Walking the Bible

by Bruce Feiler

  Sitting around a small fire underneath an acacia, Ofer explained how he came to live in this outpost. Thirteen years ago, newly married and having traveled around the world after the army, Ofer and his wife wanted to help colonize the Negev, an area that had been mostly ignored in Israel’s early rush to settle the waistline of the country. Ofer and his wife chose this spot, which at the time had two and a half families, because it had water, a well dug by the Turks. “You can live without electricity,” Ofer said. “You can live without people. But you can’t live without water.”

  “And how did you intend to make money?” I asked.

  “We didn’t really know. We lived almost without money.”

  “Really?”

  “The money was not the problem. The problem was we didn’t have a cow, so if we wanted to buy milk it was 110 kilometers,” about seventy miles.

  “You came here without a car?”

  “Oh, no, we had a car, but she broke after one month and we didn’t have money to fix it.”

  “So how did you go shopping?”

  “We walked to the nearest town by foot. We took a bus to Beer-sheba. We shopped, took the bus back, and walked home.”

  “How long did that take?”

  “Three hours each way.”

  I looked at him. “What did your mother say about all this?” I asked.

  He grinned. “Good luck.”

  In time, Ezuz started to grow. Ofer and his wife had two kids. Eight other families moved in. The community flourished as a desert hideaway, a shining village in the sand, with a naturalist, two potters, a philosopher, a French cheesemaker, and Ofer, who started running eco-tours of the region. Didn’t his kids resent not being in the city with easy access to pizza and movies?

  “We recently made a donkey trip for three days with my children and the children of my neighbors,” Ofer said. “We were sitting one night around a fire like this, and one of my boys said to his friends that we were planning to grow the community, to add another twenty families. And my boy said, ‘You know, if our parents are going to continue with this thing, bringing in too many families, I don’t want to stay.’ And his friend said, ‘Yeah, maybe we’ll speak with our parents and we’ll close the town before it becomes a city.’ ”

  “You must have been happy about that,” I said.

  He smiled. “We’ve tried to give them a good life,” he said. “The desert’s a special place. It’s my place.”

  “So where does that come from?” I said. “From history? From your parents? From the Bible?”

  Ofer suddenly got very still, as if he were waiting for the answer to come up through the ground. “The feeling doesn’t come from the Bible,” he said. “But it’s described in the Bible. There is a lot of mysticism around the desert, and around this place especially. The Bible talks about that. But the Bible did not invent it.

  “Look,” he continued, patting the ground. “I don’t want to say that this was the place that Moses walked or slept or talked to God. But I believe Moses was here. Tomorrow you’re going to go to the border, to the place where Moses may have stood and looked over the Promised Land. I see this road seven times in the week, and every time it’s different—because the sun hits it in a different place, because I am in a different mood. And for me it’s always new. I don’t feel this when I go to other places. I feel it only when I’m here.”

  We slept around the campfire that night and when we woke the following morning, the valley was covered in a dense swell of fog. It was like waking in a meringue. Unlike northern Sinai, which is low and flat, this part of the Negev is four hundred feet above sea level and gets over two hundred days of dew a year. “That’s why even desert plants are green,” Avner said. “It’s not the rain, it’s the dew.” Nearby, you could see the symbiosis at work. Dew that collected on the leaves of the acacia would drop to the white broom bushes, then in turn drop to the ground, where little yellow flowers sprung up in a circle like a wreath.

  Slowly, as the sun grew stronger, the fog began to dissipate, revealing a vast, open valley where we’d been sleeping. Six hundred thousand people could have slept here. To help determine whether they did, we were joined over breakfast by the resident naturalist of the area, Doron, the lone bachelor of Ezuz and the “half a family” Ofer had referred to the previous night. An Israeli of Yemeni descent, Doron had dark skin, hardened cheeks, and the kind of stony, impassioned eyes that could stare down an animal peering through the darkness. The symbol of native-born Israelis is the sabra, a prickly pear that’s spiny on the outside and sweet on the inside. Doron was closer to the maktesh, a cracked limestone exterior and a sandstone heart. He, like Ofer, was made of the land.

  Plus a generous helping of rock and roll. Five minutes after arriving, Doron apologized for the quality of his speech. “I’m afraid my speaking is not very good,” he said. “I learned English from the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Stevie Wonder, and Aretha Franklin.”

  “So you must speak city English,” I said. “I don’t think any of those people ever set foot in the desert.”

  Our plan was to drive across the valley and visit an abandoned Israeli military outpost on a mountain that may have been the one Moses used to survey the Promised Land, overlooking the oasis that might have been the one where the Israelites lived for thirty-eight of their forty years in the wilderness. I joined Doron in the front seat of his government-issue jeep, which was equipped with two telephones, several packs of cigarettes, and a copy of the Wayfarer’s Prayer, the one I had heard on the way to Hebron.

  For most of the next few hours we made our way south-southwest over a series of escalating passes, on a succession of deteriorating roads, toward the border with Egypt. Every now and then we’d stop, get out and explore a site, fill a pothole in the road with boulders, or just take a break, before continuing again. At one point Doron slowed the jeep to a stop and pointed to the horizon, where a small family of gazelles—a male, a female, and two calves—was grazing. They looked like they were made of sticks. These were Negev gazelles, Doron explained, able to survive without drinking water, getting all the moisture they needed from plants. “When you say desert, the usual interpretation is that it’s an empty place, with no life,” he said. “But in this desert, it’s full of life—birds, animals, bugs.”

  I asked him what was the most exciting animal life he’d seen, and he told me the story of tracking the rare Negev leopard. Recently, the radio beacon Doron and his colleagues had placed around the neck of one of the leopards broadcast from the same place for forty-eight hours. They went to see her, and found her dead. In her heart was the needle of a porcupine. “Porcupines have a wise strategy for protecting themselves,” he said. “They let the predator run after them for a while, then all of a sudden they stop. The predator—in this case, the leopard—runs right into the needle. When it sticks, the porcupine releases the needle from its body.”

  Doron didn’t act particularly excited when he told this story. He didn’t act excited when he told any story. He had that peace that comes from being comfortable in his own skin. But unlike other confident people I’d known, Doron had a quality I’d noticed elsewhere in the Middle East, in Father Justin, in Avner. It was the feeling of being comfortable across time—in the present, the future, the past. Ground yourself in this part of the world, and you may find yourself sprouting up at any moment from the third millennium B.C.E. to today. It’s as if by following a simple rule of design—broaden the base of an object in order to increase its stability—they had strengthened their lives. Perhaps that’s why time moves more slowly here: When you use ten thousand years ago as your starting point, your life seems awfully short.

  One factor in this equation, of course, is the Bible. When I first set out on this trip, I expected—or at least hoped—to find the Bible in the places that I looked. What I was unprepared for was how easily I found the Bible in the people that I met. Almost all the people I encountered—especially in Israel—carried the biblical stories in
their head like some cornerstone against which they measured their lives. To be sure, not everyone took the same lessons:To some the Bible was a measuring stick of faith, to others character, to others history. But everyone seemed to find a way to relate the stories to his or her own experience. Doron was a particularly unexpected example.

  At one point in the afternoon we pulled over to view an ancient bedouin burial site, similar to the nawamis, only these weren’t buildings but rings of stone that had been untouched in the six thousand years since they were built. A few minutes later, back in the car driving toward the Kadesh-barnea lookout, we passed a homemade stone monument to a motorcycle driver who had been killed on the road. “That’s new!” Doron said, screeching to a stop and going back to inspect it. “It’s only two or three days old. You can still see the oil stain on the road.” As the area’s naturalist, he would have to decide whether to keep the ring of stones, which had been painted fluorescent orange, or remove it. He said he would try to find a way to preserve the memorial, only make it more tasteful. I mentioned that I had never seen so many roadside memorials as I had in Israel, and asked him why.

  “This is a small country,” he said. “The population is getting larger. More people are dying in accidents.”

  “But that doesn’t explain why there are so many memorials.”

  “Jews like memorials,” he said.

  “So is there a connection between a stone memorial built six thousand years ago and one built three days ago?”

  “Sure, it’s the same thing,” he said. “In the Bible, Solomon says, ‘There’s nothing new under the sun.’ ”

  “I thought that was the Beatles,” I said, half joking.

  “If so, they took it from Solomon.”

  “Wait. I can accept that Israel comes from the Bible, that the Ten Commandments come from the Bible, that monotheism comes from the Bible. But the Beatles?!”

  “If you check their songs, their ideas, you’ll find a lot of things from the Bible.” He thought for a second. “Like ‘All You Need Is Love.’ It’s the same thing Rabbi Akiva, the famous sage, said. When he was asked to summarize the Bible in one sentence he said: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ That’s not an exact translation, but it’s similar.”

  For the first time on the entire trip I could think of nothing to say.

  “There’s another song,” Doron said, “on the Abbey Road record, the song before the last. ‘And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.’ Also from the Bible.”

  He went on like this for the next twenty minutes, pulling lyrics from his memory and aligning them to biblical verses. It was the most awesome display I’d yet seen of the Bible’s ability to reinvent itself for every generation. One person’s daily inspirational is another’s Woodstock primer.

  “And another example!” Doron said. “The whole point of the Bible is that you keep reaching for the perfect world but never reach it. It’s like Paul Simon said, ‘The nearer your destination, the more you’re slip-slidin’ away.’ ”

  “You should do a compilation,” I said. “Doron’s Biblical Guide to Pop Music.”

  He beamed.

  “Which reminds me,” I said, “which do you know better: the lyrics of the Beatles or the lyrics of the Bible?”

  Now for the first time he was quiet, before finally adding, “Is it okay if I don’t answer that question?”

  Eventually we emerged from the mountains into a clearing. We were in a wide valley now with soil white like beach sand. To our right and left was a vast, open plain, but up ahead were several small mountains. “Do you see those two breasts,” Doron said, pointing out two hills that rose alongside each other. “They mark the border. The right breast is in Egypt, the left in Israel.”

  We were headed to the hill on the left, the highest point along the border, and the best vantage point to see Ain el-Qudeirat, the northern Sinai spring commonly associated with Kadesh-barnea. Far from a passing reference, Kadesh-barnea is central to the story of the Israelites’ time in the desert and the dominant location in the second half of the Five Books of Moses. Following the rebellion over the quail, the Israelites once again set out in the direction of the Promised Land. Another rebellion ensues, in which Miriam and Aaron, Moses’ siblings, speak out against their brother because “he married a Cushite woman,” an apparent reference to the land of Sudan or Ethiopia, meaning they were upset that the woman was black. God swiftly intervenes, scolding Miriam and Aaron and saying, “Moses is trusted throughout My household.” In further punishment, God inflicts Miriam with “snow-white scales,” or leprosy. Moses appeals for her recovery, but God insists she be exiled for seven days, at which point she is readmitted and the Israelites set out for the wilderness of Paran, an area believed to correspond to the southern Negev.

  For the first time since leaving Egypt, the Israelites are now at the brink of the Promised Land, in a place the Bible refers to as “Kadesh in the wilderness of Paran.” God asks Moses to send a legion of spies to scout out the Promised Land. They return after a little more than a month, saying the land is too strong to conquer, and the Israelites once again rebel, crying, “If only we had died in the land of Egypt, or if only we might die in the wilderness.” It is this act of hostile doubt that prompts God to forbid this generation of Israelites from ever entering the Promised Land. “None of the men who have seen My presence and the signs that I have performed in Egypt and in the wilderness, and who have tried Me these many times and have disobeyed Me, shall see the land that I promised on oath to their fathers.” Your carcasses shall drop in this wilderness, he says, while your children roam the wilderness for forty years. “You shall bear your punishment for 40 years corresponding to the number of days—40 days—that you scouted the land: a year for each day.”

  The Bible implies that the Israelites spend the next thirty-eight years living in this location, which it refers to as Kadesh or Kadesh-barnea. The word kadesh derives from a Hebrew root meaning holiness or separateness; the word barnea is of unknown origin. In part because of the vagueness of this term, and in part because of the inexact description of the place, a precise identification of the location of Kadesh-barnea has been difficult to make. In the nineteenth century, the search for Kadesh-barnea focused on the Jordan valley, since the text suggests the site is on the border of Edom, which was located in the mountains of today’s Jordan. In the early twentieth century, archaeologists focused on locations in the northern Sinai. In 1914, Leonard Woolley, who later excavated Ur, and T. E. Lawrence, then an archaeologist/spy, declared that Kadesh-barnea was Ain el-Qudeirat, the largest water supply in the Sinai and thus the place most likely to be able to support a large population for decades at a time. Their identification has largely been accepted ever since.

  We arrived at the summit of the mountain and disembarked. With the two neighbors—Egypt and Israel—face-to-face on the tallest peaks along the border (2,100 feet), each side built a sentry tower. Later, when the two signed a peace accord, the posts were abandoned, though not dismantled. “It’s a disaster,” Doron said. “These buildings remain to damage nature and nobody cares.” The Israeli site had a run-down steel observatory, which we climbed to get a better view. From the top, the scene was panoramic. To our right we could see the dunes of northern Sinai and the Mediterranean; to our left the mountains of southern Sinai; to our rear much of the Negev. Had Moses stood here, he might have rebelled himself: desert in every direction; no milk or honey for days.

  The only source of green in the area was a small cluster of trees, much smaller than Wadi Feiran, on the other side of a small ridge. “That’s Ain el-Qudeirat,” Avner said.

  “It hardly seems grand,” I said.

  “It’s not like the great oases of the southern Sinai,” he said.

  The most notable feature of the area was the empty plain surrounding the spring. “In the ancient world,” Avner noted, “the road from the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Aqaba went through here. That’s why the modern bor
der is here.” That border, like most in the region, is fraught with intrigue. The Negev side is hilly; the Sinai side is flat. Before World War I, the British, who exercised imperial control over Egypt and the Sinai, drew the border with the Turks. Because the British had done extensive spying in the area, they knew that the chief water supply, Ain el-Qudeirat, was in the hilly area, so the otherwise straight line between the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Aqaba includes two brief detours, which the British referred to as Winston Churchill’s knuckles, after his role in the negotiations.

  The strategic prickliness of the area has hardly diminished since then. Ain el-Qudeirat was the one place on our entire itinerary that we wanted to go but couldn’t. The Egyptian Army refused us access, citing intelligence concerns; the government’s main military post of the region is located near the spring. As it happens, the reason we weren’t allowed to visit—the area’s strategic importance—is one of the principal reasons to doubt the link between this site and the Israelites’ route.

  In the world of biblical studies, the identification of Ain el-Qudeirat as Kadesh-barnea is viewed as a virtual certainty. Almost every article—professional or amateur—that discusses the Israelites’ route through the desert assumes as fact that they lived thirty-eight years in this region. This historical identification, though, is by no means certain. First, the spring, while the largest in the area, is nowhere near large enough to support the needs of six thousand people, no less two million. Second, the original link between Ain el-Qudeirat and Kadesh-barnea was made by Woolley and Lawrence in 1914. It turns out they spent only three days in the area. Subsequent excavations produced not one shred of evidence that the site was occupied between the third millennium B.C.E. and the middle of the first millennium B.C.E. Third, and even more devastating, the spring would have been strategically important even then. If the Israelites were trying to evade the Egyptians, they hardly would have stayed for almost four decades less than a day’s walk from where the Egyptian Army controlled the main road of the world, the Via Maris. Even Exodus mentions the Israelites had not taken that route to begin with, presumably because it was well fortified.