Walking the Bible

by Bruce Feiler

  The northeastern quadrant of Cairo is the city’s plushest, with casinos, nightclubs, art deco houses, a soccer stadium, and palaces built for successive kings, sultans, caliphs, emirs, pashas, strongmen, dictators, consul generals, military generals, and, now, presidents for life. Unlike their counterparts in ancient Egypt, contemporary leaders not only live on the east side of the Nile, they’re buried here as well. Nasser’s grave is in the area, as is the tomb of the unknown soldier. The shah of Iran died here during his last years in exile. It’s also home to a memorial to the 1973 war, called the Tenth Ramadan War in Arabic and the Yom Kippur War in Hebrew, in which Sadat regained, then relost some of the Sinai. Eight years later Islamic radicals infiltrated a parade in honor of the war and assassinated Sadat, who was subsequently buried in the area. One reason so many palaces are here is that it’s closer to the Sinai, so leaders could flee in times of peril. It’s also closer to the airport, for the same reason. “Life is nicer here,” Yasser said, “and more expensive.” He estimated the cost of a two-bedroom apartment at half a million Egyptian pounds, around $175,000.

  Yasser was an affable, talkative man who had graduated with Basem from Helwan University and was studying for a master’s degree in the history of mummification. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of hieroglyphics and near flawless use of Egyptologist English—polaris, natron salts, spinal cord marrow—but almost no knowledge of where we were going. “Most tourists have no interest in these places,” he pleaded. He did, however, have a great nose for character. When we mentioned we had met the director of the pyramids the previous day, he needed no prompting to announce, “I don’t like him much. He doesn’t deserve the tributes he seeks.” He added, “He’s not like Professor Nurel Din, who advanced rapidly from professor to head of antiquities for all of Egypt. He’s a great man.” We were off to a promising start.

  The farther we got from downtown, the more the scenery shifted from crumbling apartment blocks to dusty intersections to mud-brick villages to dilapidated farmhouses. The Delta has always been Egypt’s breadbasket, a fan-shaped web of estuaries and canals that sprouted from the Nile like tines on a rake. During the Gemini IV space mission in 1965, American astronaut James McDivitt stared down 115 miles and saw what he thought was a giant flow of lava, a triangle of muddy brown pouring into a vast blue sea. The triangle was the Nile Delta and the sea it ran into, the Mediterranean.

  Today, despite diminished water because of the dam, the Delta is still the leafiest region of Egypt, the one area outside of the narrow riverbanks where nature seems to sprout uncontrollably. Feluccas sail through fields of cotton, rice, and corn. Water buffalo stomp through marshes filled with herons, storks, and loons. In ancient times, wealthy Egyptians hunted ducks through the swamps, using throwing sticks as weapons and hunting cats for retrieval. There were hippopotamuses here until 1805, when the last one was shot, perhaps by Napoleon’s soldiers, who are said to have shot the nose off the Sphinx.

  In addition to the area’s greenery, what was most remarkable about the Delta was how untouched it seemed by time. We fell back into the game we had played on our way to Harran. I spy a worker pulling mud from the river: a slave? I spy a basket made of bulrushes: a baby? I spy some girls doing laundry on the banks: one of them a pharaoh’s daughter? We had stumbled upon another primeval tableau, a land emerging out of watery chaos. We had reached another beginning in the Bible.

  One of the more striking features of the story of Moses is how humbly it starts, yet how epic it feels. It clearly aims to mix mythical elements—a body drawn from water, a slave raised by a king—with historical ones—a pharaoh building cities, a people working in servitude—to create a sort of metahero who incorporates many of the qualities of previous biblical elders, yet ultimately supersedes them. Genesis includes four major characters—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph—as well as Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, and Noah. Moses alone fills the next four books, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. He is the central character of the entire Hebrew Bible, yet one of the most human heroes ever painted, plagued by self-doubt. As biographer Jonathan Kirsch has written:“He is a shepherd, mild and meek, but also a ruthless warrior who is capable of blood-shaking acts of violence, a gentle teacher who is also a magician and a wonder-worker, a lawgiver whose code of justice is merciful except when it comes to purging and punishing those who disagree with him, an emancipator who rules his people with unforgiving authority.” Above all, he is “God’s one and only friend, and yet he is doomed to a tragic death by God himself.”

  Exodus begins with the advent of a new king over Egypt, “who knew not Joseph.” While the old pharaoh encouraged Joseph’s family to settle in Goshen, the new pharaoh fears their descendants are becoming too numerous and orders that all newborn Israelite boys be drowned in the Nile. During this time a Levite family bears a son, but the mother is able to hide him. After three months she takes a wicker basket, caulks it with bitumen and pitch, and sets her son afloat on the river. The baby’s sister is sent to watch. The daughter of the pharaoh discovers the basket and takes pity on the boy inside. “This must be a Hebrew child,” she says. The pharaoh’s daughter asks the girl who is watching to bring her a Hebrew wet-nurse. The girl, naturally, brings her mother. It’s the pharaoh’s daughter, however, who gives the baby his name, Moses, because, she says, “I drew him out of the water.”

  As with other biblical accounts, the story of Moses’ birth has many ancient parallels. Hercules also survived efforts to kill him as a baby; Oedipus was left exposed on a mountain; Romulus and Remus were put in a chest and cast into the Tiber. Perhaps more relevant (because it predates the Bible), Sargon, founder of the Mesopotamian empire of Akkadia in the third millennium B.C.E., was born to obscure origins, cast in a wicker basket lined with bitumen, and drawn out of the river by a god. But as Avner pointed out, the differences between Sargon and Moses outweigh the similarities. Sargon was abandoned because of an illicit relationship, not a genocidal dictate. Also, Sargon’s finder did not know the boy’s origin, as the pharaoh’s daughter does. “In many ways, Moses is closer to Jesus,” Avner said. “He’s born in humble origins, passes through the highest courts, flees to the desert, then returns with a new set of beliefs.”

  Since the Bible is mostly silent on Moses’ youth, commentators invented various stories. In one, Moses is sitting on the lap of the princess when he knocks off the pharaoh’s crown and tramples it. This was considered a bad omen, and the pharaoh was advised to kill the boy. The pharaoh proposes a test instead. Aides put two bowls before the boy, one filled with gold, the other with red-hot coals. A usurper would presumably grab the jewels, but Moses grabs a coal and places it on his lips, thus saving his life and, the reasoning goes, causing him to stutter—a trait alluded to later in the text.

  As for the Bible, it picks up the story when Moses, as an adult, witnesses an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, “one of his kinsmen.” Moses looks around to make sure there are no witnesses, then murders the Egyptian and buries him in the sand. The next day Moses sees two Hebrews fighting. He asks the offender, “Why do you strike your fellow?” The Hebrew responds, “Who made you chief and ruler over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?” Moses realizes his crime has been discovered and becomes frightened. When the pharaoh learns of the murder, he tries to kill Moses, who flees to the desert. He eventually arrives in the land of Midian, an ancient territory believed to be near southern Jordan today. There, like so many others in the Bible, he meets his future wife by a well. He comes upon the seven daughters of a Midianite named Jethro, who are being threatened by shepherds. Moses rises to the girls’ defense. In gratitude, Jethro invites Moses to marry his daughter Zipporah.

  Back in Egypt, the pharaoh dies, and the Israelites continue to “groan” under their bondage. Their cries reach God, the text says, who recalls his covenant with the patriarchs and decides to act. One day, while Moses is tending Jethro’s flock, he comes upon Horeb, “the mountain of God,” which later would serve
as the place where the Ten Commandments were revealed. An angel appears in a blazing fire from a bush. The bush is “all aflame,” yet not consumed. God begins to speak from the bush:“Moses! Moses!”“Here I am,” Moses says, using the same response Abraham gives to God in Harran. “Do not come closer,” God says. “Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you stand is holy ground.”

  God then introduces himself and invokes the names of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Moses promptly hides his face, for he is “afraid to look at God.” The Lord continues, announcing that he is mindful of the suffering of the Israelites and intends to liberate them from Egypt and deliver them to a land of milk and honey. Moses will be the liberator, God announces. “Come, therefore, I will send you to the Pharaoh, and you shall free My people.” But Moses objects, saying he’s not a great man. But “I will be with you,” God says. Moses continues to demur, saying that when the Israelites ask who sent him, “What do I say?” God’s answer is one of the most famous and elliptic in the entire Bible, and is rendered in Hebrew as ehyeh asher ehyeh.Translators interpret the response as meaning “I am who I am,”“I shall always be what I have always been,” or “I will be there however I will be there.” God elaborates by saying, “This shall be My name forever. This My appellation for all eternity.”

  Moses, however, remains unpersuaded. In an effort to convince him, God turns Moses’ staff into a snake, then turns it back into a staff. He then teaches Moses to use his staff to turn the Nile into blood. Moses is still unconvinced, claiming he’s not a man of words. “I am slow of speech and slow of tongue,” he says, giving birth to the idea that he stutters. This time God gets angry and says that Aaron, Moses’ brother, can speak for him. Aaron is setting out from Egypt already to meet Moses, God says. Finally the reluctant savior agrees and sets out for Goshen.

  The unusual circumstances of this story—the fact that Moses gets his name from an Egyptian and is raised in the pharaonic court, the fact that he claims not to speak well—have led many to speculate that Moses wasn’t an Israelite at all. Sigmund Freud, in his influential book Moses and Monotheism, says that Moses was an Egyptian who learned monotheism from Akhenaten and was inspired to lead a revolt of foreign slaves out of a desire to overthrow his symbolic father. Freud says Moses gave the slaves the idea that they were a chosen people, which in turn led to antiSemitism. “It was one man, the man Moses, who created the Jews. To him this people owes its tenacity in supporting life; to him, however, it also owes much of the hostility which it has met and is meeting still.”

  Leaving aside Freud’s psychological interpretation, many scholars agree with his underlying thesis, that Moses might have been an Egyptian. One reason is his name. In Exodus 2, the pharaoh’s daughter says she names the boy Moses, or Moshe in Hebrew, because “I drew him out of the water.” This linkage, however, is believed to have been added by later editors who were thinking of the Hebrew word mashah, which means to draw out. By contrast, since the pharaoh’s daughter is unlikely to have known Hebrew, her choice for the boy’s name probably comes from the Egyptian word moses, which means child, and is the same name at the root of Thutmose and Ramoses, later Rameses.

  Also, in trying to explain Moses’ religious beliefs, many observers suggest that disgruntled priests of Akhenaten could have formed their own cult and that Moses might have picked up ideas from them. Finally, Moses might have stuttered because he didn’t speak Hebrew, in which case he would have needed Aaron as his translator. “This doesn’t make the Bible less true,” Lucy Plitman, a professor at Tel Aviv University and an advocate of this theory, told me. “If anything this makes it more plausible. I want to use skepticism to get at the truth.”

  Traditional commentators reject these views. To them, Moses enjoyed his extraordinary background because he was an extraordinary person. Citing a line in which the Lord says to Moses “I make you a God to pharaoh,” Philo, the Jewish writer from the first century C.E., wrote, “Did not Moses enjoy an even greater partnership with the Creator of all things, having been found worthy of being called by the same form of address?” Moses, he deduces, was “the greatest and most perfect man who ever lived.”

  By 8 A.M. a warm light had settled over the Delta and the morning’s activities were well under way. A cluster of workers stood in a parking lot waiting for a lift to the fields. A group of boys were piled into the back of a vegetable truck, on their way to school. There were no private cars, only buses, trucks, and vans. The telephone poles that lined the road were barnacled with the kind of ceramic telephone conductors that I hadn’t seen since I was a child. The only sign of modern life was a few streetlights with solar panels for power.

  Our first stopover was the town of Zagazig, known in antiquity as Bubastis, the House of Bastet, after the goddess of the cat. Pilgrims used to sail here from all over the region for an annual festival of drinking and lewdness. In the fifth century B.C.E., Herodotus claimed that seven hundred thousand people consumed more wine in one day than during the rest of the year put together. The town was also known as a feline free-for-all. As Joseph says, in Thomas Mann’s novel, “the city smelt so strong of catnip that it almost turned a stranger’s stomach.”

  Today, the site of the ancient city is overgrown and nearly abandoned, with a few stone cartouches overturned on the ground and a sagging barbed-wire fence around an ancient animal cemetery, where mummified pets were buried. A small residential area contains remains of mud-brick houses like the ones the Israelites were said to be building in Exodus. We walked around for a few minutes, then decided to stop in the small museum. It was closed, not open until 9:00, the guard said. It was 8:40.

  “But we are—”

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “But we only want—”

  “Sorry,” he repeated.

  “But maybe—”

  “No chance.”

  Baksheesh?

  “Come right in.”

  Before spending time in the Middle East I had heard countless tales of baksheesh and always wondered how one knew when to wield such a tool. As it turns out, one needn’t wonder. Egyptians, at least, make their desires quite clear. One still has to learn the proper amount, but as Yasser said, “Any amount is enough; any amount is not enough. No matter what you do, they complain.”

  Moments later, after touring the mostly empty museum, we piled back into the jeep and turned north. Before reaching the eastern perimeter of the Delta and the likely site of the biblical Red Sea, we hoped to see the ancient garrison towns of Pithom and Rameses, which Exodus says the Israelites built for the pharaoh during their bondage. To do that, we needed to leave the main road and navigate a web of dirt roads to Sa el-Hagar, one of several candidates for the city of Rameses.

  Almost immediately we got lost. If no tourists go to Zagazig, no people at all come to Sa el-Hagar. Any hint of development quickly disappeared and we were in a borderless, unchanging never-never land of cabbage carts and rice paddies, wooden wheelbarrows and cattails. The arterylike canals close to Cairo multiplied into hundreds of capillaries that carried water to the spongy ground. Alongside the narrow waterways, wooden pumps were set up to distribute the water for irrigation. In lieu of electricity, the pistons were tied to donkeys, who walked in a circle, ladling water as they went. The region seemed more overgrown than Eastern Turkey, but less developed. The tallest objects were palm trees, silhouetted against the haze, which had now replaced the fog.

  We stopped for directions. Then stopped again. We stopped a third time, and a fourth. Whoever popularized the theory that men don’t ask for directions has never visited the Egyptian Delta. But the directions were often contradictory: left past the third mound of dirt, right at the fork in the canal; left at the tractor, right at the burning manure. Eventually at a gas station we got directions that sounded right—“Stay on this road, not left or right”—if only because they sounded as if they came right out of the Bible. Within seconds, Avner produced a passage, Joshua 1:7, with the same instructions:�
��Turn not to the right hand or to the left, that you may prosper wherever you go.” It’s no wonder it took the Israelites forty years to cross the desert; they spent half that time just getting out of town.

  In the meantime, while Ahmed was getting increasingly frustrated, the rest of us occupied ourselves with the bottomless brainteaser of ancient Egypt, the Rubik’s Cube of the Bible: Who was the pharaoh of Exodus?

  By the time Moses arrives back in Goshen, in the Nile Delta, the stage is set for the signature showdown of the Pentateuch, the battle between the God of the Hebrews and the god-king of the Egyptians. Exodus is more than an event, it’s the seminal demonstration of how God involves himself in the daily lives of the Israelites, exercises control over other nations, and ultimately changes the course of history. Exodus is also living history, referred to over 120 times in the Hebrew Bible, reenacted every year by Jews at Passover, and recalled every year by Christians at Easter. It’s also living metaphor, as leaders from Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr. have invoked the plight of the Israelites and the plea of Moses, “Let my people go!”

  Considering this transcendence, it’s surprising—even troubling—that the story of the Israelites’ flight to freedom appears nowhere outside the Bible. This makes dating the event almost impossible. The only evidence even remotely related is a reference in an Egyptian victory stela from the fifth year of Merenptah, circa 1209 B.C.E., that mentions four entities recently subdued in Canaan: Ascalon, Gezer, Yenoam, and Israel. This would seem to put the Exodus no later than 1250 B.C.E., since it took the Israelites forty years just to get to Canaan.