Where God Was Born

by Bruce Feiler

  “It’s a difficult question,” she said. “Most of the time I explain that, as a Christian, I believe this is the place. None of us knows the actual place, but for generations we have believed it was here.”

  “There are many scholars who say that the reason Jesus was born in Bethlehem is because the Hebrew Bible says the messiah must come from the House of David. Otherwise, why would a pregnant woman have left Nazareth and walked three days to get here?”

  “The Bible says there was a census that required people to return to their hometown,” she said matter-of-factly, “and Joseph came from Bethlehem. So there’s the reason!” She scratched her head for a second. “You have to understand, for us believers, we don’t care about these questions. If you find an answer for this question, you’ll just find another question, so in the end, it’s better not to question.”

  We retreated outside and proceeded back to the border. As we drove, I noticed that Arlet was wearing an image of the Virgin Mary around her neck. She’s one of an estimated thirty thousand Palestinian Christians living in the Palestinian territories, or 2 percent of the population. Once as high as 13 percent, the population has dwindled in recent years as Christians sought better opportunities abroad. “So let me ask you,” I said. “You’re a Christian, you live surrounded by Jews and Muslims. Can the religions get along?”

  “They have to get along, otherwise we all will suffer. As a Christian, I prefer the Jewish people; you can deal with them as humans. I will never allow myself the mistake of marrying a Muslim. But I’m still a Palestinian; I just don’t care about a state. Really, all I want is to live in peace.”

  “So do you belong to a country?”

  “No, I belong to a city. Bethlehem.”

  I met Avner at the border, and we drove east toward one of the most overlooked regions of Israel, the Elah Valley. Tucked in the foothills between the central highlands and the Negev, the Jordan Valley and the coastal plain, the Elah, named for the pistachio trees that line its cascading slopes, is a hidden breadbasket, filled with vineyards, orchards, and one of the largest eggplant farms in the Middle East. It’s also home to one of the more famous showdowns in history, between David the Bethlehemite and Goliath the Philistine.

  As the David story begins, the biblical story is concentrated in the southern half of the Promised Land. “There are a number of reasons for this,” Avner explained. “First, this is a better area to cultivate than up north around Shechem. There are fewer rocks and more rain. The second is geopolitical. The Philistines, a powerful, rival kingdom from the Aegean, occupy the nicest land, along the Mediterranean coast of Canaan.”

  “People think of Israel today as being so tiny,” I said. “But ancient Israel was even tinier, half of what it is today.”

  This sets up the central tension of the story: if the Israelites want to grow, they must acquire better land. They can’t go east; there’s a desert. They can’t go south; there’s a desert. They can’t go north; they will bump into the Mesopotamians. The only way to expand is to go west, but the Philistines are in the west. The underlying reality of David’s life is that the only way for Israel to fulfill its destiny is to confront the Philistines. But this isn’t easy. The Philistines, whose name comes from the Hebrew root for Palestine, brought a highly sophisticated society from the Aegean. For starters, they had a monopoly on forging iron, which gave them better weaponry, even chariots. To them, the Israelites were bumpkins.

  “Remember, the Philistines are repressing the Israelites,” Avner said. “That means conscription; it means taxes. It means they can do whatever they want. They come from a highly urban, extremely civilized society. The Israelites come from the desert. The Philistines are building huge cities. Ekron is eighty acres, compared with two to three acres for the biggest settlement of Israel.”

  One irony of this story is too rich to ignore. The Philistines have been much maligned in history, largely because the Bible presents them in such negative light. Long after they disappeared, their name endured—as an insult. The word Philistine first entered nonbiblical usage in seventeenth-century Germany, when literary critics used it to mean “enemy.” Soon German students began labeling nonstudents or other venal people Philister. This usage entered English, where a philistine came to be any person who has no sophistication or knowledge of culture. But the original Philistines were very sophisticated. Indeed, in the battle between the Israelites and the Philistines, the Israelites were the philistines.

  “So the Philistines have better land,” I said. “They’ve got bigger cities. They’ve got greater technology. Why should the Israelites risk defeat?”

  “This is the Promised Land,” Avner said, “and it needs to be settled. But in order to do that, the Israelites need a leader.”

  We rounded a bend and suddenly were there: the verdant site of David’s showdown with Goliath. Part of me expected we would have to trek to some isolated spot far from the highway, but the duel took place on the main crossroad through the valley—then, as now, the easiest way to get from the mountains to the coast. We pulled into a grove of squatty olive trees with sage-colored leaves and gnarled trunks that looked like creatures out of Tolkien. On either side of the half-mile-wide valley were grassy tells, remains of the two cities mentioned in the story. Running along one side was a dry riverbed carpeted with small white stones.

  In I Samuel 17, the Israelites and Philistines mass on opposing hills. A Philistine representative, Goliath of Gath, steps into the plain. He is six cubits and a span, around nine and a half feet, tall and is wearing a bronze helmet, greaves, and a breastplate, which together weigh 5,000 shekels, or 125 pounds. He carries a spear with a shaft like a weaver’s bar, meaning it has a roped handle, and an iron head that weighs 600 shekels, or fifteen pounds. “Choose one of your best men and let him come down against me,” Goliath cries. “If he bests me in combat and kills me, we will become your slaves; but if I best him and kill him, you shall be our slaves.”

  Three of Jesse’s sons are encamped with the Israelites, and David is dispatched from Bethlehem to take them a care package of parched corn, bread, and cheese. David arrives at the barricades just as Goliath speaks. The boy is rapt: “Who is that uncircumcised Philistine that he dares defy the ranks of the living God?” David’s brother scolds the lad: “I know your impudence and impertinence; you came down to watch the fighting!” David marches straight to Saul anyway and volunteers to be his proxy. Saul dismisses him: “You are only a boy.” But I have “killed both lion and bear,” David counters. Finally Saul relents. “May God be with you.”

  Saul places his armor on David, but the boy can’t move. He chucks the protection, grabs a stick and a few smooth stones, and totes along his sling. Goliath scoffs at the boy. “Am I a dog that you come against me with sticks?” David’s reply is one of the more memorable in the Bible: “You come against me with sword and spear and javelin; but I come against you in the name of the Lord.” The Philistine advances, but David, shockingly, runs toward him. He reaches into his bag, loads a stone into his sling, and hurls it at his enemy. The stone strikes Goliath in the forehead and sinks into his skull, killing him instantly. David lunges for the warrior’s mighty sword and slices off his head. The boy then parades his severed trophy to Jerusalem. The Bible has a new savior prince.

  The story is certainly memorable, and everyone from Michelangelo to Mark Twain has taken a spin on it; on playing cards, the sword on the king of spades commemorates this battle. But even the Bible suggests the story may be hyped. For starters, II Samuel 21 relates that it was actually Elhanan of Bethlehem who killed Goliath the Gittite, a giant who had six fingers on each hand, six toes on each foot, and a spear like a weaver’s bar. The version that appears in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint, the original Greek translation that predates the text we read today, suggests Goliath wasn’t even that tall, four cubits and a span, which is less than six and a half feet.

  The logical conclusion is that the story is a romantic gloss desi
gned to make David into the boy hero devoted to God. Usually this is the sort of conclusion that archaeologists come to, but in the case of David, history may actually bolster the tale. The description of Goliath fits squarely into the model of mercenary warfare in the Mediterranean at the time. He has iron, which is consistent with the Philistines. His outfit is what Avner called a “greatest hits” of the region: Egyptian armor, an Asiatic sword, an Assyrian helmet. Even the method of sending a single emissary into combat mirrors the battle of Hector and Achilles in the Iliad, which takes place around this time.

  More striking, because David was unburdened with armor, he may have had the tactical advantage. Josephus, writing in the first century C.E., was one of the earliest to suggest that Goliath’s substantial armor may have “impeded a more rapid advance.” In antiquity, warriors came in three categories: heavy infantry (Goliath), cavalry, and light infantry (David). Light infantry often had the advantage in hilly terrains like the Elah. Thucydides stresses in his History of the Peloponnesian War that the heavy infantry of Athens was destroyed by the light infantry of Sicily, often by using the sling. Sling stones, carved flint about the size of tennis balls, are frequent finds around the Mediterranean. From a military point of view, it is plausible that David defeated Goliath.

  Could I? Avner hopped from our Jeep and started rummaging through the back until he emerged with a piece of cardboard about the size of my hand. He bored a hole in each side and threaded a piece of rope through one side, then the other, until the contraption hung down about a foot from his hand. “This is a sling,” he said.

  I was shocked. I had always assumed David used a Y-shaped stick with stretchable bands. This device had only a single rope with a piece of fabric. “You mean it’s not a slingshot?”

  “That requires rubber. David didn’t have rubber. Shepherds today still use this type of sling to chase predators.”

  Avner walked over to the riverbed and picked up a handful of pebbles.

  “They look like camel dung,” I said.

  He loaded the stone into the belly of the sling, pulled back his arm to begin swinging, and the stone fell feebly to the ground. We laughed. He tried again, and the stone shot backward, strafing my leg. We laughed again, but this time I stepped behind a tree. “This could get dangerous.” He tried a third time, and the rock flew forward, about three feet, and tinkled to the ground. “I have a better idea,” he said.

  Avner returned to the car and came back with bandage from a first-aid kit. He unfurled the gauze, revealing a soft cotton patch in the middle, more flexible than the cardboard. I put a stone on the cotton and swung my arm a few times, as if pitching a baseball. I quickly realized that the hard part is not swinging but releasing only one of the two ends of the rope, so the stone comes out clean. I let go, the stone launched forward, but not very far. By this point, Goliath would have skewered me with his spear.

  Finally I had an inspiration. Instead of pitching my entire arm forward, as if tossing a lasso, I rotated just my wrist, and did it backward, as if jumping rope in reverse. Suddenly I built up a head of steam—you could hear the sling whipping through the air—I released one of the handles, the stone came shooting out like an underhanded strike in softball, and it took off, whizzing by my leg, avoiding Avner altogether (point!), crossing the riverbed in a single whir, and just for a second causing a shocked lump in my throat as I heard the anticipation of the crowd, the collective dreams of a life of freedom, the hope that a single, smooth white stone could change the course of time. “Do you believe in miracles?”

  The stone hit the cliff about thirty yards away with a faint, pale ping.

  “Oh, well,” I said. “I could have killed David, but I don’t think Goliath.”

  A few minutes later we turned down a dirt road overrun with organic vegetables and brimming with grapevines. A burst of bougainvilleas and geraniums lined the steps to a small terra-cotta-tiled restaurant and winery. The name was carved in wood, KELA DAVID, “David’s Sling.” The logo showed two sticks in a Y formation: a slingshot, not a sling. Half an hour earlier I wouldn’t have known the difference.

  Smadar Kaplinski greeted us warmly, a hint of gray peeking through her mopped red hair. We ordered plates of eggplant ragout, pickled olives, hummus, and home-baked bread, along with a glass of her Cabernet. Joan Osborne was singing “What If God Was One of Us” on the radio. Smadar was something of a Davidic figure in the land of David. A former bureaucrat with the Department of Education, she had been living with her husband and children in Tel Aviv when she decided she needed to flee her marriage. She decided to overturn her life as well.

  “I looked from village to village for a place to buy for me and my children,” she said. “I knew I could make money from food. All my friends told me not to go, I wouldn’t survive. I told them I would, with good weather, open air, and hard work. I hate to say it, but Israeli people don’t like to work.”

  “So why did you choose this place?”

  “The weather. The soil. The people. The relationship between Israelis and Arabs is better here than elsewhere. We work together. We trust each other. We are friends.”

  She opened a restaurant, began tilling the fields, and now produces ten thousand bottles of wine a year, as well as the best garlic soup and pineapple cake in the region. All she needed was a name.

  “We wanted a name with meaning,” she said. “We feel that we are part of our past. We are continuing the life of the Jewish people from the Bible. David’s sling is close to us. Three kilometers from here is where the fight took place.”

  “David is the story of an underdog,” I said. “Are you an underdog?”

  “I feel that I have made a good life for my children. I had family problems before I arrived here. I had no money. I came where there was nobody. Yet this place makes you feel strong. Now I have a restaurant, a winery, a farm. It’s the area of dreams.”

  I asked her if she felt some spirit was looking over her.

  “I don’t know, but I do feel God helped me make good things for my family. I know that we appreciate our lives more than before. We need to serve our land in this country, not just our cities. We have to make agriculture, take care of our water, make sure that our air is clean. My children will know how to do this now.”

  “And where is David in this story?”

  “When I go to pick up my workers in the morning, and I see a young shepherd walking along the top of the ridge, I can see him. I can see him when I close my eyes, as a little boy, not tall, with orange hair, and curls.”

  “But when he grows up,” I said, “he’s not so innocent. He’s a bandit; he’s cruel to women.”

  “I’m not going to criticize him,” she said. “Their life was complicated. Biblical heroes weren’t always good, but neither am I. I try to be good, but I feel that a lot of time people use me, and lie to me. I’m not as good as when I arrived here. Maybe that’s the way I’m most like David. Living here can make you believe in God, but it will also make you tough.”

  We drove a few miles away, to a hill in the center of the Elah Valley, to set up camp for the night. We found a grove of Jerusalem pines, planted by the Jewish National Fund to reforest the country after the Ottomans chopped down most of the trees to build a highway from Syria to Saudi Arabia. Parks like this, with picnic areas, outdoor cafés, and military lookouts, are commonplace in Israel and sometimes make camping in the country akin to hiking in Switzerland.

  Except the peaks are lower. We laid our gear near the top of the hill and within a few steps could see all the way to the Hebron Mountains in the east and the Mediterranean in the west. In the fifty miles between us and the coast, few lights were visible, and we could barely see Gath, home base of Goliath. By contrast, the swath along the shore was lit up like an amusement park. Today, three thousand years after David, the basic population structure of the land is unchanged: sparse in the middle, dense along the coast.

  Soon we were growing nostalgic. A flash of fireworks went off on
the coast, and I was surprised Israelis could still celebrate with explosions. “When you and I first started traveling years ago,” Avner said, “we were in the bubble of peace. Everybody, and especially I, was full of great hope that we could reach a peaceful solution. I was working closely with people in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Egypt. Those connections are still valid, and on a people-to-people level we still relate as human beings. But there is a lot of sadness now—and big questions.”

  He was lying on his sleeping bag, propped on his elbow. The desert-worn lines on his face were accentuated by a candle. Naturally gnomic, his mind seemed to have paused on the edge of a groove, as if rubbing endlessly on a mourner’s bead.

  “I started looking around,” he continued, “and asking, ‘Why are we not succeeding?’ All our problems are not Palestinian problems. There are concerns with Israeli society. We have no constitution, no long-term plan. One of the problems with Israel is that our leadership is mostly people from the Army who are used to solving immediate problems. We have a deep lack of identity. I’m sure one of the reasons people cling so strongly to the land, and don’t want to give up this or that piece, is that they have nothing else to hang on to. They’ve forgotten what the land stands for.”

  This idea was similar to the one I had heard from Yaya, and I was surprised to hear it again from such a different political viewpoint. One of the central themes of the Pentateuch is the longing for land and the promise it holds for living in peace and freedom with God. But no sooner do the Israelites conquer the land than they squander the peace and destabilize their relationship with God. Is being on the land incompatible with being in accord with God?

  “Many of the first Zionists who came here,” Avner continued, “turned their backs on the diaspora and Judaism. They said, ‘We are new people, we are connected to the land, why pray all the time?’ So much so that among many young people today, like my children, there is a feeling of hostility toward religion. Seventy percent are secular. There is no country on earth where young people travel so much looking for meaning—to India, South America, doing drugs.”