Walking the Bible

by Bruce Feiler

  As the community threatens to pelt them with stones, the “presence of the Lord” appears before the people. Once again God threatens to destroy the people, and Moses talks him out of it, saying, “If then You slay this people to a man, the nations who have heard Your fame will say, ‘It must be because the Lord was powerless to bring that people into the land which He had promised them.’ ” The Lord pardons the people, but punishes them: Everyone above twenty years old will die in the wilderness. “Not one shall enter the land in which I swore to settle you,” save Caleb and Joshua, who are rewarded for their optimism. The other spies are killed by a plague sent by God. The Israelites, however, promptly ignore God’s warning and march by themselves—without Moses and without the Ark—to the crest of the Promised Land, where they are “dealt a shattering blow” by the Anakites and the Canaanites, just like the British at the same place three thousand years later.

  Standing near that spot, I began to understand the significance of the spies. After resisting God for two years, the Israelites, at this moment, finally decide they are ready to conquer the land that God promised them. This is their manifest destiny, they conclude. But by going forth to claim their destiny without their manifest, the Israelites learn an even greater lesson. The covenant is a triangular relationship among the people, the land, and God. Without God, the people do not deserve the land and can’t conquer it. Without the Ark—and the commandments within it—the people are helpless.

  And this, I finally realized, points to the major lesson of the first half of Numbers and what I had been hearing in my conversations with Ramadan, with Ofer, with Rami: The desert is a cauldron where the Israelites must coalesce. The desert not only cleanses, it constructs. In Exodus, the desert is a vast sea of sand, a pool in which the Israelites rid themselves of their shackled past and receive the written law from God. Numbers tells a more complicated story. The Israelites begin their trek to the Promised Land, but at each step along the way they resist putting their faith in God. Finally, after the spies, God gets so fed up that he lashes out. And what punishment does he levy? He doesn’t kill them. He doesn’t send them back to Egypt. He doesn’t even rescind his oath of land. Instead he banishes them to four decades in the desert. Only by spending that additional time in the wilderness will they fully purge themselves of their past and become a nation of God. Only then will they become worthy of their corner of the triangle.

  The rebellions thus become an important turning point in the Pentateuch, the crisis that marks the end of the second act. The final third of the story, including the rest of Numbers and the entire book of Deuteronomy, will be devoted to the story of how the Israelites finally become a people. The desert, having given the Israelites life, must now take their lives, so it can give life to a new generation. It’s the oldest cycle in the Bible: creation, destruction, re-creation. And it’s those seemingly bifurcated roles, which directly mirror the split functions of God, that Ben-Gurion seems to have understood about the desert: Because the place is demanding, it builds character; because it’s destructive, it builds interdependence; because it’s isolating, it builds community.

  Because it’s the desert, it builds nations.

  1. The Wars of the Lord

  Crossing the border from Israel to Jordan is even more complicated than crossing the street in Cairo. Only here there aren’t any cars or buses or people around—just decades of distrust.

  It was early summer when Avner and I arrived at the Arava border crossing north of Eilat, one of only two land crossings between the former enemies, and prepared to set out on the last leg of our trip, retracing the final third of the Pentateuch up the east bank of the Jordan. The Arava crossing is an isolated outpost in a dusty valley, with a large paved area and several industrial buildings, sort of like a Wal-Mart in the middle of the desert. Arriving from Eilat, one first has to pass through the legendary Israeli security system, which involves relentless prodding of one’s luggage, passports, travel plans, and personal history. “Why have you made so many trips to Egypt?” “Where did you sleep last night?” “Please take off your sunglasses so I can see your eyes.” The longer I traveled in the Middle East, the more passport stamps I gathered from Arab countries, and the more closely I was scrutinized at Israeli border crossings. “Are you Jewish?” “Do you speak Hebrew?” “Were you bar mitzvahed?” On this morning the questions seemed more intimate than usual—“Do you go to synagogue?” “Do you light candles on Shabbat?”—when suddenly the female security officer asked me a question that, given my recent travels, seemed more provocative than usual: “What is the meaning of Passover?”

  I was startled, and a bit annoyed. “It celebrates the Israelites’ journey from slavery to freedom,” I said, adding for good measure that if she wanted to learn more about it she could read Exodus chapters 12 through 15. “But I don’t believe there were six hundred thousand men,” I said.

  If the Israeli side is prying, the Jordanian is plodding. Once you pass through the barrage of Israeli questions, unpackings, repackings, X-ray machines, and computer scannings, then carry your bags across the border, you are greeted by a wall of inefficiency, softened only by Arab hospitality. One undeniable reality of traveling in the Middle East is that the gross domestic product of Israel is roughly equal to that of Egypt, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria combined. As a result, of all the places along the biblical route, the Promised Land, even for its difficulties, is by far the easiest to maneuver. At the Arava crossing, for example, the Jordanian side has a series of small, concrete-block offices—one for applying for a visa, one for paying for a visa, one for receiving a visa, one for paying the entrance tax, one for inspecting passports, one for inspecting luggage, and one for selling soft drinks, ice cream, and duty-free cigarettes. On this morning, four guards were manning all seven offices, which meant, as a practical matter, that three were closed at any given time, except for the duty-free, which always remained open.

  Even animals can get caught in the morass. In 1992, before Israel and Jordan signed their peace treaty, a gray gelding belonging to Crown Prince Hassan, the brother of King Hussein, tossed his trainer during a run on the beach of Aqaba, swam a few hundred yards across the gulf, and walked ashore in Eilat. Israeli officials, not knowing the animal’s pedigree, transported him to a nearby kibbutz, where the stray pony became something of a celebrity among local schoolchildren, who combed, rode, and fed him. When word reached Israel that the horse belonged to the Jordanian prince, the government, fearing a diplomatic disaster, sent special veterinarians to watch over the animal and began trying to arrange a discreet handover across the border. Two days later, the Israeli Army drove the horse twenty-five miles north of Eilat and gave him to officials of the UN, who walked him across a specially arranged opening in the border, where officers from the Jordanian Army were waiting. In a brilliant act of public diplomacy, the “petulant royal polo pony,” as the Israeli press dubbed him, took along hand-painted messages from Israeli schoolchildren pleading with the prince for peace.

  These days, peace is nominally at hand, and a visitor arriving from Israel is expected to come bearing cigarettes at least. Having made this trip many times, Avner knew the drill and presented our Jordanian guide, Mahmoud, with a red-and-white carton fresh from the duty-free. “But they’re not Marlboro,” Mahmoud said. “They’re Gold Coast.” His disappointment at the cheap imitations was palpable, so Avner walked back through the security gate and to the border itself, only to arrive back fifteen minutes later, unsuccessful. “Oh, well. It’s all poisonous just the same,” Mahmoud said, and we were on our way.

  The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is a water-poor, desert-rich country of five million people in an area slightly larger than Portugal and slightly smaller than Indiana. The country’s per capita consumption of water is 200 cubic meters a year, compared to 1,800 in Syria, 7,700 as the world’s average, and 110,000 in the United States. That means the average American uses 550 times more water a year than the average
Jordanian. The main reason Jordan uses so little water, of course, is that it has so much sand: Only 4 percent of Jordanian territory is arable, and that’s concentrated in the north, around the capital. Jordan is shaped like a pistol, with the trigger being the area around Amman, the handle jutting hundreds of miles eastward toward Iraq, and the barrel pointing downward toward the Gulf of Aqaba. In this scheme, the trigger represents most of the habitable land, while the handle and barrel contain little but dust.

  In part because of this inhospitableness, the land that is today called Jordan has been mostly overlooked since history began. The area didn’t even have its own name until the twentieth century and was called (since Ottoman times) Transjordan, a name that means “across the Jordan river” but that implies “the other side of the tracks.” In the Bible, the area has a split role. Parts of it—the fertile hills around Amman—are included in the Promised Land. It’s there, in the valley of Jabbok, where Jacob wrestles with God’s messenger and receives the name Israel. By contrast, other parts—namely, the desert—are treated with contempt.

  The first indication of this contempt comes with the story of Abraham and Lot. Earlier, Genesis explains how Lot flees Sodom and Gomorrah to the mountains of Jordan and gives birth to two incestuous sons, who grow up to head the nations of Moab and Ammon. Centuries later, in Deuteronomy, the Israelites under Moses encounter these two nations on their final trek up the east bank of the Jordan. Though these two nations are technically descended from the same family as Abraham—Lot being Abraham’s nephew—they are now rivals of the Israelites.

  Another enemy the Israelites encounter on their northerly trek also has patriarchal roots. Ishmael and Esau, of course, are the banished first sons of Abraham and Isaac. In a little-noted twist that links the two outcasts, Esau marries the daughter of Ishmael, his cousin Basemath. Their descendants (along with those from Esau’s other two wives) eventually settle across the Jordan River and become the clan of Edom.

  What Lot, Ishmael, and Esau have in common is that all are disaffected family members, separated from the tribe, who ultimately give rise to nations that become antagonistic toward their forebears’ descendants. That all three nations are located across the Jordan seems to confirm that biblical storytellers viewed this territory as a particularly poignant mirror image, one that looks identical to the Promised Land, is settled with nations that are directly related to the inheritors of the Promised Land, but that for some reason were not chosen to live in the Promised Land. In the case of Lot, his fate seems to come from associating himself with the lascivious inhabitants of Sodom. By contrast, there is no comforting explanation why Ishmael and Esau end up across the river, permanently ostracized from the land of milk and honey. Ishmael, to be sure, was the son of a concubine, but such unions were considered legal at the time; plus, Sarah sanctioned it. As for Esau, he was merely the wronged older brother of Jacob.

  The only consolation seems to be that God allows both Ishmael and Esau to father a people. This is subtle storytelling: God’s chosen people may be the most elite nation in the region, but God also creates other nations—spin-offs, if you will—that still warrant a watered-down version of his blessing and serve, in a geographic sense, as buffer states around his chosen lot. These semichosen people are hostile to the children of Israel, but forever attached to them, too; blood rivals living just across the street.

  This intimate connection between both sides of the Jordan has never disappeared. Since biblical times, the fate of Jordan has never been removed from the fate of Israel, making the two lands the Siamese twins of the Middle East, joined at the head and hips by a single river often no more than a few feet wide. David, the first king of Israel, conquered parts of Jordan; and the two places together were subsequently overrun by the Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Umayads, Mamluks, and Turks. The interconnection became particularly intense in the twentieth century. During World War I, the British recruited Sharif Hussein, a bedouin emir from Arabia (and a purported direct descendant of Mohammed), to help oust the Turks from the Middle East. In return, the British promised to promote Arab independence. Hussein and his two sons, Abdullah and Faysal, led the so-called Great Arab Revolt, spurred by a British information officer and onetime archaeologist, T. E. Lawrence. The revolt appeared to be a success, as Faysal and Lawrence led a band of bedouin guerrillas from Medina to Aqaba, and later to Damascus. In 1920, Faysal declared himself king of Syria, while Abdullah was named king of Iraq.

  Their independence proved to be a chimera. The British had, indeed, promised to help the Arabs gain sovereignty, but they had also promised to help the Jews carve out a homeland, and were simultaneously colluding with the French in the Sykes-Picot Agreement to keep the Middle East under European control. In the end, loyalty to their colonial partner proved deeper. Faysal was ejected from Damascus, and Abdullah was barred from Iraq. Abdullah was then offered a golden parachute, a job no one considered of much importance, head of the Emirate of Transjordan, a completely fabricated state drawn up by Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill.

  Abdullah ruled the colony for more than twenty-five years, at which point the British finally granted him independence. In 1946, the emir became a king, and Transjordan finally lost its pejorative prefix Trans and became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. (The term Hashemite refers to Abdullah’s family lineage.) In no time, the rivalry between Jordan and Israel reignited, as the new kingdom controlled much of the West Bank of the Jordan and half of Jerusalem. Palestinian residents of the West Bank were frustrated, too, since they wanted a homeland of their own, and in 1951 a Palestinian walked up to King Abdullah while he was visiting the Temple Mount and shot him dead; a bullet intended for the king’s fifteen-year-old grandson, Hussein, ricocheted off a medal on the boy’s chest. Abdullah’s son Talal had schizophrenia and was unable to rule, so Hussein became king. He ruled until his death in 1999 and was succeeded by his eldest son, who, in a fitting emblem of the convoluted politics of the region, had a British mother, an American education, a Palestinian wife, and the name of his great-grandfather, Abdullah.

  King Abdullah II had another remarkable genealogical claim that linked him to the literary tradition at the root of the region: the Bible. Abdullah’s great-great-grandfather Hussein held the title of sharif, or nobleman. Sharifs had ruled Hejaz, the region of Arabia around the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, for over one thousand years, with Hussein’s branch maintaining control since 1201. The first sharif was the Prophet Mohammed’s elder son, which means, as a matter of tradition, that Abdullah II is a forty-third-generation direct descendant of the founder of Islam. The lineage doesn’t stop there, though. Mohammed’s great-grandfather Hasem, whose name is the root for Hashemite, was a member of the tribe of the Arab chieftain Quraysh. Quraysh claimed to be descended from Ishmael. If true, this would mean that today, more than three thousand years after Moses first set foot in Transjordan, and four thousand years after the patriarchs passed through here, the current king can trace his family tree back to Abraham himself.

  One consequence of this pedigree is that two tiny nations, Jordan and Israel, already bound by geography, climate, and history, also share national story lines that bind them to one of the oldest stories ever told: Abraham and his son. In the case of Israel, the son is Isaac; in the case of Jordan, the son is Ishmael. This difference, seemingly minor, has actually made one of the narrowest rivers in the world seem like one of the widest.

  As we drove north on the only highway of southern Jordan, a single-lane road that bisects the reddish desert, I explained to Mahmoud the nature of our trip. He brought out a notebook and occasionally diverted his eyes from the road to jot down notes. Of all our guides, he was clearly the most studious. About forty, with eyeglasses and an accountant’s meticulousness, Mahmoud described himself as a student of the holy books. I asked if that included the Bible.

  “In Islam we believe in all the holy books,” he said. “Mohammed tells us, ‘Don’t refuse all the Bible, and don’t acce
pt all of it.’ ”

  “So how do you know what to accept and what not to accept?”

  “We don’t know. We should compare it to logic, to the Koran, and so on.”

  “So have you read the Bible?”

  “In Arabic, yes.”

  “What was that like?”

  “From the central points, it’s the same. But from the religious points, it’s completely different. Because the Koran, we believe, is the last book, it’s our holy book. Every sentence is important because it came from Allah to the Prophet Mohammed. But the Bible—we believe that some parts of it are not the original ones.”

  “When I look through the Koran, I notice that there are far fewer details about places,” I said. “The writing seems more poetic.”

  “Here is the main point. To understand the Koran you should read it in Arabic. You can’t translate it. There are some sentences in the Holy Koran, for example, that the Prophet Mohammed made us promise would be kept in Arabic writing.”

  “So do you find the Bible beautiful?”

  “In the Bible, as I told you, there are a lot of things which are useful. It’s one of the great books for a lot of things. For example, I am interested in botany. There are lots of plants mentioned in the Bible that I can recognize.”

  “What about the god of the Bible? Do you understand him?”

  “From the Muslim eye, Allah is the same god who deals with Moses, who deals with Jesus, who deals with Mohammed. In Hebrew you call him Yahweh, or Elohim. In Arabic we call him Allah.”