by Bruce Feiler
Equally stunning is that today, three thousand years after the events on Mount Sinai, the legacy of that encounter still manages to thrive on a mountain in the southern Sinai peninsula. In the Bible, Mount Sinai is a physical place that serves as a spiritual emblem. Jebel Musa, regardless of its archaeological pedigree, is the same thing, a physical place that serves as a spiritual symbol. That symbolism is only deepened by the layers of devotion that enshroud the mountain: the monastery at the base, the hermit caves on the side, the chapel on the summit. And perhaps it’s those shrines, perhaps the memory of Moses, or perhaps the lingering presence of God, but the place does have a spirit. It’s the spirit of the people who came here, struggled to survive, and managed to find a way to believe.
And deep into my trip now, I realized that spirit was unlocking something within me, something that I hadn’t even known existed. It was the feeling of the land reaching up to me that I first felt in Turkey. It was the feeling of myself reaching out to the land that I first felt in Karnak Temple. It was the feeling that the spirit in the places and the spirit in me were somehow colluding with one another to circumvent my better judgment and bring me to an entirely different place, a place that seemed, if nothing else, beyond my control. Where was this place?
At the moment, standing on that mountain, staring out at what a pilgrim once called the “sea of petrified waves,” I had no idea. I also, for the first time, felt any fear of that place drift away. I watched, instead, oddly comforted, as the sun set behind me and the shadow of the mountain stretched out before me, drawing slowly, slowly, over the cliffs, onto the sand, and finally to the water’s edge, pointing ever so slightly toward the northeast, and to the promise to come.
1. Wandering
First, you get thirsty. You wake up thinking about water. You go to bed thinking about water. You walk, talk, and eat thinking about water. You dream of water. You wonder, “Do I have enough water?”“Am I drinking enough water?”“Where is the water?” But you stay calm. You know water. You know how much water you need. Twelve liters a day. Or is that thirteen? And what if it’s hot? Does that mean more? What if it’s windy, does that mean less? Just drink. Drink when you’re thirsty. Drink when you’re not thirsty. Because “If you’re thirsty, it’s too late.” And you’re thirsty. So that’s bad. But you know yourself. And you know water. So you tell yourself, “I can go longer than most people.” But you’re wrong. Everybody needs water. Needs it now. Go wandering in the desert, for days, weeks, or forty years at a time, and water becomes the most important thing, the only thing. Water becomes life. Becomes salvation. “The fountain of wisdom is a flowing stream,” says the Proverbs. “With thee is the fountain of life,” adds the Psalms. Or, as God puts it, in Isaiah 55, “Oh, all you who thirst, come to the waters . . . incline your ear and come to me.”
Next, you get hungry. And you stay hungry. Your first few days in the desert, you have remnants of the city, a bit of chocolate, a cookie, an apple. You eat these in diminishing portions, and with increasing relish. You’ve outwitted the desert. You’ve brought the fleshpots with you. But then the desert wins. That piece of chocolate you’ve been saving melts. The cookie crumbles. The apple rots. You’re left to the ground, which is a cruel resort. You’re left to your provisions. You eat breakfast—bread, cheese, tuna, honey. You eat lunch—honey, tuna, cheese, bread. You eat dinner—the same. Traveling in the desert would be ideal for five-year-olds: Every meal you eat is identical. Inevitably, though, the routine tires. The sameness grates. It’s then, as with water, that food becomes more. It becomes metaphor. “They asked, and he brought them quail,” says the Psalms, “and he gave them bread from heaven.” Food, like water, becomes a way to salvation. As Philo notes, “The soul is fed not with things of the earth, which are perishable, but with such words as God shall have poured like rain out of that supernal and pure region of life to which the prophet has given the title of ‘heaven.’ ”
Finally, you get tired. You get tired of the heat. You get tired of the cold. But mostly you get tired of the sand. Sand is relentless. It goes through your shoes, through your socks, and lodges in between your toes. It seeps through your pants, through your underwear, and gloms on to places it ought never to see. It penetrates your windbreaker, gets under your shirt, and sticks to anything with hair. It infiltrates your food, sticks onto your teeth, and passes eventually into your stomach. And as a result, whenever you expel anything from your body, it comes with a blasting of sand. Sand in the desert is like rain in Britain: Sometimes it storms, sometimes it sprinkles, but most of the time it just hangs in the air and waits for you to walk into it. Thus, sand, like water and food, becomes cause for misery. And out of this agony comes meaning. “The wilderness is the most miserable of all places,” the sages said. “Having received the Torah there, Israel could take it to the deprived of the earth, and from lowliness ascend to the heights.” Who preserves the Torah? the sages asked. “He who makes himself like the desert: set apart from the world.”
Spend enough time in the desert, and you begin to see that nothing is quite what it seems to be. Water becomes wisdom. Food becomes salvation. And sandstorms become poetry. Everything, in other words, becomes grist for allegory. As Moses tells the Israelites near the end of their journey: “Remember the long way that the Lord your God has made you travel in the wilderness these past 40 years, that he might test you by hardships to learn what was in your hearts.” Today, almost three thousand years since those words were written, the appeal of the desert remains the same. By its sheer demands—thirst, hunger, misery—it asks a simple question: “What is in your heart?” Or, put another way, “In what do you believe?”
Those questions would dominate the last half of our trip, as they dominate the last half of the Pentateuch. The final three Books of Moses—Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy—tell the story of the forty years the Israelites spend in the desert following their receiving of the Ten Commandments. These books contain far less narrative than Genesis and Exodus and far more discourse on how to behave. Leviticus is given over entirely to a seemingly interminable litany of laws covering such topics as how long a woman must remain segregated after giving birth—seven days for a boy; two weeks for a girl—to how one should dispose of a bull after sacrificing it to the Lord:“The priest shall remove all the fat from the bull: the fat that covers the entrails and all the fat that is about the entrails; the two kidneys and the fat that is on them; and the protuberance on the liver, which he shall remove with the kidneys. The priest shall turn them into smoke on the altar of burnt offering.” But the hide of the bull, it continues, “and all its flesh, as well as its head and legs, entrails and dung, he shall carry to a clean place outside the camp, to the ash heap, and burn it up with wood.”
The Bible, in other words, which contains some of the most moving narrative passages in the history of literature, suddenly slows to a dead stop, a filibuster of legislative minutiae. As commentator Everett Fox has written:“It is as if a history of the American Revolution contained all of the debates on and drafts of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, as well as accounts of battles and biographies of key personalities.” That such an approach parallels neither Homeric epic nor other ancient texts is precisely the point, Fox concludes. “We have here a new genre of great complexity and richness, in which narratives exemplify laws and laws follow narratives. The result is truly a torah, a ‘teaching’ or ‘instruction.’ ”
The narrative resumes in Numbers as the Israelites depart Mount Sinai and begin the long trek toward the Promised Land. Our plan on this leg was to follow this path by moving north from Jebel Musa into the central zone of the Sinai, the so-called Wandering Plateau, before proceeding into the Negev. We left Jebel Musa at dawn and began our gradual drive northeast. The mountains, bulging like potato sacks, began to thin and shorten a bit. The big sky returned, once more dominating the landscape like one of those children’s drawings with sky and clouds covering most of the page and a thin line of
ground along the bottom. Close to midday now, and several hours from Saint Catherine’s, we pulled to a stop on a charred plateau just off the highway. Small pieces of flint covered the ground like debris cast off from the carving of an oversized sculpture. Avner picked up a piece, which was smooth on the top and sharp on the edges, like an arrowhead. He tossed it about twenty-five yards toward the open terrain. It landed with a tinkle and came to a stop. “See anything special there?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“Look again.”
Stepping forward, I began to detect a gathering of large, standing stones emerging out of the landscape like a family of deer materializing out of the brush. The five stones averaged about six feet tall, with the middle one slightly taller, and were arranged in a half circle like basketball players waiting for the tip-off. The effect was like Stonehenge, only smaller. “This is a cult corner,” Avner explained. “It’s probably a sacrificial site for people who buried their dead nearby.” But for our purposes, he said, it’s even more important. These stones are what the Bible calls matzevah (or matzevot, in the plural), which translations refer to as stelae or pillars. They appear in various places throughout the Bible and embody one of the more vexing struggles in the biblical narrative: the battle between monotheism and paganism.
The delivery of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai has always been understood as the crowning achievement of monotheism, the final sealing of the bond between the people of Israel and their God. But like all matters related to the Bible, the truth is not that simple. As many commentators have noted, a close reading of the text suggests there were two principal phases in the development of Israelite religion: the patriarchal phase and the Mosaic phase. In the first phase, the patriarchs most likely viewed their god, Elohim, as being similar to El, the primary god of Canaan, who appears to the patriarchs as a friend and sometimes even assumes human form.
The God of Moses, by contrast, whom the text refers to as Yahweh, is a much more violent and stormy deity, who appears in the guise of smoke, fire, and lightning. While the God of Abraham destroys the city of Sodom, the God of Moses reaps havoc on the entire country of Egypt, later gives the Israelites permission to do the same in Canaan, and in between is forever threatening to vanquish the Israelites and begin anew with a different people. Several times he exacts a demanding purge on his own chosen people.
There is another change from the patriarchs to Moses. Whereas Genesis makes no mention of tensions between the patriarchs and their neighbors over religion, Exodus explicitly says that God is in competition with other gods. With the plagues, for example, the war on paganism becomes paramount, as God promises to mete out punishment to the “gods of Egypt.” This conflict is deeply embedded in the Ten Commandments, which clearly assume the presence of other gods. As God states:“You shall have no other gods beside Me. You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them.” There would be no need for this commandment if this practice were not common at the time.
Even the shema, the holiest words in Judaism and what one commentator calls “the great text of monotheism,” seems to imply that other gods exist. The traditional translation is “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God. The Lord is One.” But the words, which come from Deuteronomy 6, are considered vague by Bible scholars and are often translated today as “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.” God, the words suggest, should stand apart and above other gods, meaning he is the superior god but not the only god.
The ever-shifting interaction between the God of Israel and the gods of neighboring cultures is embodied by the matzevot, the standing stones. The ones we were viewing date from the fourth millennium B.C.E., but the Bible uses them later, during the time of the patriarchs. In Genesis, after Jacob has the dream in which he sees the angels on the ladder, he erects a matzevah. “And this stone, which I have set up as a pillar, shall be God’s abode.” He repeats the gesture later, when God renews his promise to bestow the Promised Land to Jacob and his descendants. “And Jacob set up a pillar at the site where He had spoken to him, a pillar of stone, and he offered a libation on it and poured oil upon it.” In these stories, Avner noted, the stones mark a holy location, a sort of notarization of the communication between God and Jacob.
“Isn’t this pagan?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t say that. I would say that this is part of a language used by all the people of the Mediterranean. Therefore it appeared in the Bible.”
“But these stones are essentially the land,” I said. “These are rocks. That’s the ground. And they become symbolic of God. That’s pagan, isn’t it?”
“Yeessss,” he said, tentatively.
“Isn’t the whole point of the Ten Commandments ‘Don’t make graven images of God’? Leviticus explicitly warns against constructing matzevot.”
“That’s why in the text it never says that such stelae should represent God. But the reality is, sometimes they did, even after the Ten Commandments were given.”
“So as a practical matter,” I said, “these matzevot are a transitional step between paganism, which said that God existed in the rock, to something more abstract, which said that God needs no representation.”
“You must remember,” Avner said, “monotheism went one step beyond the existing understanding of God, but it didn’t change the whole concept of daily life: that the world was created out of water, that it was created in a certain order, that a flood followed. Those details show that certain features were shared across the area by all people of the region. So the Israelites, even when they became monotheistic, did not pull themselves out of the world entirely. They were part of the world. They just trumped the world with the larger idea of God.”
As he spoke, I began to realize how much conversations like this had altered my view of the Bible. On the one hand, they shattered a host of childhood myths I still clung to about the story—that Noah put all the animals into the ark, that hundreds of thousands of Israelites crossed the Red Sea, that the patriarchs believed in only one God. On the other hand, those myths were being replaced with new ideas, far more complex, but no less compelling. If anything, this new framework made the Bible more intriguing to me as an adult. Flood stories exist in many cultures; the Bible simply recast its version to include God’s disappointment with humanity. The Exodus may have involved a smaller number of people and occurred over a longer period of time, but its historical significance is in no way diminished by this fact; and its literary significance may even be magnified. Dispelling childhood illusions may have been painful, but discovering adult nuances can be palliative—even restorative. I didn’t have to feel juvenile, or willfully naive, to be interested in the Bible. I could embrace it as a sign of health—and maturity.
This was nowhere more true than with the issue of the Israelites and their monotheistic God. “One of the things I’ve taken away from this whole endeavor,” I said to Avner, “is that the Bible is not a direct line: the triumph of the Israelites, the rise of monotheism. Instead, it’s one step forward, two steps back. Three steps forward, two steps back.”
“True for today as well.”
“But why?” I said. “Why was it so hard to accept the notion of an abstract God?”
“Because you have to be capable of having such an abstract notion and living with it daily. That’s not always so easy. Look at today. In Christianity and Judaism, there are many examples of representations of God: building sculptures of Jesus, putting faxes into the Western Wall. Are you faxing your prayer directly to God?”
“Not necessarily,” I said. “You’re not worshiping the stone. The stone is just the representation of a holy place.”
“Okay, that’s a nice way to put it. So it is with the matzevot. Even monotheism needs its monuments.”
We drove north to the Ain Khudra Valley, a wide, winding former riverbed dominated by a
sandy floor with sheer sandstone walls on either side. The crumbling brown cliffs reminded me of one of those ready-made graham cracker piecrusts. We unloaded at an oasis and decided to hike across the valley floor, eventually climbing up a steep path to visit the Written Stone, a free-standing rock with numerous inscriptions in Nabatean, Greek, and Latin. There we would meet up with our jeep and camp for the evening.
Compared with the mountain air, the atmosphere was thick, filled with heat and dust. Also the glare was more pronounced, as the light bounced off the sand in starbursts. The desert was not only one of the least quiet places I’d ever been but also one of the most alive, with particles leaping and jumping, as if they wanted to transform themselves, kaleidoscope-like, into a different formation. Look long enough at one patch of sand and the effect is like watching an ant colony under a strobe light. Before long, you find yourself asking:“Is it really changing, or am I?”
In time we reached the end of the valley and began climbing the path, which was like a scratch of white on the otherwise sandy cliff face, as if someone had taken a knife and carved an S in the skin of a Bosc pear. This was a camel path, Avner said, as opposed to one for donkeys or goats. Camel paths are less steep because of the animals’ size and deeper because of their weight. Camel dung is also bigger—and lighter—than that of donkeys and goats. When all else fails, follow the camels; they’re blazing superhighways through the sand.
We reached the top and settled onto a rock. It was clear we were now in a transitional area. The granite mountains of the south were behind us; the sandstone cliffs of the center were around us. Soon we would enter a flatland, with few of the extremes in height or climate, but none of the water runoff from the mountains, either. Here was the broad emptiness of the desert; here, for travelers, is the true test of the land.