractable gray maw.

  Ignoring the Air Force, Boaz maneuvered the helicopter over the city, which was bracketed by two beautiful peaks: Gerizim, the mount of blessing, and Ebal, the mount of cursing. They were clearly the highest summits in the area. My mind considered how high a rocket-propelled grenade could fly. Boaz seemed unmoved. Earlier, I had asked him if he ever got nervous. “During a situation, you don’t have time to feel uncomfortable,” he said. “It’s like being in a car accident. Afterward, your legs are shaking, but during, you have to guide the steering wheel.” And do you feel more peaceful? “From the air, everything looks different. I don’t know how to describe it, but when you’re up here, you feel better.”

  He steered us to the center of town, directly between the mountains, and over the monastery of Jacob’s Well. And then he stopped. The staccato warnings from the controller continued. The rotor kept spinning, and the sun tried to sieve through the clouds. But we weren’t moving. We paused, suspended in midgulp, just beyond the reach of conflict, far from the fullness of calm, motionless, yet hoping for a hint of blessing from the rival hills.

  Yaya broke the silence. For the first time all morning, his voice was low, unanimated. It was personal. “Whenever I try to read the Bible,” he said, “I try to grab the most significant part. In my opinion, the most significant part of this story is that Joshua didn’t read the Law
s of Moses only to the heads of the tribes. He read it to everybody. Remember, they had no radios, or loudspeakers. Try to imagine what it means to pass a lesson along the chain so it reaches every man, every woman, every child.”

  “So why does he do it?”

  “Because that’s what distinguishes the Israelites from the rest of the world. Moses’ rules touch every little corner of your life, from the moment you wake up to the moment you sleep. Even hygiene: how to take care of animals, keep your camp clean, what happens when you pee. Even today, how many countries have legislation on how to treat animals? But three thousand years ago, the Israelites built their nation around living a meaningful life. That’s why they survived.”

  The journey south from Shechem became more treacherous. We were covering the most hostile part of the terrain, the central mountains, where for millennia the weaker peoples have been driven to live. What confines the Palestinians to this territory today is exactly what drove the Israelites here in antiquity: because the land is less desirable, the lesser power must accept it. Surviving in the Middle East is elementally a matter of water, not land. The most fertile areas are secured the earliest. In Canaan that means the Galilee, the coastal plain, and what the Bible calls the shefela, the foothills. In today’s world of long-distance surveillance and projectile weaponry, the tops of mountains might be coveted, but in antiquity they were shunned. None of the strongest cities in Canaan, like Beth-shan and Hazor, or even the second-tier cities, like Jericho or Jerusalem, were built at the summits in their neighborhoods. They were built closest to water.

  Joshua’s warpath through the Promised Land is brilliantly designed to capitalize on this. First he threads his population in between Canaanite strongholds and stations them alongside a takable city, Shechem. Then he prepares to attack surrounding cities. But his enemy adjusts. A huge coalition of regional kings, including ones from Jerusalem and Hebron, form an alliance to attack the Israelites. Joshua marches all night to surprise them. The seminal battle takes place a few miles west of Jerusalem, where Boaz steered our craft. The hills below were covered in terraces, desperate attempts to keep rainwater from draining away too quickly.

  In the battle, Joshua has the advantage of attacking first. But he has an even greater ally. In the war’s most arresting scene, God actually joins the fighting, hailing huge stones from the sky to destroy the fleeing enemy. Desperate for total victory, Joshua pleads for God to stop time. God obliges.

  And the sun stood still

  And the moon halted

  While a nation wreaked judgment on its foes.

  Never before, the Bible says, “has there ever been such a day, when the Lord acted on words spoken by a man.”

  Joshua soon sweeps from north to south and completes his vanquishing of Canaan. “Thus Joshua conquered the whole country,” the text says, “with all their kings; he let none escape, but proscribed everything that breathed.” In less than ten verses, the dream of the Israelites for over ten centuries has come true.

  Or has it? Since I began exploring the Bible, I had been bedeviled by the tantalizing, tender relationship between the details in the text and the facts in the ground. After two centuries of aggressive digging, archaeologists have come to what can be characterized as an awkward accommodation with the Hebrew Bible. For the Torah, there is simply no physical evidence that any of the events described took place. There is, however, plenty of support that the stories fit squarely into the historical reality of the second millennium B.C.E. When Abraham wanders from Mesopotamia to Canaan, for example, he follows a familiar migration pattern. When Moses commits murder and flees to the desert, he travels a well-known trading route. Later, with the rise of the prophets in the middle of the first millennium B.C.E., history arrives in full panoply and the Bible is a much more reliable narrator. Joshua, along with David and Solomon, inhabits a ticklish middle ground.

  The primary problem with Joshua’s conquest story in the text is that few of the cities described—including Jericho and Ai—show any signs of having been occupied at the time the Israelites appeared in the country. As Avner put it, “The walls could not have come tumbling down around Jericho because the city didn’t have walls. Plus, it wasn’t inhabited in 1200 B.C.E., when the Israelites arrived. For sure we have a story that was added later.” Nevertheless, there is extensive evidence that the social and political landscape of the country changed around this time and irrefutable proof that the Israelites eventually took over. So what happened?

  There are four theories. The oldest is the monolithic war theory: the Israelites came en masse, largely as described in the text, with the story receiving some tinkering when it was written down a few centuries later. Avner, like many, was taught this as a child. A more radical idea, introduced in the 1920s, was peaceful infiltration: the Israelites were pastoralists who wandered in with their flocks in seasonal migrations, settled in the sparsely populated highlands, and eventually clashed with the Canaanites.

  Later archaeology showed that the Israelite communities were more advanced, unified, and apparently established within a few generations, which gave rise to a third theory, the wave. The Israelites moved in aggressively from outside, but not all at once, and they never really conquered the entire land, only parts of it. This is what Avner learned in graduate school. A revisionist theory, introduced more recently, suggests the Conquest was an internal rebellion. The Israelites, instead of being outsiders, were Canaanite peasants who broke away from their lords and fled to the highlands, where they adopted the religious ideals of equality gleaned from renegade Egyptians.

  “So what do you believe now?” I asked Avner.

  “I still believe there is a lot of truth in the biblical story,” he said. “Granted, it’s much more complicated, but I have difficulties saying they are indigenous people. Archaeologically, I would expect to see much more continuity. The new inhabitants dressed the same, but they had much poorer materials. Even the pottery shows differences. We have a clear break with Canaan. I think we can be confident that the Israelites came from outside and somehow took over the country.”

  Soon we arrived over the southern hills, our last stop before Jerusalem. Yaya had grown more emotional, pointing out landmarks where he trained as a private. Hearing him tap into that raw passion of youth drew me closer to him, and I said, “The Bible never says men going into war are scared. In your experience, do people get scared?”

  “No doubt. One of the things you do as a leader is say, ‘All those who are afraid, go back.’ Almost everyone will go forward. If you identify with the unit, and your commander, you will overcome your concern. People will do unbelievable things if they believe in the values of the group.”

  I had been thinking a lot about fear. I wasn’t a direct combatant in this conflict. I didn’t wear a uniform, live in an occupied town, or face mandatory service, like all young Israelis. Instead I was something odder: a volunteer. The simple fact was that I didn’t have to be in this helicopter. I didn’t have to leave my mother crying on the telephone. I didn’t have to leave my new apartment and the mementos I’d just bought on my honeymoon. I didn’t have to leave my new wife.

  Yet I did.

  And I was afraid. Afraid that I was doing the wrong thing, that I was taking my life into my hands, that I was bringing pain to the people I loved. And I was concerned that the idea that motivated me—thinking about the past as a way to understand the present—was wrong.

  Still, my motivation seemed clear. After decades of traveling around the world, thinking about religion and God had brought me more stability than I had ever experienced. Exploring the world through the prism of the Bible had allowed me to understand my surroundings in a way I never thought possible. Interfaith problems are rooted in Abraham; the first war in Iraq was between Cain and Abel. For years I ran decisions through the part of me rooted in my hometown in Georgia and the part grounded in my Ivy League education. Now I also ran them through the Bible and the lens of meaning provided by the ancient sto
ries.

  But nagging questions remained. The hardest one I was asked about my earlier journeys through the Bible was how they had affected my faith. I was raised as a fifth-generation Jew in the South in one of the oldest synagogues in the United States. Religion was a matter of rote and pride, not a matter of conviction. But my journey grounded me, I often said. I discovered in myself a molecular attachment to the land. My bond with the Bible moved from my head to my feet.

  I felt safe.

  But there was something I felt that I rarely said: Traveling in the desert drew me closer to God but further away from organized religion. I love the text, but not necessarily what human institutions have done in its name. Manipulation, exclusivism, hatred, and violence are undeniable outgrowths of biblical monotheism. Perhaps I had no need for religion and could cultivate a personal, nonsectarian relationship with the Bible, with other seekers, and with God.

  September 11 at first deepened that conviction. My animosity toward religion seemed bolstered by the new reality, as violence in the name of faith now imperiled the world. Turn on a news broadcast anywhere. Fundamentalists had seized control of faith and slammed the door on tolerance. There was only one route to salvation, and Osama bin Laden, or Mullah Omar, or Jerry Falwell, or any number of radical Jewish settlers I had met over the years held the key. To me this extremism held an alarmingly real prospect for religious war.

  But the alternative—radical secularism—seemed equally dangerous and unappealing. The bloodiest wars of the twentieth century were fought for secular ideologies, including socialism, fascism, and communism. When I was growing up, the world had seemed to be disengaging from religion; it turned on the axis of the Cold War and worshiped the twin gods of science and pleasure. In the West, the biggest alternative to faith was capitalism and the promise that the global marketplace held for heaven on earth. People were just too busy getting ahead and enjoying the moment to worry about profiting from the past or preparing for the afterlife. The result left what Jean-Paul Sartre called a God-shaped hole in human consciousness, where the divine once was but had disappeared.