Walking the Bible

by Bruce Feiler

  Such elaborate explanations for the plagues, while engrossing, seem to beg a common question. Proponents of these theories, like promoters of other theories about biblical events, seem to espouse them in an effort to prove that the Bible happened, that it’s real, that it’s a matter of science. This is what Gabi Barkay was referring to when he said some observers view the Bible as a kind of machine: If you can prove that two of its screws existed, you can prove the whole machine must have existed. But after examining many of these theories, I came to believe that far from enhancing the Bible, they often undermine it. The reason is simple: If the biblical stories can be explained entirely by natural causes, what does that do to the supernatural? In other words, if a volcano caused the plagues, where does that leave God?

  In many ways I could relate to the thinking behind these theories. It’s certainly easier to look for naturalistic explanations for seemingly inexplicable phenomena, especially considering the alternative, which would be to attribute them to divine intervention. When I first started reading the Bible closely I, too, wanted—maybe even needed—to hide behind the screen of history, topography, science. I was interested in the setting of the story, I said. I was interested in the historical context. I was interested in the characters, by which I meant the patriarchs, their wives, Moses, the Israelites. But in doing so, I was strenuously—at times acrobatically—avoiding showing interest in the central character of the entire book. I did this, I was coming to see, because I deeply wanted to avoid thinking about that character, about what that character meant to the story, and about what that character might mean to me. But in doing so, I was shielding myself from a principal storyline of the Bible: the relationship between humans and the divine.

  Not until I reached Exodus did I finally begin to recognize the futility of this exercise in self-delusion. As it happens, the text itself reveals precisely what caused the ten plagues. God caused them. To miss that point is to miss the essence of the tale, the battle between the god of the Israelites and the gods of the Egyptians, the battle that Eliezer Oren referred to as “My god is stronger than your god.” Biblical storytellers clearly understood this struggle, because the plagues expressly attack the things that Egyptians held most sacred: the sun, the animals, the river. As the Bible says, summing up the experience, “The Lord executed judgment on their gods.”

  With that judgment the Bible makes a significant break—and with it, I, at least, made a break as well. Up to now, the Israelites have been wandering, from Mesopotamia, through Canaan, to Egypt, and absorbing elements from all these places. They are now ready to break away and begin forming their own culture, their own empire. They must now become active participants in their own story: actors, not just reactors. God makes the meaning of this transition clear. “This month shall mark for you the beginning of the months,” he says. All Israelites shall sacrifice a lamb, he exhorts, and put its blood on their doorposts. This lamb shall be roasted, eaten, and the leftovers burned.

  Also, in the first instance in which God seems to address the readers of the Bible, not just the participants, he says the Israelites should mark this passage forever in the ritual holiday of Passover, by eating unleavened bread for seven days as a sign of how they left Egypt in haste. In other words, each of us should mark this moment in time and relive it every year. We should enter the story ourselves, reimagine ourselves in bondage, and reconsider the feelings of awe, fear, apprehension, and expectation we have upon being released by a god we’re just seeing—and feeling—for the first time. Put more directly, as I was just understanding, we should embrace our ignorance of God, and our own reluctance to recognize the need we inherently have for him, until he, on his own accord, reaches out and frees us. We should, in eating that meal, in painting that blood, in reliving that transformation, open ourselves, ultimately, to him. Because while the Israelites are having the first Passover feast that evening, the Lord sets forth, striking down all the firstborn in Egypt. It’s this act, at last, that breaks the pharaoh, and he summons Moses and Aaron. “Up, depart from among my people,” he says. “Go, worship the Lord as you said! Take also your flocks and your herds, as you said, and begone! And may you bring a blessing upon me also!” At last the Israelites are free. At last we are free—or at least seem to be.

  Half an hour after emerging from the trees we began to descend the sloping sand toward an odd sight, a perfectly linear horizon in an otherwise undulating landscape. The road began to straighten, like a runway. Suddenly from this unusual terrain came an even stranger vision: an enormous oil tanker, sitting on the horizon like a beached whale. For a second I was startled—was this an antimirage?—until I realized: This was the mother of modern Egypt, the gateway of the modern Middle East, the Suez Canal.

  As we approached the banks, the strangeness of this waterway became more apparent. Unlike the Nile, the Suez Canal doesn’t flood, so it doesn’t bear silt and therefore isn’t lined with green. Instead, the three-hundred-foot-wide canal slices through the desert bringing no apparent benefit to the sand on either bank. One reason for this unfriendliness is the canal’s unusual cocktail of fresh- and saltwater. The canal connects the Mediterranean with the Gulf of Suez, both of which are saltwater. In between, however, it joins with the Bitter Lakes and Lake Timsah, which are freshwater. The canal has other distinctive features. At one hundred miles, it’s the longest man-made waterway in the Eastern Hemisphere, twice as long as the Panama Canal, though only a twentieth as long as the Saint Lawrence Seaway. It’s also perhaps the world’s leading canal with roots dating back to the ancient world.

  The first attempts to link the Red Sea and the Mediterranean were made by Pharaoh Necho II, who lived around 600 B.C.E. Herodotus claimed that 120,000 workers had died before an oracle predicted the canal would only benefit Egypt’s enemies, and the project was abandoned. The Persian emperor Darius completed the first leg around 500 B.C.E., linking the Red Sea with the Great Bitter Lake. From there, ships could pass into a smaller canal built by Rameses II that linked the lake with the cat city of Bubastis, and from there to the Mediterranean. In other words, assuming the Exodus wasn’t caused by the Thera volcano, the Israelites could have built the first Suez Canal! Menachem Begin would have been proud.

  Napoleon considered extending the canal from the Bitter Lakes, but his idea was vetoed by his engineers, who said there was a thirty-three-foot height difference between the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Suez. In fact there is none. The discovery of this error in 1840 prompted French consul Ferdinand de Lesseps to propose the project to Egyptian Mohammed Said Pasha. The British objected, claiming it would lead to war, but Said proceeded anyway, using French and Turkish money. The effort, which began in 1859, employed twenty thousand Egyptians and took ten years, ultimately bankrupting Said’s successor and nephew, Ismail, who was forced to sell his 40 percent to Britain, effectively making the canal the property of the crown. As Prime Minister Disraeli reported to Queen Victoria:“You have it, Madam.”

  The canal was significant because it cut the time needed to travel from Western Europe to India and the Far East by half, and this importance was apparent on November 17, 1869, when six thousand dignitaries from around the world gathered for the gala opening. Ismail had built an opera house in Cairo and commissioned Verdi to write Aïda; a platoon of five hundred cooks and one thousand servants were brought from France and Italy; and the pyramids were illuminated with magnesium light, the precursor to the sound and light shows of today. Predictably, the event almost turned into a disaster. The fireworks dump blew up, nearly destroying the new town built for the occasion. A ship ran aground, blocking the canal. And not until de Lesseps had the ship blown up could the armada of seventy vessels, led by the emperor of Austria dressed in a white tunic, scarlet pantaloons, and a cocked hat with a green feather, sail between the grandstands, declaring Africa an island. Perhaps the most intriguing moment of the canal’s opening went unnoticed by the public. Several months earlier, the Prince and Princess of Wales were on ha
nd when the sluices were first opened and great quantities of salt water from the Mediterranean came pouring into the Bitter Lakes, instantly killing all the freshwater fish.

  As the ancient omen predicted, the canal has been a continual source of tension between Egypt and its enemies. In 1956, Nasser, needing resources, nationalized the canal. Britain and France were outraged and recruited Israel to advance into the Sinai, a pretext that allowed them to “safeguard” the canal by occupying it. At this point, the Soviet Union threatened to get involved on the side of the Egyptians, and the UN was brought in to evacuate the British, French, and Israeli troops. By the time the fracas ended, Nasser had emerged victorious and the canal was almost destroyed. The battered region had barely recovered when the war of 1967 caused further damage, leaving the waterway blocked by sunken vessels. Though it reopened in 1975, the canal remained surrounded by Egyptian and Israeli troops until 1982, by which time many supertankers were too large to pass through the three-hundred-foot width and chose to sail around Africa instead.

  Today the area is eerily quiet, a boulevard of postindustrial arks in an otherwise flood zone of sand. When we stopped and walked to its edge, I was amazed by the haphazard dunes that seemed almost man-made, as if the canal were dug only recently. A burnt-out bridge lay discarded nearby; and it struck me that the damage could have been caused in any of a half-dozen wars. I was also fascinated by the color of the water, a vivid turquoise. Altogether, it seemed the perfect setting for a biblical/sci-fi film, Raiders of the Lost Ark meets Star Wars.

  For all its apocalyptic atmospherics, the canal was also deeply emotional, a living tribute to a timeless dream. “There’s a lot of emotion in this place,” I said to Avner. “You can feel it.”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “There’s the canal, the water where Moses might have crossed. But for me there are also a lot of bad memories—of the wars, and the fronts. I was here under heavy shelling many times. In the 1973 war one of the worst mortar fights was not far from here. It’s called the Chinese Farm, where the Israelis crossed and met an Egyptian brigade. There was horrendous shelling for days, and I lost many friends. It’s still hard for me to come here.”

  “So where did Moses cross?” I asked.

  We sat down and pulled out our Bibles. In Exodus 12, with permission from the pharaoh now in hand, Moses rallies the Israelites—a total of “600,000 men, aside from children”—and sets out for the Promised Land. Instead of leading them by the “way of the Philistines,” which probably means the northern border where they would have encountered fortresses, God sends them via what the Hebrew calls yam suf, and what English Bibles call the Red Sea. They stop at several towns—Succoth and Etham, whose locations are unknown today—before changing direction and camping in Baal-zephon, near the sea. At this point the pharaoh changes his mind, summons six hundred chariots, and leads his army after the slaves. When the Israelites spot the Egyptians they realize they are trapped. “Was it for want of graves in Egypt that you brought us to die in the wilderness?” they cry to Moses.

  God, who has been leading the Israelites in the form of a pillar of smoke during the day and a pillar of fire at night, moves the pillar of smoke behind the Israelites to protect them from the advancing Egyptians. Moses then holds out his arms over the sea and God drives back the waters with a strong eastern wind, forming a “wall of water” to the right and left. The Israelites cross on this boulevard of dry ground. The Egyptians, freed from the smoke, start to follow. But as soon as the Israelites reach the other side, Moses holds up his arms and the sea returns to normal. The Egyptian army is swallowed alive. The fate of the pharaoh is not mentioned.

  Inevitably, efforts to decipher where this event took place have preoccupied biblical readers for centuries. One nagging problem is the confusing nature of the name the Bible gives to this body of water, yam suf. Yam is the Hebrew word for sea; suf is the Hebrew word for reed. No body of water with this name is known from antiquity. Even more confusing for many Western readers is how this term has been translated. By all accounts it was the Greek Septuagint, translated by Jews in Alexandria in the third century B.C.E., that introduced the most famous mistranslation in history, “Erythra Thalassa,” Red Sea, for what should have been Sea of Reeds. This mistake was picked up by the Latin Vul-gate and embedded into English with the King James Bible in 1611.

  Straightening out the name does help the identification somewhat, but not conclusively. There are five major candidates for the Sea of Reeds: (1) the Mediterranean, specifically a bay north of the Delta; (2) the marshy area just south of the Mediterranean; (3) Lake Timsah, or Crocodile Lake, a large lake halfway between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea; (4) the Bitter Lakes, a series of lakes just to the south of Tim-sah; and (5) the Red Sea itself, specifically the Gulf of Suez.

  Again, the name does provide clues. The Hebrew word suf is generally considered to be a borrowing from the Egyptian word twf, or papyrus. Papyrus grows only in fresh water, which would seem to rule out the Mediterranean and the Red Sea (though in Numbers 21, while the Israelites are on their way to Edom, the Bible apparently uses yam suf for the Gulf of Aqaba). Also, since the ancient marsh north of the Timsah is now covered by the Suez Canal, and therefore unknowable, it has few proponents. Instead, informed speculation centers on Lake Timsah and the Bitter Lakes. It is possible these were part of a continual stream of lakes, all of which are referred to as yam suf. But differences do exist among them. The Bitter Lakes are bigger and deeper. Timsah, by contrast, is relatively shallow, often no more than three feet deep. It’s tempting to imagine the Israelites, on a windy day, wading across this body of water, while the Egyptians mindlessly followed and got their chariots stuck in the mud.

  As for me, now that I was nearing the area, the matter of finding the actual spot where the Israelites crossed was beginning to seem less important. This feeling was a mark of exactly how much change I’d been undergoing. When I first came up with the idea of retracing the Bible, I was fascinated by questions of archaeology and identification: the precise place where Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac, the specific valley where Jacob had his dream; the exact mountain where Moses met God. Now, more than a year later, I was shifting my objectives. I still found these questions fascinating, but more in an academic, recreational sort of way. Instead, the questions that were drawing me more were those of symbolism, character, metaphor. I was reading the text less as a Baedeker now and more as a Bible. I was reading it for meaning.

  That change, which first began in Israel, became more fully realized in Egypt, as I discovered the powerful emotions that ancient sites are still able to evoke. They are testaments to the ability of places to mark holy spaces where humans come into contact with their god. And what better example of that contact than the parting of the Red Sea. In dividing the waters, God shows his mastery not only over nature but also over humanity. He uses wind, smoke, and water both to save the Israelites and to destroy the Egyptians. In this sense, it doesn’t matter where the event happened, or whether it happened. As Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher, said, “What is vital is only that what happened was experienced, while it happened, as the act of God.”

  What’s also important is that, in recording the event, the writers show their mastery of storytelling. As Avner said, “I remember as a child imagining the wall of water on both sides of my bed.” Reading it as an adult, one can see even more. The dramatic events surrounding the crossing of the sea harken back unavoidably to the opening verses of Genesis: the dividing of the Red Sea recalls the splitting of the watery world into two; the destroying of the Egyptian army evokes the slaying of the forces of chaos. In this passage, the Bible serves up yet another creation story. And this time the product is not the world; it’s the nation of Israel. As Avner said, “Now the people are free. Now the real work begins.”

  Back at the car it was past 3:00 and Ahmed and Yasser were getting antsy. None of us had eaten since 4 A.M. Delirium—and exhaustion—were starting to weigh heavily. Also, the
sun was about to set. Still, we had yet to attend to the main purpose of our journey. I may have been less interested in the precise location where the Israelites crossed, but we were still interested in experiencing what they might have gone through during their flight. But where to do that?

  We turned south toward Ismailia, a garden city erected during the construction of the canal and named after Ismail, which sits at the northern cusp of Lake Timsah. The city was largely deserted by the time we arrived, as most people had gone home early on Thursday afternoon in advance of the Muslim sabbath. The once grand avenues seemed like emblems of a ghost town, with baronial mansions turned into tenement houses for workers in the run-down resorts around the lake. We drove through the streets for twenty minutes, trying to suss out the best way to get afloat. We stopped and asked a local policeman, who gave us directions to a hotel on the lake.

  There were few cars in the parking lot of the Mercury Hotel, and no one in the lobby. Clouds had started to form overhead and the sense of vacancy was now accented by a stormy gloom in our car. Ahmed and Yasser stayed in the jeep as Avner and I went to the front desk and asked if we could rent a boat. The woman looked at us quizzically, then glanced at her watch. “We have a boat leaving ten o’clock tomorrow,” she said. “But we need it this afternoon,” we pleaded. “Impossible,” she said. I reached for my wallet. “No, no,” she said, waving my hand away. “It can’t be done. You need permission from the police, from the army, from Cairo. It takes two weeks.”“But we’re going home tonight,” I said. She dropped her head. “Sorry. Maybe you should try the boats in the park.”

  Back in the jeep Ahmed and Yasser were half asleep and were not interested in trying the park on the northern shore of the lake. “Can’t you just take a picture?” Yasser said. I shook my head. “Let’s try the park,” I said. Ten minutes later we found the chain-linked entrance to Mallhala Park; it was padlocked. I shook the gate for a second and a man emerged. Avner explained what we wanted and the man went inside and used the telephone. A few minutes later a car appeared, and a well-dressed man stepped out. Seeing that we were foreigners, he berated the guard for not letting us in and opened the gate. We paid the small entrance fee and drove inside.