by Bruce Feiler
Ahmed decided to move, and chose this spot because it was high enough that it would not be imperiled in a flash flood. He marked the area, laid out the walls, and brought a builder to help construct it. He built a foundation of limestone, on top of which he placed cement, which he purchased in forty sacks from the city and mixed with water from the well.
“It’s become more and more expensive to build in the open valley, away from the cities,” he said. “A house like this costs two thousand Egyptian pounds,” or about $750.
Every house has the character of the person who designed it, I suggested. How did his house reflect his character?
“In the old days, when my father was young, there were no houses. Only tents. Tents meant moving from place to place. They were not a stable place to stay:Today you were here, tomorrow you were there. But now you have a stable, sturdy place. I think we are a more stable people.”
“But is that bedouin?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “Being bedouin is not about moving all the time. It’s about being open to nature. It’s about being open to people. Look at this house. It’s open. In the morning and the night it is open. In the summer and the winter it is open. We are always open.”
“So what feature of this house are you most proud of ?” I asked.
He chuckled. “Maybe you understand,” he said. “If you have such a house, your wife is pleased, so you are pleased. I think it’s the same everywhere you go.”
We spent the night on the floor of Ahmed’s second room, and the following morning lingered over a traditional bedouin breakfast—bread, cheese, honey, tea. They seemed not to favor canned tuna; or maybe we had depleted the Sinai’s reserves. Either way, by the time we viewed the inscriptions of the Written Stone, which early scholars also attempted to attribute to the Israelites (although its inscriptions turn out to date from much later), it was nearing noon. We were late getting started for a daylong hike that Avner said might be an elaborate detour, but proved to be an unexpected looking glass through which to catch a glimpse of ancient Israel.
While he was chief archaeologist of the Sinai, Avner initiated a variety of projects. Many involved excavating and restoring known archaeological sites like Serabit el-Khadim, the pharaonic temple near the turquoise mines. A few involved preserving historical sites like Saint Catherine’s. On one occasion, though, he discovered a site of such profound historical and archaeological importance that it not only challenged conventions about the Bible and the ancient Near East, but also raised provocative questions about the course of human evolution.
The discovery almost never happened. One day some bedouin whom Avner knew in the area came to him and announced, “We have found this magical place.” With the bedouin, of course, this could have meant almost anything—a mountain, an oasis, a cave—but Avner knew enough to follow their hunch, and the place they led him to proved to be an unknown gem of early man, overlooked by hundreds of years of explorers. Petrie, the great Egyptologist, had been two hundred yards away, but had never made it to the cliffs overlooking an isolated plateau. It’s possible the bedouin knew of the site for decades but waited to tell someone they trusted. By the time we arrived, I could understand their protectiveness. Even after weeks of inaccessible sites, this was one of the more inaccessible. The terrain had a dusting of chipped stone, like burnt almonds, similar to the ground around the matzevah. In late afternoon, the sky had a pearl sheen to it, like the inside of a shell, light along the horizon, darker on the top.
As we approached, nothing appeared distinctive about the site. But once we climbed up the small cliff, a remarkable scene unfolded, with two dozen round huts, like stone igloos, spread out over an area the size of two football fields. Each hut was about shoulder high, constructed with overlapping slabs of sandstone, with an open mouth like a doghouse. The sides were constructed with corbeled stones that supported a stone roof. From afar, each shack looked like a giant hamburger, or, more accurately, the contents of a can of tuna. I had never seen anything like them.
Nor had anyone else, it turns out. The bedouin name for these constructions, which were duplicated in several nearby sites, was nawamis, which means mosquitoes. The bedouin told Avner they were constructed by the Israelites during the Exodus when they needed a place to escape the mosquitoes. Excavation, however, revealed that the nawamis were far older, from the mid-fourth millennium B.C.E., a thousand years earlier than the pyramids, and 2,500 years before the Israelites passed anywhere close. The nawamis are now considered the oldest structures with intact roofs ever found on earth, perfectly preserved remnants of a six-thousand-year-old culture that may represent the world’s first pastoral society.
The purpose of these structures, Avner and his team concluded, was not residential, but funereal. Since pastoral tribes never stayed in one place for very long, members temporarily buried their loved ones in the desert where they died. The tribe would then return the following year to claim the bones and move them to a permanent burial spot. These bones were then interred in the nawamis in family groupings, along with ostrich-egg jewelry, small jugs of oil, and other household items. The deceased would have needed these commodities, Avner said, because the afterlife was considered a physical continuation of life on earth. Six thousand years later, the bedouin continue to honor the memory of the deceased: During Avner’s excavation, his workers refused to enter the tombs.
We did enter, though. Avner went first, and I followed. As with the hermit’s cave on Jebel Musa, I had to back in, squeezing my backside in first, then my torso and head, and finally my legs. The ground was sandy inside and the space barely large enough for two men to sit cross-legged. The construction was remarkably tight, and may have been waterproof had there been any water. As it was, almost no light seeped through the cracks in the layered stone walls or roof. The structure could have been on the cover of an Architectural Digest special issue, “Best Buildings Before Buildings Were Invented.”
Once inside, when my heart stopped racing, Avner began to explain how discovering the nawamis had changed his view of ancient history and, in turn, the Bible. As a student at university, he said, he had learned that evolution was a largely linear process, with mankind progressing from nomadic hunter-gatherers to settled, farming populations around the time of the agricultural revolution about eleven thousand years ago. This was true, he noted, for all areas where populations had regular access to water and could raise crops. Some areas of the world, though, were only semiarid at the time; they could support grasses and other vegetation, but not large-scale cultivation. In succeeding millennia, because of climatic changes, these areas became deserts. In the Near East, people who were obliged to live in these areas—usually because they were denied access to urban communities, or because they never learned how to farm—were forced to develop alternate means of survival. The easiest way was to learn to raise animals in the desert, usually goats, and trade the by-product, wool, with the settled areas in return for provisions.
“For the first time in the history of mankind,” Avner continued, “there was this split among people. There was a society of farmers; there was a society of pastoralists. This view goes against the theory that evolution in society is linear.”
Each group related to the environment in different ways. As Avner summed up the divergence: “Those in agricultural areas used technology to change the world around them. They changed it by plowing, seeding, planting, domesticating animals. The strategy of the pastoralists was to adapt themselves to the environment. That’s why all their tombs face east, for example, to get warm as early as possible in the morning.”
Also, they developed strong tribal bonds—bonds that can still be seen in desert cultures of today. “I don’t know if I ever told you,” Avner said, “but when I was in the Sinai, we made a documentary about the bedouin legal system. We asked one person to play the judge, and another the judged. One man volunteered to play the criminal, and we asked, ‘What ill have you done?’ He said, ‘I approached a gir
l while she was grazing goats.’ ‘And what did you do?’ we asked. Well, he didn’t hug her, or rape her, or anything. He asked her to make him tea!”
The point was, Avner said, the man had embarrassed his family by his action. He had behaved in a non-bedouin way: being selfish at the expense of customary rules for interaction. “When you live in the desert,” Avner said, “there is no way to guarantee that once you leave your community, no one will come steal your animals, or stab you. But no one will do that, because that bedouin is not alone. Even though he’s physically walking alone, he’s under a huge umbrella of his brothers, his uncles, his nephews. He’s in the middle of a pyramid of five generations. If there’s an evil done by anyone, you could endanger not only yourself but the whole group.”
In the end, it’s that quality of desert culture—its community, its stickiness—that is most striking to an outsider, and the most inspiring. It’s also the part of living in the desert that emerges most powerfully from the stories of the Bible. The desert is somehow necessary for the Israelites. Viewing the nawamis offered one powerful reason why. Abraham likely lived his life as a pastoralist, moving from settled areas into unsettled areas and back again in a never-ending stream. In his case the settled areas were not always the same—he spent time in, among others, Ur, Harran, Shechem, Beer-sheba, and Gerar—but the basic outlines of his life were pastoralist, involving herds, tents, and grazing conflicts with the settled communities. (Some scholars use the term pastoral nomads to describe the patriarchs, since their lifestyle includes some element of nomadism—linear wandering—with the seasonal migration patterns of pastoralists.) Isaac and Jacob follow similar paths.
With Joseph, though, and his offspring, the Israelites become fully settled in Egypt. After their escape, but before they are allowed to settle their own society, God forces them to spend forty years—two generations—in the desert, moving in a cycle of wandering and settling that are also clearly pastoralist in nature. By forcing the Israelites to pass through this phase, God, in essence, interrupts the linear flow of evolution, reversing the Israelites’ seemingly inexorable rise to nationhood, and making them revisit—and reclaim—some of the wisdom of their desert forefathers.
This act of reconnecting with the past, I was starting to realize, is largely what I was undergoing on my trip through the desert as well. I was wriggling free from the firm grip of modern life and inching toward something else, something more instinctive and untaught. I was breaking away from modes of thought I had used since I was a teenager—reason, skepticism, logic, learning—and moving toward modes of relating to the world—emotion, intuition, trust—that I probably hadn’t relied on so much since I was a child. In doing so, I felt myself slide farther away from the rigid, controlled person I was at the beginning of this process. I was less of an upright wooden chair, to use the local vernacular, and more of a roll-out carpet. I was conforming to the land.
I could see this change in how I related to the text. In the early months I was consumed with the factual foundations of the stories—Near Eastern mythology, land routes from Egypt to Mesopotamia. Then I moved toward trying to understand the power of the stories, the motivation of the characters, and their evolving relationship with God. Now I was in a different place entirely. I was much more interested in trying to grasp the underlying, raw human emotion involved in being in a stark place, confronting the limitations of one’s upbringing, and trying to forge a new identity in the midst of a difficult, transforming journey. Understanding this transition—which, after all, lies at the heart of the Five Books of Moses—required, for me at least, a new approach. I couldn’t quantify whatever I learned; I couldn’t prove it, or even document it. I could only feel it, and hope that by experiencing it myself—however superficially—I might reach some deeper insight into the story.
Yet as comfortable—and as natural—as this process felt, I could only wonder how long it would last. Would I succumb to city life once I returned home? Would I forget what happened to me in the desert? Would I forget what happened to the Israelites? This anxiety, I realized, is yet another reason to be thankful for the Bible: It serves as a living testament to the Israelites’ life in the desert, to their struggles with the Almighty that took place there, and to the covenant of laws they received there. In performing this function, the Bible serves as a sort of universal literary moonrock—a souvenir of the desert that allows each of us to feel as if we’ve touched it ourselves. Readers of the Bible may not be able to visit the desert themselves, but by embracing its stories, they have tangible evidence of the power of the wilderness as a spiritual foundry.
To be sure, there is an element of romance in this view—that experiencing the desert can offer spiritual guidance to residents of settled areas. But one thing I learned during my trip was never to underestimate the power of the desert to serve as a metaphor, not just to people who are born in it, but even more to people who are not—people like retired Irishman Jerry Bracken, Father Justin, Avner, or even me. Before we left the nawamis, I asked Avner if he would like to be buried in one of these tombs. He thought for a second, then said, “Sure. I would love to be among these people. I’d love to be forever in the Sinai.”
By the time we emerged from the tomb, evening had set, and I had that disorienting feeling one has upon going into a movie theater during daylight and emerging after dark. It was as if we’d missed some moment of transition and were left in a breach. “Excuse me, what millennium is it?”
We started down the hill to the place where we had arranged to meet Yusuf, when we noticed another jeep speeding across the desert floor, sliding back and forth like a water-skier, in that way desert drivers have of not getting bogged down in the sand. The jeep came skidding to a stop not far from where we were standing, and a bedouin driver jumped out. He was shorter than some of the men we had met, and more highly strung. He had a tight red-checked kaffiyeh wrapped around his head and no shoes. “Abunar!” he cried. “Abunar!”
“Ramadan!” Avner echoed. “Ramadan!”
The two men sprinted toward each other and embraced, kissing three times on the cheeks and holding each other’s hands like schoolgirls. A few minutes passed and they kissed again, as if to convince themselves they were actually together. Eventually, introductions were made. Ramadan had been the guard and chief aide-de-camp Avner employed to watch over the nawamis during the five-year excavation. He had been like an older brother to Avner’s two children, Smadar and Ido, and Avner, in turn, had been like a father to him.
In no time the two had rerouted our schedule; instead of spending our last night in the Sinai outdoors, we would spend it with Ramadan and his family. We drove across the desert, met up with Yusuf, and made our way to a small bedouin community located at the junction of two dried riverbeds. This village was more organized than the one in which we had spent the previous night, and the houses sturdier. Ramadan led us through a small gate and a yard cluttered with chickens and discarded tires. His house was smaller than Ahmed’s, but more elaborate. The main living area was about the size of a crowded hospital room. Assorted mats and blankets covered the floor, making it look like a Mondrian painting; a fabric decorated with gray whales was draped like a canopy from the ceiling in a manner reminiscent of a bedouin tent. The walls were equally ornate, in a teenage bedroom sort of way. One wall was painted with fake flowers and a giant pheasant. Another had a painting of an elk in front of snow-covered mountains. The biggest wall was covered with six dime-store posters of plump infants with slogans like “Delicious” and “I Feel Cold.” Why these babies? I asked. “Everybody loves children,” Ramadan said.
By far the dominant, and most surprising, feature in the room was a twenty-inch color television set, the first Avner had ever seen in a bedouin home. Less than a year old, the set received only two Egyptian channels, but coupled with radio reception, it had created quite a stir. Ramadan said he watched television six hours a day and listened to radio twelve hours a day. As he was demonstrating the televis
ion, his sister arrived, dressed far more elegantly than other bedouin women we had seen, in a shimmering purple and maroon robe. She said, “When he goes to bed he switches from TV to radio.” She rolled her eyes to indicate her frustration. The two of them, together with their mother, his wife, and their child, all slept in this one room. When the sister, and later the mother, joined the edges of our gathering, and especially when the sister said that she had found work outside the home, I realized we were seeing that moment of transition when the bedouin meet the world. Did that mean, for them, that the desert had lost its appeal? After dinner around a communal plate of rice, lentils, and bread, I asked Ramadan that question.
“I like to have electricity,” he said. “I like to have television. But I wouldn’t like to have all the chaos of the city. I wouldn’t want to have all the tall buildings. I like the desert.”
What did he like about it?
“First is the sun, which is always here and always reaches the ground. There is no pollution. Second is the wind. Third is the environment, the mountains, the trees.”
“What about water?”
“Water is not a problem. Now we get water from a government cistern.”
“So can someone like me, who grew up in the city, learn to love the desert?”
“Everybody has a spirit, a dream, of being calm and quiet, at peace with himself,” Ramadan said. He was seated at this point on the edge of his room, with the rest of us gathered in a small circle. In the middle was a ceramic stove, an electric campfire, on which he was boiling a kettle of tea as beat-up as the one from the previous night. The intensity I had noticed earlier only grew as he spoke in slow sentences, running his fingers over his lips as if drawing out every word.