by Bruce Feiler
“Despite your military studies, may we meet in peace,” I said.
“We’re all looking for peace,” he said, then pointed at my hand. “We’ve spent too much time fighting ever since the stories in that book.”
We drove along the spine of the mountains for a while, toward the place where we would camp for the night. Dusk was setting, and the paved road soon became dirt. As we rose and dipped along the craggy spine, moving gradually higher, the rich blend of trees also gave way to the familiar amalgamation of boulders and desert shrubs, like trail mix sprinkled along the side of the road. There were no other cars on the road, only the occasional bedouin with a camel.
Just after dark, Mahmoud pulled over to greet a bedouin friend in front of his tent. The man, Nissim, insisted we stop for tea, and soon insisted we spend the night. His tent had three rooms and was quilted together out of black goat hair intercut with red-and-gray-striped blankets and the occasional burlap sugar sack. The tent was about fifty feet long, ten feet wide, and faced east. By the time we settled into the southernmost section, designed for guests, and were joined by a few neighbors and teenage boys, this section alone easily accommodated a dozen people. One boy started a campfire out front. A few goats wandered just outside; some camels brayed nearby. The whole place smelled of animal musk, charcoal, and sage. After my encounters with bedouin homes in the Sinai and solar châteaus in the Negev, this was by far the most antiquated lodging I’d seen. Following a few glasses of tea, I asked Nissim why he had chosen to pitch his tent here.
“This is my birthplace,” he said. Nissim appeared to be in his thirties and had a serious, focused air to him.
“But why not go to a town?” I asked.
“I prefer to live here in spring and summer. I have goats, it’s easy to find space for them.”
“How many times a year do you move?”
“It depends on the year. Sometimes we have good rain and I stay in one place. In dry years I sometimes move two or three times in a year. But I prefer here.”
“Is there something special about this area?”
“Over there,” he said, pointing north toward Petra, “is Wadi Musa,” the Valley of Moses. “The prophet Musa passed through there and stuck his stick in the ground and brought water.”
“So do you feel more connected to Moses than other prophets because you live here?”
“Since we are Muslim, we believe in all prophets,” Nissim said. “But Mohammed is the last prophet, so we feel closer to him.”
We had dinner—a platter of barley with vegetables and steaming bread—and afterward I asked him to tell me more about the story of Moses and the spring. Mahmoud was eager to join the conversation, and the two of them described the story as it appears in the Koran. Moses and the Israelites are enslaved in Egypt, when Allah liberates them, leads them across the Red Sea and into the Sinai. Allah gives Moses the Scriptures, but the people rebel and build an idol in the shape of a calf. Later, Allah sends manna and quail for the people to eat. But they still lack for water, so Allah instructs Moses, “Strike the rock with your staff.” Moses does, and twelve springs gush forth.
“What happens next?” I said.
“The people drink,” Mahmoud said.
“But isn’t there a punishment?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Is Moses punished for how he strikes water from the rock? In the Bible, he’s not allowed to go to the Promised Land. He has to die in Jordan.”
“I don’t know this story,” Nissim said.
I retrieved the Bible from my bag and read the version of the same story that appears in Numbers 20. After Miriam dies, and before the long series of wars with the Jordanian kingdoms, a mini rebellion occurs in which the people complain about the lack of water. Moses and Aaron make a plea to God, who instructs them, “Take the rod and assemble the community, and before their very eyes order the rock to yield its water. Thus you shall produce water for them from the rock and provide drink for the congregation and their beasts.” Moses does as he is told, but instead of speaking to the rock—“ordering” it to yield water—he strikes the rock twice with his rod. Out comes “copious water,” and everyone drinks. But God becomes irate and, in a gesture long viewed with horror among commentators and lay readers alike, issues a stern retribution. “Because you did not trust Me enough to affirm My sanctity in the sight of the Israelite people, therefore you shall not lead this congregation into the land that I have given them.” Moses thereby learns his fate: He will not set foot in the Promised Land. He, like the people he led out of Egypt, will die in the wilderness.
After I finished the story, Mahmoud, who had been taking notes, asked me a few questions to get the details right. Nissim, meanwhile, wanted to look at my Bible and I handed it across the circle. Several of the teenage boys surged forward to get a closer look. One of them handed me a miniature Koran with well-thumbed pages and a black cloth cover. Here, I thought, was an extraordinary scene: an informal congregation of Muslims and Jews—scholars, shepherds, bedouin, travelers—all sitting around a campfire, beneath a homemade tent, talking, discussing, trading details about the stories of the ancient world.
At least that’s what I thought was happening.
After a while I started asking a few more questions of my own. “So this business about talking to the rock versus striking the rock is not mentioned at all in the Koran?” I said.
“No,” Mahmoud said.
“And the idea that Moses must die in Jordan. That’s not mentioned?”
“No.”
“So there’s no disappointment?” I said.
“What do you mean, ‘disappointment’?”
“Moses doesn’t make it to the Promised Land. It’s one of the saddest moments in the whole book.” I raised my voice in emphasis, and frustration.
Mahmoud seemed a bit confused by my remark. He started fidgeting and glancing at Nissim, who was still playing with my Bible. Mah-moud was uncomfortable, and so was I. There was something missing from our conversation, but I couldn’t quite place it.
“Between the Koran and the Bible there is a difference over where Moses died,” Mahmoud repeated. “The Koran doesn’t say.”
“But the difference is bigger than that,” I said.
“The main reference to Moses in the Koran—” Mahmoud started to say, but I cut him off.
“I know the story,” I said, a bit rudely. “The point I want to make is this: It’s not the same Moses. The Moses in the Bible and the Moses in the Koran are different people.” Avner, who had been listening nearby, winced.
“You mean not physically, but their meaning?” Mahmoud asked.
“Both,” I said. “We think it’s the same person, but it’s not.”
“You’ll never make it as a diplomat,” Avner remarked dryly.
I knew, under the circumstances, that I should be more gracious, but I couldn’t help myself. “I’m basing my opinion on the fact that for Moses in the Bible, the whole objective, the whole point of his life, is to lead the Israelites into the Promised Land. To get them to Israel. Moses in the Koran does not have that. The Promised Land is not even a factor; it’s not mentioned. Of course, the Koran doesn’t want to glorify the land of Israel. It wants to glorify Mecca and Medina. Therefore, the whole reason Moses lived—according to the Bible—is not mentioned in the Koran. They’re the same person, but they have different meanings.”
At this point, hearing the slightly frantic edge to my voice, Nissim wanted to know what I was saying, and began conversing with Mah-moud. I took the occasion to step out of the tent. There was a slight chill in the air, and the black bowl of sky was filled with stars as bright as I remembered from my first night in the Sinai. Looking up, I felt more alone than at anytime along our route. An experience that moments earlier seemed so warm and full of possibility suddenly seemed constricting, and cold. We were dealing with stories, passed around campfires not unlike this one, and written down many years later. And yet, in eac
h version of the story, the details were different, therefore the meaning was different, therefore the lessons were different.
For so much of this trip, I realized, I had allowed myself to get caught up in the emotional awakening I had been experiencing. If I could feel a growing openness in myself, if I could sense a similar feeling in Rami, Ofer, Father Justin, and countless other people we met, if I could picture a world full of ecumenical desert people, in touch with their inner selves, riding a wave of sand-hewn memories to international peace and togetherness, then surely it could happen. Surely we could forget the centuries of wars that have been fought over these stories. Surely we could overlook the millennia of bad faith that have been engendered by these stories. Surely we could remove these stories from politics, religion, and geography, and view them instead as a universal sourcebook offering readers a guide to spiritual emancipation and personal fulfillment. Surely, in other words, we could forget the things that drew me into this project—the archaeology and history that firmly anchor them in a time and place—and focus instead on the more universal qualities of reading the book—the internal growth and reaching toward God. Couldn’t we?
A few minutes later Avner came out to see how I was doing.
“That was the worst moment of the trip,” I said. “It was so exciting sitting around with all those books, but it turned out to be so discouraging.”
“But that’s the reality of Judaism and Islam,” Avner said. “There’s almost no commonality. Most Muslims don’t know why Jews care about the Holy Land. They don’t know that Jews believe it was promised to them.”
“So is there any way of reading this conversation as being anything other than depressing?” I said.
“Yesss,” Avner said, tentatively. “I suspect if you want to be diplomatic and say, ‘Here we at least find the core of the big trouble, and now that we know the problem, maybe we can address it.’ ”
“But we’re talking about different books, different characters, different everything,” I said. “We may be people of the Book, but since they’re different books, we’re different people.”
Avner sighed in agreement. “I’ve been dealing with this for years,” he said.
“Part of me wants to run away from what just happened.”
“But you can’t,” he said. “There are other ways to build bridges.”
“Maybe. But this is certainly a dagger through any sense of romance I might have been feeling. It’s the same thing that happened with Lawrence. When I walked out here I realized, ‘This is why he went home. He couldn’t bridge the gap.’ I finally understood.”
“That’s clear, even from the movie,” Avner said. “The two worlds are not the same.”
“The same thing happened with Moses,” I said. “Like Lawrence, his role was to get the people out of bondage, but he couldn’t lead them all the way to freedom. The people had to do that on their own. And maybe it’s not so sad, after all. Maybe it’s unavoidable.”
“It’s a little sad,” Avner said.
“But it’s God’s plan,” I said. “And that’s the point, I suppose. If we went back in there and wanted to create a happy moment, all we would have to do is turn it to God. That’s what the Bible and Koran have in common. It’s not the characters. It’s not the people. It’s God.”
“That’s what we were discussing after you left,” Avner said. We were standing in the open air. Each of us staring straight ahead. There was a certain space between us, and an even greater space between us and them. “Mahmoud said, ‘God created everything,’ and I agreed. So, in the end, they are the people of God, and so are we. He said it, and I said it, too: ‘It’s the same God.’ ”
I looked at him with admiration. He was, indeed, a bridge builder: a man of the desert, not of a nation. “I’d like to believe that,” I said. “I really, really would.”
2. Half as Old as Time
Waking up in a bedouin tent in the middle of Jordan, twenty miles from the nearest electrical outlet, one hundred miles from the nearest traffic jam, is not as peaceful as it might seem. A goat with a cowbell nibbles on the tent. A camel trips over a guy wire. A handful of shepherd girls, none older than twelve, slip on their sandals and black homemade shawls and chirp with their moms who are packing them lunch. Their brothers snap pieces of wormwood and begin heating the pudgy kettle, which soon emits a growl that seems far more treacherous than tempting. A baby wails. I stick my head out from under my blanket and look at my watch. It’s just after 4:00. The monks in Saint Catherine’s are still in their beds. The bedouin of Petra are well into their day.
With no choice but to get up, we huddle half-asleep around the campfire for an hour, then decide to begin our morning trek up Jebel Haroun, or Mount Aaron, the holiest site in Petra, where Aaron is said to have died and been buried during the Israelites’ final march. Short of a helicopter, or a two-day hike, the only reasonable way to ascend the mountain is by camel, so at just after five we mounted three camels that Mahmoud had engaged from our host. Nissim’s camels, it seems, are not unlike Prince Hassan’s horses:They suffer from wanderlust. A few weeks earlier, nine camels wandered down the mountain and strolled across the border into Israel, where they promptly disappeared. Nissim mentioned the problem to Avner as we were leaving, and after an hour of excruciating uphill climbing on a narrow, unkempt path, Avner had an idea.
He drew our camels to a stop at a serrated ledge overlooking the Dead Sea. The bone-colored rock was so dramatic here, cutting into the sky like one of those shark-tooth knives that saw through aluminum cans on late-night infomercials, that you could still feel the force of the earthquake that caused the great rift twenty-five million years earlier. Now within earshot of Israel, Avner reached into his knapsack and pulled out his mobile phone. He punched in Ofer’s number in Ezuz and outlined the plight of the missing camels, being careful to describe their brand—two horizontal lines and a vertical one like old-fashioned football goalposts. Ofer said he would check into the situation and call back. Who needs diplomatic immunity, when you have a network of desert missionaries and access to a cellular phone?
As we continued, I asked Avner about a persistent question I had read about in discussions of the historical accuracy of the Bible: Were camels domesticated during the time of the patriarchs? Camels appear frequently in the Hebrew Bible, surfacing as early as Genesis 12, when Abraham travels to Egypt during the drought and receives as a gift from the pharaoh, “sheep, oxen, asses, male and female slaves, she-asses, and camels.” Abraham’s servant later takes “ten of his master’s camels” on his trip to Harran to get a wife for Isaac, and Jacob subsequently brings even more camels back from Harran with his family. William Foxwell Albright, the archaeologist, was one of the first to conclude that camels were still wild animals in the Near East during this time of the patriarchs, the early second millennium B.C.E. The earliest inscription that mentions domesticated camels was not until the eleventh century B.C.E., Albright noted, and camel bones were not found in significant numbers near cities—a sign of their domestication—until centuries later. Albright insisted that the use of camels in the Pentateuch, including a reference in Leviticus that prohibits eating camel meat because the animal has no hoofs, was an anachronism.
Avner mentioned that he knew an archaeozoologist, Liora Horowitz, who was studying the issue and who thought she might be able to date camel domestication early enough to include the patriarchs. “We’ll have to call her when we get home,” he said. “No wait!” Though we were on a particularly tricky bend in the path at the moment, Avner again reached around for his phone, pressed a few numbers of recall, and spoke into the mouthpiece. Then he tossed the phone to me. “Professor Horowitz?!” I said, after juggling the phone in my hands.
I explained my question and she rattled off the results of recent surveys. An article appeared in Archaeology a number of years earlier, she said, that cited figurines and camel-hair rope to suggest that camels were domesticated in the Nile Valley as early as 2600 B.C.E.
But that data was inconclusive, she said. More recently, she had reviewed all the surveys of second millennium B.C.E. sites in Israel and found no evidence of bones. By contrast, in later periods, the site contained extensive camel remains used in cult sacrifice, suggesting camels had been herded by that time.
“All in all, I’d say there were no domesticated camels from the early second millennium B.C.E.,” she said. “Albright is holding up quite well.” I thanked her and tossed the phone back to Avner. Who needs the Internet when you can do research today on camels in the ancient world from the back of a camel on an ancient trail?
We continued for several more hours along a narrow ridge. The mountains were rugged here, though much paler than the ones in Sinai, roughly the color of saltines. The mix of cavernous valleys and ashen cliffs seemed lunar in its barrenness. We would navigate a particularly tight bend, then reach a flat area where we could see Israel to our left and Jebel Haroun up to our right, then descend into a valley where water collected in the rainy season and a shock of pink oleanders lined the ground like a Hawaiian lei on a beach. Then the path would jerk upward, the greenery would disappear, and we’d have to hold on tight.
When the camels needed to climb, they would place their right front foot tentatively on a rock to test its stability, then frantically pedal their back legs like a car stuck in the sand, before lurching forward with a hitch and a groan, and an occasional squeal from their riders. It took such concentration to stay on the saddle, gripping the pommels in front and back, that I began to feel physically drained. All conversation stopped. The only sound I could hear was the gurgling and growling of the camels as they masticated their latest meal. The only smell was from the perspiration that ran down my face, intermingled with the dust that kicked up from the ground and the occasional grassy mulch from my camel’s sneeze. All this on a day we were visiting Petra, one of the most romanticized places in the world.