by Bruce Feiler
Then I went to Jerusalem. I had just completed a long project and decided to reward myself with a trip to the Middle East. On my first day in the country I joined an old friend, Fred, who was giving a tour to some high school students. We stopped for lunch on a promenade overlooking the city. “Over there,” said Fred, “is Har Homa,” a controversial new settlement. “And over there,” he said, pointing to the Dome of the Rock, “is the cliff where Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac.” Real or not, that piece of information hit me like a bolt of Cecil B.DeMille lightning. It had never occurred to me that that story—so timeless, so abstract—might have happened in a place that was identifiable, no less one I could visit. It had never occurred to me that the story was so concrete, so connected to the ground. To here. To now.
In subsequent weeks I had the same experience in a variety of places—the Dead Sea, Petra, the Pyramids. In the Middle East, I realized, the Bible is not some abstraction, nor some book gathering dust. It’s a living, breathing entity unencumbered by the sterilization of time. If anything, it’s an ongoing narrative: stories that begin in the sand, get entrenched in stone, pass down through families, and play themselves out in the lives of residents and visitors who traverse its lines nearly five thousand years after they were first etched into memory. That was the Bible I wanted to know, and almost immediately I realized that the only way to find it was to walk along those lines myself. I would take this ancient book, the embodiment of old-fashioned knowledge, and approach it with contemporary methods of learning—traveling, talking, experiencing. In other words, I would enter the Bible as if it were any other world and seek to become a part of it. Once inside, I would walk in its footsteps, live in its canyons, meet its characters, and ask its questions in an effort to understand why its stories had become so timeless and, despite years of neglect, once again so vitally important to me.
At first, few people thought this was a good idea. I returned home and tried to put it out of my mind, but couldn’t. A few months later I traveled back to Jerusalem, and on my first day went to visit Avraham Biran, the dean of biblical archaeologists and the colleague of a friend. Professor Biran listened attentively to my ramblings. He squinted at me from behind clouds of cigarette smoke. And when I finished, he leaned across his desk and told me politely that I was out of my mind. There were few confirmed sites. Most sites that did exist were in war zones. And most were supervised by archaeologists who were far too busy to explain them to me. “It really would be an imposition,” he said. I sat back, deflated.
But even as he discouraged me, Professor Biran could not resist reaching out his hand. Over the next two hours, he plucked photographs from his desk, pulled books off his shelf, and eventually took me to the maws of his laboratory to show me some shards of pottery. That night he called me at home. “What you need is someone to go with you,” he said, “someone who has a sense of poetry. Somebody like Avner Goren.” Several days later, in the Negev, I ran into two young Israeli guides and discussed my plan with them. “What you need is someone like Avner Goren,” they said.
Two days later I telephoned Avner at his home in Jerusalem. He agreed to pick me up the following morning and arrived at dawn in a rickety blue Subaru. In his fifties, with a body that reminded me of Winnie the Pooh’s, he had squinty blue eyes, bulbous cheeks, a boyish grin, and curly hair. Though he was dressed in standard Israeli fare—blue jeans, T-shirt, and sandals—that morning his most dashing feature was a long white scarf, Lawrence on his way to Arabia but still clinging to Oxford. After greeting me warmly, he drove around the corner to a coffee shop in the fashionable German Colony where we chatted over herbal tea and croissants—instant neighbors in the global bistro.
A charming, charismatic figure, Avner was a romantic, a child of the desert. For the fifteen years that Israel controlled the Sinai—1967 to 1982—he was the region’s chief archaeologist and preserver of antiquities. But soon after, he abandoned the academy to become a popularizer of biblical history, one of Israel’s most eloquent spokesmen on life in the ancient world. He tutored prospective Israeli and Palestinian guides, gave lectures on ancient history around the world (for the State of Israel, the UN, and others), and was a charter member of a pioneering group of Israeli, Jordanian, and Palestinian educators who were using archaeology to open the fabled Nabatean Spice Trail to cross-border traffic. Indiana Jones, meet Dag Hammarskjöld.
As we talked, a sort of implicit teacher-pupil relationship developed. “I was thinking about which route in the Sinai to take,” I said. Avner didn’t flinch. “I prefer the southern route,” he said. “It offers the best experience.”“I’m concerned that I won’t be able to get to certain sites in Egypt,” I said. “Fear not,” Avner said, rubbing his fingers together in the international expression for an exchange of money. Finally, after tiptoeing through this logistical minefield, I told him about my conversation with Professor Biran. “Half the people I meet tell me I’m out of my mind,” I said. “They tell me it can’t be done.” As I finished a smile slowly crept across his face. “I don’t think you’re crazy at all,” he said. “I think it sounds exciting.”
I sat back, relieved and exhilarated. “Somehow I knew you would,” I said. “By the way, would you come along?”
A year passed between that meeting in Jerusalem and our first foray into the field, in Turkey. During that time I returned to the United States and set about preparing myself for the trip. First I read the Bible, chapter by chapter, verse by verse. It took me almost a month, and I was amazed by how little I remembered. Abraham went to Egypt? Moses committed murder? What were all those rebellions in the desert? I began making a chart linking places in the text to places on the ground. Was Abraham born in Iraq or Turkey? Where was Mount Sinai? Was there really a place called Sodom? This process led me to read about what those places would have been like at the time the stories were written. I started with books on history, archaeology, geography. These were rational subjects, consistent with my past as an undergraduate history major, as a master’s student in international relations. Keep it real, keep it concrete, keep it safely removed from spirituality. “This is a literary quest,” I kept telling myself. “This is about me and the Bible. This is not about me and God.”
As I bounced from topic to topic I realized how little I knew about the ancient world. Books about history led to ones about religion; religion books led to language books; language to culture. In time, the topics became more obscure. I found myself scouring used bookstores for volumes on desert botany, pyramid construction, Babylonian creation stories. I even bought a book called The Bible and Flying Saucers: The Miraculous Truth, which included the cover line “The messengers are here!”
The homework itself became part of the adventure. My chart became more and more complex. One bookshelf filled up, and I bought another. My friends wondered about this new obsession. Why was I sprinkling conversations with references to African quail migration or the biological roots of manna? Why did I want a six-volume, 7,035-page reference book for my birthday? “Not to worry,” I assured them. “I’m not becoming a nut.” And I believed it, too. This was about history, I assured myself, this was about grounding the text in reality. “I’m giving myself a master’s degree in the history of the Bible,” I said. What could be more fun, or more rational?
For all of my reading, however, the moment I met Avner at the Tel Aviv airport for our trip to Turkey, I realized that my education hadn’t even begun. I was dressed in a neatly pressed shirt from Banana Republic with a bag full of books and a new pair of hiking boots. Avner, meanwhile, was nearly spilling out of his T-shirt, beltless baggy trousers made by some bedouin in Sinai, and fifteen-year-old scruffy sandals. The message was clear: My learning was all in my head; Avner’s was all in his feet. I had never met a man who knew so much who carried his knowledge so lightly. He knew all the languages of the biblical route—Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish—as well as a few others—English, Greek, and hieroglyphics. He had not only several bookcases full of Bib
le books but several rooms. Yet he was unassuming to the point of being bashful. At times this frustrated me—why didn’t he speak up when we ran into a pontificator? But eventually I realized that Avner, in his way, was like the place he idolized. From afar the desert might seem distant and reserved; draw closer and it has a great story to tell.
Avner was like the desert in another way: He seemed completely removed from the modern world. For all his clarity of mind, he was conspicuously disorganized, with more twisted pieces of paper, bent paper clips, and stale pieces of chocolate spilling from his pockets than anyone I ever met. His car was like an archaeological site, with layer upon layer of his life piled up in the backseat. He rarely returned messages. He often forgot where he was going. And he never met me for a trip having not stayed up overnight to pack. Even then, we usually had to go back for his passport. His appearance, which rarely varied from that morning at the airport, reflects this personality. He owns only one tie, which he keeps knotted under his bed. He once addressed a UNESCO conference in Paris wearing hiking boots. And when, late in our journey, his daughter, Smadar, got married, Avner had to buy his first pair of dress shoes.
There was another way in which Avner was a paradox. For all his learning, for all his stature and international acclaim, he had never bothered to finish graduate school. He was too drawn by the opportunity to give a speech, to join a crusade—to go on a trip with someone like me. Remarkably, this blemish did little to stunt his success. If anything it was a testament to his talent that he continued to rise in intellectual circles despite not having the one credential that would seem to be necessary. He was a fellow at the prestigious Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Israel. He was recruited for prominent digs. He counseled prime ministers. And he knew everyone within a thousand-mile radius of Jerusalem. I never produced a name of someone I wanted to meet—an artist, a scientist, a bedouin, a scholar—whom Avner couldn’t deliver within twenty-four hours. And I never attended a meeting with one of those individuals in which the other person, regardless of stature, didn’t defer to Avner. As a friend of his told me, “Avner Goren is like Moses. He’s a prophet. He has no boundaries, no borders, he’s actually part of the land. And the best thing is, he doesn’t even realize it.”
This set up the unusual equation at the heart of our experience. I wasn’t looking for a father any more than Avner was looking for a son (he has one). I wasn’t looking for a prophet any more than he was looking for a disciple. And yet, we both were looking for the Bible, which, at the moment, had brought us together at the start of a journey that was still hardly defined.
It was just after 5:30 on our first morning in Turkey when I joined Avner outside our hotel in Gaziantep. The street lamps, at this hour, were still flickering orange. The smells of dawn—cinnamon, cardamom, a whiff of burnt sugar—were just starting to emerge. We had decided to begin our trip by trying to catch sunrise on the Euphrates, before proceeding eastward to the Tigris and the two-day trek through the Turkish highlands to Dogubayazit. We nodded our good mornings with Sait, our driver, and buckled in for the ride. Since meeting him the previous day, Sait’s unflappable personality (along with the occasional pack of cigarettes) had helped ease our way through the numerous checkpoints where authorities prodded our passports, our luggage, our bodies, or all three.
Once we were out of town, the air grew agitated, until suddenly a crack of lightning careened across the sky. The flash was followed by another, and the two jolts ignited a series of awakenings. First the sky began to lighten, revealing a clog of slate gray clouds. Then the ground emerged, exposing a flat landscape of pale, spent grass. Gradually other life-forms appeared—groves of young pistachio trees, a stretch of tufting cotton bushes. A turtle crossed the road.
Minutes later we sped past an open floodgate, parked, and ambled down the rocky bank. Large boulders huddled at river’s edge, with pebbles trickling into water the color of mint. A woman in a black bedouin dress tiptoed down the embankment carrying a teakettle. The current was swift in the middle of the river, but the edges were smooth like gelatin. From here, the river picks up strength as it passes through Syria and into Iraq, before merging with the Tigris near the Persian Gulf.
By the time we slipped our toes into the water, the sky was light but the sun was still hidden. For a few moments we watched it try to burn through the clouds. Occasionally a ray would peek through, only to be blotted out again. The struggle continued for half an hour, with the sun angling to penetrate the shield, reaching, stretching, and giving off the most storybook sunburst, which was all the more remarkable, since its source was veiled. Finally, at a few minutes past seven, the sun prevailed. Because of its ordeal, it had lost any romantic qualities by the time it slid free. It wasn’t orange or red or even yellow, like most morning suns. It wasn’t tender at all. It was clear, round, and white.
It was day.
The ride east from the Euphrates started out painless. Compared to the European part of Turkey, with its soaring pines and castles, the Asian part is flat and dusty. In late summer, the fields were blotted with green, but cautiously, as if the crops might sag back into the sand. The main reason was the fickle supply of water, which is ferried across the fields by a ramshackle network of gutters and concrete entrails. At one point we stopped by a roadside gathering, where a boy playing on one of those aqueducts had just been swept to his death. The previous week, a woman said, there had been no water at all.
As we drove we began to discuss the importance of water in the ancient world. In the history of humanity, civilization came relatively late. During most of their time on earth, humans roamed in migrant bands that hunted and foraged for food. This period, the Old Stone Age, began around three million years ago and continued until approximately 15,000 B.C.E. A Middle Stone Age, with communal living, continued for roughly another five thousand years. The bigger change, what Avner called “the most important revolution in history,” occurred around 9000 B.C.E. with the advent of agriculture. That change was centered in Mesopotamia, in the area of present-day Turkey and Iraq, where local populations began experimenting with cultivating wheat and barley. As cultivation proved successful, farmers began looking for ways to expand production in order to feed more people. To do that, they needed reliable irrigation, which led them to tap their greatest resource: the Tigris and Euphrates.
What the rivers provided was a regular supply of water and, more important, an annual inundation that covered the desert with arable soil. The floods of Mesopotamia and Egypt were so unusual in an otherwise arid region that, coupled with the rain-fed mountains in today’s Syria and Israel, they formed the incubator of civilization, the Fertile Crescent, a cradle of productivity in a sea of sand. In particular, rivers gave people the incentive to stay in one place and organize themselves—to dig canals, bake bricks, build plows. “Just imagine you have a canal in your area,” Avner said. “You have to clean it; you have to maintain it; but you never enjoy the water. It flows to a place that’s twenty days away on a donkey. So you take care of the water for people you’ll never meet; and somebody else takes care of yours.”
With thousands of canals serving tens of thousands of people, the only way to maintain this growing network was to develop an equally elaborate system of laws, schools, trade. Civilization. “Soon enough, individual civilizations started fighting,” Avner said. “To survive, the victorious states started annexing their neighbors.” Empires were born. The first such empire—Sumer, in lower Mesopotamia—was quickly shadowed by ones in Akkad and Assyria, also in Mesopotamia, and ultimately one in Egypt. The inevitable clash of these titans created a combustion that would make the Fertile Crescent an unprecedented engine of creativity, giving birth to the world’s first epic poetry, legal code, religious proverbs, and written word. In time, it also gave birth to a written document that would prove to be an even greater generator of culture.
By late afternoon, we had crossed the floodplain and begun our descent to the Kurdish stronghold of
Diyarbakir. One of the oldest cities on earth, Diyarbakir dates back five thousand years and was controlled at times by the Assyrians, Persians, and Alexander the Great of Greece. The Romans built a huge city wall of basalt, which in turn was rebuilt by the Byzantines, who nicknamed the place “The Black.” Residents boast that the circular five-mile wall, along with the Great Wall of China, is one of two man-made objects visible from space.
For all its past greatness, the town is chokingly grim today, a mix of concrete buildings around a dilapidated town core. With half a million residents, Diyarbakir boasts a handful of impressive mosques and a market selling carpets, spices, and Medusa-like shags of cheap belts. On this day, the heat baked the bananas and garlicky meat, mixing them with diesel exhaust into a noxious perfume. The one source of delight, and good aroma, was the hundreds of plump watermelons spilled from every flat surface. Sprung from the Tigris and fertilized by pigeon droppings, the fruit is the town’s trademark. This week a watermelon festival was under way. Driving into town, we passed a fifty-foot obelisk with a giant, papier-mâché watermelon impaled on top; it reminded me of a Claes Oldenburg sculpture of an olive on a toothpick.
We dropped our bags at our hotel and headed down to the river. The Tigris was narrower here than the Euphrates, and murkier. The muddy banks were lined with reeds. Underneath a stone bridge, a group of adolescent boys splashed in their underwear while an older boy watered a cluster of cows. Nearing six o’clock, there was almost no light on the river; the sky was the color of sludge. Nearby a man tossed a net into the current and pulled it out with a bamboo pole, spilling mullet onto the mud. We sat on a boulder for a few minutes until Avner reached in his knapsack and pulled out a book with a royal blue cover. “Shall we?” he said.