Walking the Bible Read online

  “Tell me about the land. Do you have a different relationship with it?”

  “There are many things about living in Israel that are wonderful. One of those is the land. When my kids used to go on field trips in America they went to a museum, to the Empire State Building. Here when you go on a field trip they drop you off in the middle of nowhere and you walk, for hours and hours and hours. A field trip is seeing the land, connecting to the land. You don’t have to see a thing. There’s an expression, ‘To walk in the land of Israel is a holy thing to do.’ ”

  We pulled out our Bibles and began to discuss the sections that take place in Bethel. After Abraham leaves Shechem, he travels south to the hill country “east of Bethel,” where he once again builds an altar to the Lord. Later Abraham revisits the place on his return from Egypt. After that, Bethel only grows in importance, becoming, after Jerusalem, the most frequently mentioned place in the Bible. Jacob, during his flight from Beer-sheba to Harran, sleeps there and has his famous nocturnal vision of angels ascending and descending on a ladder. He awakens and erects a pillar to mark the place, calling it Bethel, house of God. Years later, on his way home from Harran with his wife and children, Jacob again stays in the place. Fern began to read this passage, from Genesis 35.

  “And God said to Jacob: ‘Arise, go up to Bethel and remain there; and build an altar there to God.’ ” Jacob responds, instructing his family, “Rid yourself of the alien god in your midst, purify yourselves, and change your clothes. Come, let us go up to Bethel, and I will build an altar there to the God who answered me when I was in distress and who has been with me wherever I have gone.” Jacob hides the idols under the same terebinth tree in Shechem that his grandfather used. Then he travels to Bethel, where God again invokes the name he earlier gave Jacob: Israel, meaning Striven with God. “And God said to him, ‘You whose name is Jacob, you shall be called Jacob no more, but Israel shall be your name.’ Thus He named him Israel.”

  As she was reading, Fern began to choke up. She closed the book. “Maybe it was my destiny that I ended up in Bethel,” she said. “There are such special people here.” She got up and walked to the one shelf that wasn’t covered in books, where she retrieved a large framed photo of a mother and her son. She handed it to me. “They were killed about two years ago now. They were gunned down on the way back to Bethel from a family gathering. When we first came to Bethel they were the first family that had us over. I didn’t speak Hebrew. She didn’t speak English. But there was such warmth there, and welcome. Just very special people. We went to their funeral. We went to the funeral of a kindergarten teacher. We went to the funeral of a young man in his early twenties. My children go every six months to someone else’s funeral. When I lived in America the only funerals I went to were for old people.”

  “So why do you keep her picture?”

  “Because I don’t want to forget them. It’s part of our life here. We have a cemetery. It’s filling up!”

  “And that doesn’t make you want to stay less?”

  “It makes me want to stay more. It strengthens my pride for this place. Not only was Abraham here, and Jacob. But now I’ve been here, and my children, too. Not only did they make sacrifices. We made sacrifices, too. And we did it for the same reason. We believe in God.”

  Avner and I were quiet for much of the way home. Once again an impromptu meeting had produced a connection to the Bible so profound—and so personal—that I felt it in my gut. I was struck by how physical Fern’s experience was: First she felt a longing for her biblical roots, then she came to Israel, then she felt as if she had become a part of the story herself. It’s as if the act of going through those steps had taken her closer to God. Was there something inevitable about that process?

  For the time being, I was focused on more tangible issues, specifically trying to figure out what Canaan was like when Abraham got there. The Bible is strikingly unhelpful in this regard. Abraham’s initial encounters seem almost hurried over in the text. The account of Abraham’s travels from Shechem, to Bethel, to the Negev is covered in only four verses. The absence of any details raised a question, which I asked Avner the following day: Is there a connection between what we were seeing and what Abraham would have seen? “Let’s take a drive,” he said.

  We turned south from Jerusalem toward Beer-sheba along the same route Abraham would have taken, the Patriarchs’ Road. The original path would have been three or four feet wide, Avner noted, a stone-riddled trail winding around the mountains to avoid steep climbs. The Romans later widened it and paved it. Today it’s a four-lane highway, with regulation shoulders, guardrails, light poles, the longest tunnel in Israel, as well as the longest bridge. At a scant two hundred yards, the bridge doesn’t even cross a river; it crosses a ravine. “It’s a small country,” Avner said apologetically.

  The road has other Israeli idiosyncrasies. The first is that almost every driver—including Avner—was cradling a mobile phone. Also, every car had at least one bumper sticker, mostly on political topics, like GIVING UP TERRITORY IS DANGEROUS FOR JEWS, some were emotional, like SHALOM HAVER, or “Good-bye Friend,” which is what President Bill Clinton said at the funeral for slain Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. “We’re drawn to written things,” Avner said, explaining the stickers. “We’re still a people of the Book.”

  We zigzagged along the mountains for an hour while Avner began to sketch what Abraham would have found in Canaan. Though today the central hills are a mix of coffee-colored ridges, butterscotch boulders, and caramel soil—blended with groves of olive trees—the land wasn’t always this parched. In the patriarchs’ time, Canaan was a leafier place, covered with sycamores, oaks, and pistachios, as well as fields of wheat and barley. Canaanites built their cities in areas flush with trees, and thus water. Specifically this meant the Mediterranean coast, the Galilee, and the foothills of the central mountains. Abraham may have stopped in these areas, but when it came time to settle more permanently he moved farther south, to the threshold of the desert. “Wandering tribesmen didn’t need areas to cultivate,” Avner said. “They also didn’t want conflict with cities. They wanted to be on the edge of civilization.”

  After several hours we neared the edge ourselves. The browns and beiges dissolved into a chalky moonscape of ashen hills, cracked mounds, and mesas that jab the air like fists wrapped in gauze. Suddenly Avner steered the car over, jumped out, and plopped down in the dirt. “You need a geology lesson,” he said.

  As he started constructing a model in the sand, I pulled out my Bible. After Abraham arrives in the Negev from Bethel, a severe famine strikes the land and he is obliged to seek relief in Egypt. This excursion inaugurates a new, much more detailed part of Genesis, in which Abraham finally emerges a more fully realized character, with feelings for his wife and nephew, and the foundations of a code of conduct centered on right and wrong. As Abraham is about to enter Egypt he says to Sarah, “I know what a beautiful woman you are. If the Egyptians see you, and think, ‘She is his wife,’ they will kill me and let you live. Please say that you are my sister, that it may go well with me because of you, and that I may remain alive thanks to you.” Events transpire as he predicted. The pharaoh takes Sarah into his possession and pays Abraham a rich dowry, including sheep, oxen, asses, and camels, as well as male and female slaves. But God intervenes before the pharaoh has relations with Sarah, and she is released. Abraham and Sarah, now further enriched with gold and silver from the king, return to Canaan.

  Once they arrive, tensions arise between Abraham and his nephew, Lot, who also became wealthy in Egypt. “The land could not support them staying together,” the text says, “for their possessions were so great.” Their herdsmen start to quarrel. Abraham, in a touching act of generosity, tries to assuage the problem, saying to Lot, “Let there be no strife between you and me, between my herdsmen and yours, for we are kinsmen. Is not the whole land before you? Let us separate: if you go north, I will go south; and if you go south, I will go north.” Lot survey
s the land, noticing how well watered the land of Jordan is, “like the garden of Eden.” Lot, naturally, chooses the nicer land, “the whole plain of Jordan,” while Abraham is left with the deserts of Canaan. Soon, though, God appears to compensate Abraham for his munificence. “Raise your eyes and look out from where you are,” God says, promising to give Abraham all the land he sees, including Jordan. “I will make your offspring as the dust of the earth, so that if one can count the dust of the earth, then your offspring too can be counted.”

  While Abraham’s offspring may be entitled to the entire area in the long term, in the short term Abraham is confined to a narrow, almost uninhabitable patch between the central mountains and the Dead Sea. “That’s where we are now,” Avner said. While I was reading, he had molded a mound of sand into a strip, like a baguette. “These are the central mountains,” he said, pointing to the model. “These mountains were old, worn down over time. Then, about two million years ago”—he gestured toward a ravine he had dug alongside the mound—“the Rift Valley was created.” The rift, a giant scar across the face of the earth, extends from Lake Victoria in Central Africa, up through the Sinai and Jordan, all the way to the Euphrates. It reaches bottom at the Dead Sea, 1,300 feet below sea level, the “lowest spot on earth.”

  Once the rift appeared, the eastern side of the hills dropped off far more dramatically than the west, creating a geological oddity. When rain clouds from the Mediterranean reach this ridge, they suddenly get hit with a thick wall of air. The air is denser here because the Dead Sea is so low. The lower the ground, the more atmosphere there is. The more atmosphere, the more pressure in the air. One consequence of so much pressure is that it sucks the moisture out of the air. “It’s like if you press your lips against your sleeve and blow,” Avner said, “your sleeve becomes hot. That’s how this desert was created. It’s the private desert of the Dead Sea. I hate to say it, but it’s the smallest desert on earth.”

  “How many superlatives do you have?” I said.

  “Let’s see, Jericho is the lowest city on earth. The Sea of Galilee is the lowest freshwater lake on earth. The Dead Sea is the lowest—”

  “I get the idea.”

  “Do you?” he said, smiling. He gestured for me to follow.

  We got back in the car and made the steep descent to the Dead Sea, continuing to read. Suddenly at this point in the story, Genesis 14, Abraham gets drawn into a war, indicating, if nothing else, that he is growing in stature: A mere shepherd would not attack a large army. Four kings from Mesopotamia who have come to the Negev, possibly for the copper mines, terrorize the region. Eventually five kings from the city-states of Canaan, specifically the Jordan River region where Lot is living, engage them in battle. The Mesopotamian kings triumph, seizing the wealth of Sodom and Gomorrah, and taking Lot prisoner. When Abraham learns of his nephew’s plight, he pursues the kings, defeats them, and rescues Lot. “Your reward shall be very great,” God tells Abraham. How can that be, the octogenarian Abraham protests, “seeing that I shall die childless?” Fear not, God says, your offspring shall be as numerous as the stars.

  Sarah, seeing her husband’s frustration, follows Near Eastern custom from the time and offers him her Egyptian maidservant, Hagar, as a concubine. When Hagar gets pregnant, though, Sarah begins to treat her harshly and Hagar flees. An angel rescues Hagar, who then gives birth to a son, Ishmael. God reappears when Ishmael is thirteen and asks Abraham to follow another Near Eastern custom: circumcise himself and his son. This act is portrayed as a sign of the everlasting covenant between God and man, but for a God torn between acts of creation and destruction, it’s also a fitting emblem: forever branding a man’s source of creation with a mark of destruction.

  One day, when Abraham is sitting at the entrance of his tent, the Lord visits in the guise of three men. Abraham, who doesn’t know that the men represent God, follows bedouin tradition and orders that they be given food and water. “My lords, if it please you, do not go on past your servant. Let a little water be brought; bathe your feet and recline under a tree. And let me fetch a morsel of bread.” Abraham hastens to Sarah and asks her to prepare a meal of choice cakes and curd. He then slaughters a calf, “tender and choice,” and serves it, too.

  After eating, the men ask Abraham where his wife, Sarah, is. He tells them, and one of the men announces, “I will return to you when life is due, and your wife Sarah shall have a son!” Sarah, who is then ninety and no longer having “the periods of women,” is listening and laughs out loud. She adds, to herself, “Now that I am withered, am I to have enjoyment—with my husband so old?” “Why did Sarah laugh?” God asks Abraham. Sarah grows frightened and denies she laughed, but God repeats, “You did laugh.”

  At this point, the men suddenly decide to leave and Abraham escorts them out. Along the way, God decides to reveal himself and the purpose of his visit. “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?” he asks. God then announces that he intends to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, because “their outrage is so great, and their sin is so grave!” No explicit sin is given. Abraham, in the first instance in which he stands up to God, protests, saying, “Perhaps there are fifty righteous people in the city.” The two negotiate the number down to ten—another sign of Abraham’s growing stature—and God departs.

  In Sodom, Lot also welcomes the visitors warmly, but that night his neighbors demand the right to have sexual relations with the men. Lot resists, but the people of the town insist. “Where are the men who came to you tonight?” they ask Lot. “Bring them to us, that we may be intimate with them.” This is a clear reference to homosexuality (and the origin of the word sodomy) and God responds by destroying the city, using what the King James Bible calls “brimstone and fire,” and what modern translations often call “sulfurous fire.” Before this happens, though, God instructs Lot and his family to flee, but not to glance behind them. When Lot’s wife does look back, she becomes a pillar of salt.

  Avner and I had now reached the bottom of the descent and he pulled to a stop once again. We stepped out of the car at the southern tip of the Dead Sea into a mixture of sulfurous air, oppressive heat, and deceptively inviting turquoise waters. The climate here is like an anti-greenhouse, with all the moisture sucked out of the air. Because of the heat, water evaporates at a faster rate here, meaning the sea contains 25 percent solids and a retching 7 percent salt—six times saltier than the ocean. People are said to be able to float in this brine, but that’s not quite true. The one time I went in, I felt like a wonton—not quite floating, not quite sinking, and covered in a fatty soup. There is one benefit to this otherwise deadly place. The thicker atmosphere prevents ultraviolet rays from reaching the ground, which means, Avner said, that the Dead Sea is the “best place to get a suntan in the world.” The sun, coupled with minerals from the water, is so effective against psoriasis that German and Austrian health plans actually pay patients to fly to Israel rather than stay at home applying lotions.

  In the ancient world, the Dead Sea, which the Bible calls the “Salt Sea,” was less of a novelty and more of a frightening marvel. To explain, Avner led me on a short hike up the cliffs. We scrambled over rocks so brittle they sometimes broke loose in our hands. After a while, we crawled through a narrow opening into a formation called the Cave of Two Chimneys. It was a cylindrical chamber about the size of a spiral staircase with matching two-story knobbly pillars that looked like drumsticks. Only these towers weren’t made of wood. They were made of salt.

  “Entirely of salt?” I asked.

  “Lick it,” he said.

  These columns proved to be the most unexpected sideshow of the lowest place on earth. Because water evaporates so rapidly here, the floor of the Dead Sea is lined with a layer of minerals several miles thick. With so much atmosphere, the air actually pushes down on the water, which in turn pushes down on this layer of minerals, squeezing out the salt, the most malleable of the minerals. The salt is forced deeper into the earth and eventually out toward the shore, a
t which point it pushes up through the ground into assorted asparagus-like formations. The two chimneys were striking examples, and when we scampered to the top of the hill we saw several more. The process continues to this day. Avner told me that when he came here as a boy there were gas-station pumps near the road. When he returned a few years later, the mountain had expanded so much its outer edge had overtaken the pumps. “It’s a living mountain,” he said.

  Which brought us back to Avner’s model in the sand. We were sitting now atop Sodom mountain, overlooking the Dead Sea. There were no cars, or people, for miles.

  “Sodom is the first example of biblical storytellers taking an actual place,” Avner said, referring to salt flats around the Dead Sea, “and using a story to explain how it developed. With the Flood, or Mount Sinai, the Bible tells the story and we can try to match the place or not. Here we know the place, and the Bible tells us what it means. Every schoolkid today calls these formations Lot’s wife.”

  “But why such a violent story?”

  “Because to them, this was a place of death.”

  He pointed me back to the text. After his wife dies, Lot and his daughters flee first to Zoar, then to a cave in the high country. Avner tapped me on the arm and pointed across the Dead Sea. “That’s Zoar,” he said. As the Bible describes, it was green, and above it was a range of mountains. “And before you get to the dirty part, let me tell you that in those mountains is a cave, which the Byzantines identified as Lot’s.” Once settled, Lot’s daughters, concerned by the lack of men, get their father drunk and commit incest. The elder daughter has a son, who becomes father of the Moabites; the younger has a son who becomes father of the Ammonites. Both nations settle across the Jordan River, adjacent to the Promised Land. “Do you see those mountains?” Avner said, pointing above Zoar. “That’s Moab. Further north is Ammon.”