Walking the Bible

by Bruce Feiler

  The park was set up for summertime recreation, with a few steel umbrellas over picnic tables, a grassy area for soccer, a mosque, and a narrow beach about the width of two towels. The complex was entirely vacant, and a bit eerie. One reason is the unusual nature of the lake. Close to where we were standing, Timsah, which covers an area about seven square miles, looks like any lake in Minnesota. But the center of the lake has been completely taken over by the canal, as if a superhighway were plopped down in the middle of a duck pond. When we arrived, two enormous tankers were passing in front of the beach, close enough to hit with a Frisbee.

  Feeling desperate now, I sprinted quickly from one side of the park to the other until I spotted a small cabin with a handful of rowboats chained together in front. My heart leapt. I knocked on the cabin, nobody answered. I knocked a little louder, still nobody answered. I screamed. No reply. I even went to the boats themselves and tried to dislodge one. I couldn’t. Either way, I didn’t see any oars. However romantic it might seem, the idea of paddling across the Suez Canal with a palm branch, dodging oil tankers, hardly seemed prudent.

  It started to rain. I slumped back to the pavilion, where Avner was speaking with the man who had let us in. “It’s winter,” the man said. “It’s Ramadan. It’s raining. Are you sure you need to do this?” I thanked him and turned back toward the car. Of course I didn’t need to cross the Red Sea, no more than I needed to climb Mount Moriah or lick Mount Sodom. I didn’t need to be here at all, yet here I was, nearly halfway through my travels, called by some unhearable voice, following some unfollowable path. And where had it gotten me? For the moment, standing in the rain at the Suez Canal, staring at the desert in front of me, feeling the pull of civilization behind me, having dragged a small carload on this quixotic quest, and having landed, trapped, in the most predictable of dead ends: an uncrossable body of water.

  Back at the car I explained the situation to Yasser and Ahmed. They did little to disguise their displeasure. It was almost time to break the fast, they said, and they wanted to return to Cairo. By the time Avner arrived they were openly sulking. Cheerily I announced a desire to give it one more try. We could drive south along the waterfront of Lake Timsah, I said, and if we reached the end without finding a boat, we could give up and go home. We went around the car in an informal vote. Ahmed stared ahead; he was apparently voting no. Yasser was more vocal; he wanted out. I turned toward Avner. He looked at the others, then at me. And as he did, I realized how long we’d been traveling together, how much we’d seen already, and how lucky I was to have found him. As much as he knew about the Bible, he seemed to know more about the nature of travel, about how to go to places, leave a bit of yourself behind, take a bit of the place with you, and in the process emerge with something bigger—an experience, a connection, a story. Maybe that’s one reason the Bible has such enduring power: At its heart, it’s a great adventure tale.

  “I think we should give it a try,” he said.

  Along the waterfront the choices were not promising. The farther south we drove, the more industrial the lake became. We saw several container ships docked in a shipyard, but I figured the chances of their taking a $10 offer of baksheesh to ferry us across the lake were small. We spotted some tugboats, but even they seemed unlikely. Also, there were few people around anyway. The quays were totally abandoned. The sense of misery in the jeep was now palpable. The sense of righteousness worse. It looked like Ahmed and Yasser were right. You couldn’t cross the Red Sea at dusk during Ramadan. Our flight of fancy had come up short. I felt disappointed, and a bit silly. The romantic folly behind our journey never seemed more palpable. What was I expecting? A crack of lightning, a raised staff, a miraculous parting of the tankers?

  In time we emerged from the commercial zone into the last residential stretch and I was preparing to concede defeat, when all of a sudden we rounded a bend and I spotted to our right a small fishing enclave, with dozens of newly painted, bright white rowboats. “That’s it!” I shouted, flinging open the door. Ahmed screeched to a halt and I leapt from my seat. Avner followed and we went sprinting to the narrow beach. All the boats were empty, except one, which was just pulling into the shore. An older man jumped off and began dumping fish into a barrel.

  When the man finished, Avner spoke to him for a second, asking if he might take us for a ride. The man seemed agreeable, chuckled a bit, and after consulting with the teenager who was manning the oars, invited us aboard: me, Avner, Ahmed, Yasser. If the police escort had come, he couldn’t have fit. There were now six of us struggling to find seats in a boat the size of a bathtub. I sat in the stern, closest to the oarsman. Mohammed was sixteen, with maroon pants and a black turtle-neck with CAT imprinted on the collar. A wet blanket covered his knees. His boat was made of eucalyptus, he said, and the turquoise paint on the seats was a week old. “Does the boat have a name?” I asked. “Number Fifty,” he said.

  He steered us carefully through the bay, which was crowded with anchored rowboats. This part of the lake was similar to the northern tip, with turquoise water lapping against a few yards of beach. The dredged area where the canal intersects the lake was several miles away. With no tankers passing, we had a clear view of the sandy shore of the Sinai. All around us, the water was shallow, and you could see the vegetation on the bottom. The farther we got from the fishing boats, the more the lake began to take on a natural, pristine feel. Huge sprouts of marsh grass blossomed from the banks, with cattails swaying like candle flames. The image of Moses in the basket was unavoidable. Regardless of its relevance to the biblical story, Timsah, at least, is a lake with reeds. A fish jumped out of the water and squiggled back in place. It stopped raining.

  “So what kinds of fish do you catch?” I asked Mohammed. “Mostly gray mullet,” he said. “Sometimes perch, or Moses fish.”

  “Moses fish?” I repeated.

  “It’s good to eat,” Mohammed said.

  “I think it’s a kind of flounder,” Avner added.

  As we were speaking the sun slowly broke through the clouds. Quickly the entire feel of the scene changed, as the light filtered through the yellowy grass and filled the air with a saffron glow that when it reflected off the sheen of the water—turquoise and gold—reminded me of Tutankhamen’s mask. Instantly I recalled the sense of power—and fear—I felt upon seeing the mask in the museum. And in so doing I began to see the Exodus in a different light. No matter how oppressive the pharaoh must have seemed to residents of Goshen, for the Israelites, crossing this (or any other) body of water would have been a profoundly frightening experience, akin to what religious refugees must have felt like boarding boats in Europe in the 1600s and sailing for the New World. No matter how full of hope they were, they were still leaving the most civilized place on earth for the most barren. In the case of the Israelites, this meant leaving Egypt behind for the desert. They were “going forth” from a world they knew to a world that didn’t yet exist based solely on the word of a god they’d never actually seen. Perhaps no one since Abraham could understand the depth of faith that required.

  And in sensing the mix of anxiety and awe, I felt an emotion I hadn’t experienced since my earliest days in Turkey. It was the feeling of the land reaching up to touch me, elbowing aside my preconceived views of the Bible as a sterile collection of stories set in places I couldn’t see, involving characters I couldn’t relate to, experiencing desires I didn’t have. What emerged instead was a vibrant view of the Bible as a collection of living tableaux, set in actual places, involving genuine people, experiencing the most basic of human desires: the longing to live in a place, with their own beliefs and their own aspirations.

  Before coming to Egypt, I had been somewhat apologetic about this leg of our trip. I would travel down the Nile in search of Joseph; I would visit the pyramids and the land of Goshen; but I didn’t expect to find much directly related to the Bible. Now I realized more than ever that you can’t understand the Bible without understanding Egypt. The text itself seems
to hint at this connection. Joseph could simply have lived in Egypt. Instead he rose to prime minister. Moses could have been raised in any household. Instead he grew up in the pharaoh’s. From the use of dreams with Joseph, to the importance of the Nile to Moses, Egyptian motifs fill the Pentateuch and lend a geographic—and cultural—balance to the Mesopotamian themes that dominate the early chapters of Genesis. Even the story of the parting of the Red Sea has an Egyptian antecedent. During the reign of Snefru, the father of the king who built the Great Pyramid, the pharaoh one day convened a rowing party. A young woman dropped a brooch into the Nile and became inconsolable, so the pharaoh summoned a magician who separated the waters, reached to the dry ground, and retrieved the brooch. The waters soon returned to normal.

  Like many, I suspect, I’d always thought of Egypt in the Bible as being the adversary, the wicked tyrant of the west. Now I’d come to see that that view was too narrow. Egypt, like Mesopotamia, was a powerful empire that the Israelites first had to understand and cohabitate with; later they could draw ideas from it; later still they could supplant it. In effect, the Israelites were taking the best elements of each belief system they encountered along their journey and combining them with their own notion of a universal God to create a new pan–Near Eastern religion that could therefore become the dominant creed of the Fertile Crescent.

  And maybe it was appreciation at having made that discovery; maybe it was the sense that I had touched the two outer wings of the biblical narrative and was now on my way to the desert core, the place where the people finally receive their blessing; or maybe it was relief at having persevered through a trying day (and the antagonism of Ahmed and Yasser), but as I sat on the water that afternoon, listening to the gulls, smelling the salt, I felt something inside of me suddenly open up that I didn’t even know was closed. I felt a quiet snap of release, like a door clicking open in the middle of the night, beckoning me to a place I’d always been afraid to go. So when Mohammed mentioned that he rowed to this spot every day trawling for Moses fish, I felt myself giving in to the emotion.

  “So what do you know about Moses?” I said.

  “He was a prophet, wasn’t he?” the boy said.

  “Yes, he’s the one who split the sea,” I said. “Do you think you can do that for us?”

  Mohammed smiled and tugged a little harder. “Sorry,” he said, “that’s a miracle.” And for the first time since I started the trip, I felt myself start to cry.

  1. A Land of Fiery Snakes and Scorpions

  Light. The first thing you notice about the desert is the light. It’s a white light, bleached across the horizon, that bounces off the blue helmet of sky, picks up the glint of quartz in the sand, and washes out everything in its sight. The desert may be defined by the absence of rain, but a watercolor painting of the place would have far more water than color.

  The second thing you notice about the desert is the space. The panorama is almost overwhelming, with sand blowing across the ground, bushes bent against the wind, and everywhere rocks, mesas, dunes, and mountains. Montana may be Big Sky country, but the Sinai is Big Land country. One almost needs wide-angle vision to take it all in, and even that’s not enough. Stand facing the Sinai from the Suez Canal, as I did with Avner in early spring, having returned to begin the next leg of our trip, retracing the Exodus through what the Bible calls “that great and terrible wilderness,” and two eyes are not enough to take in the scene; two arms are not enough to embrace it. The Sinai would diminish any crowd.

  The last thing you notice about the desert is the noise. In preparing for this part of our journey, I steeled myself for the silence. The desert would surely feel isolated, an island of seclusion. But once I stepped into the open terrain I was amazed by the din—the wind whining through the mountains, the sand tinkling against your face, the rocks crunching beneath your feet. As Jim Crace wrote in Quarantine, a retelling of Jesus’ stay in the desert, no wild land is ever truly silent. “Earth collapses with the engineering of the ants; lizards smack the pebbles with their tails; the sun fires seeds in salvos from their pods; pigeons misconnect with dry branches; and stones, left loosely to their own devices, can find the muscle to descend the hill.” The desert may be empty, but it’s the least quiet place I’ve ever been.

  And the most alluring.

  From the moment I crossed the Suez and set foot in the Sinai I felt a sense of exhilaration. It was partly the openness of the place, partly its inhospitality. It was partly the feeling of anticipation after the changes I marked in Egypt. But mostly it was the feeling of being drawn to the land. Having passed, at least in spirit, through the congested histories of Mesopotamia, Canaan, and Egypt, I understood even more the importance of the Sinai to the Bible, to the need of the Israelites to shed the skins of other cultures and start growing one of their own. The desert destroys affectation; it demands authenticity. The Sinai, in particular, poised between Africa and Asia, compels a certain clarity. Come with a vague sense of identity; leave with a deeper sense of self. If God knew this, as the Bible suggests, he may, indeed, have known everything.

  The importance of discovery hits one almost immediately in the Sinai, if for no other reason than it’s impossibly easy to get lost, even for a onetime resident like Avner, who from 1967 to 1982 was the chief archaeologist of the Sinai. As we started our trip, accompanied by a new driver, Yusuf, a reed-thin Nubian from Aswan with Dagwood hair and a constant smile, we were disoriented at once. We were heading south on a two-lane, coastal highway from Lake Timsah, looking for Ain Musa, the Spring of Moses, believed to be the Israelites’ first stop in the desert. The narrow strip of blacktop was mostly barren, with a few budding resorts popping out of the sand: Queen Beach, Banana Beach, Mykonos. The resorts were just road signs and empty shells at the moment, part of Egypt’s nascent effort to turn the Sinai, one of the most desolate peninsulas in the Middle East, into a Club Med–style paradise. We drove into a few of the abandoned complexes and even skirted the shore, in a vain attempt to find someone to ask for directions. Finally we were ready to give up and turn south, when we spotted a few palm trees on the horizon, a cartoon vision of a mirage.

  The Spring of Moses is one of about four hundred oases in the Sinai. A compact area about the size of a baseball diamond, the oasis is little more than a cluster of trees—mostly palms, with a few eucalyptuses and tamarisks—huddled around a spring. The landscape seems random, as if the palms had been dropped from the sky. They protrude from odd angles, jut, swoop, lean, and prod. Some are dense with fronds, like one of those sponge brushes used to clean drinking glasses. Others look like tired feather dusters. Many are barren, with their tops decapitated in one of the Sinai’s recent wars. An Israeli battery stationed at the oasis bombed the Suez Canal during the War of Attrition between 1967 and 1970. Even the palm trees here have a past.

  We got out of the jeep with our Bibles and sat on the stump of a tamarisk tree facing the Suez Canal. After they cross the Sea of Reeds, an event described in Exodus 14, the Israelites briefly celebrate by chanting the Song of Miriam, widely regarded as one of the oldest pieces of text in the Bible. “I will sing to the Lord, for He has triumphed gloriously;/Horse and driver He has hurled into the sea./The Lord is my strength and might;/He is become my salvation.” Then the Israelites set out into the “wilderness of Shur.” After three days they arrive at a place called Marah, where the water is too bitter to drink. When the people complain, God points Moses toward a piece of wood, which he tosses into the water, making it sweet. Having performed this miracle, God promises the Israelites that if they obey him, he will protect them from the desert. He then leads them to Elim, where there are twelve springs of water and seventy palm trees. Tradition holds that Ain Musa is one of these two sites, an identification helped by the fact that the water here is strongly malodorous and works as a laxative—bitter by any definition. “There certainly are seventy palm trees,” I said, to which Avner replied, “Would you care to count?”

  As with many places
in the Sinai, the absence of evidence hardly matters, as modern visitors have decided these sites are the ones mentioned in the text. As we were sitting, a tour bus rolled up and fifty South Koreans disembarked, said a quick prayer by the spring, and prepared to re-embark. “This is the site of Marah,” the minister explained, when I asked him why he had come. Moments later a van full of American college students appeared and repeated the ritual. Their professor was less confident. “I don’t worry about assigning places,” he said. “In the end it doesn’t matter whether they took the northern route, the central route, or the southern route. What matters is that they were here.” Minutes later, a carload of Frenchwomen arrived. “Who cares if the Israelites were actually here?” one woman said. “We’re here because it’s biblical!”

  We piled back in the jeep and headed south. Outside its few resort towns, the Sinai is essentially empty, sixty thousand bedouin in an area the size of Ireland. As a result, there are only a handful of paved roads, and those are vulnerable to flash floods. One shifts instead among two-lane highways, dirt causeways, dried riverbeds, and open terrain. Because of this variety, each all-terrain vehicle must be a veritable Pullman-style sleeper, capable of surviving for days on end with the help of pillows, cushions, cans of tuna fish and okra, raw onions, extra water tanks, and garishly colored blankets that looked like beach towels from Atlantic City. In our case, the only thing we didn’t have in ample supply was cassette tapes. Yusuf had only one: a Bob Marley collection called Exodus. For months afterward if anyone mentioned the word Sinai in conversation, I would instinctively repeat the reggae lyric, “Movement of the people!”