Authors: Bruce Feiler
But as I sat on the Temple Mount, I realized that the
akedah
also accomplishes something else. It’s the first time that God explicitly challenges Abraham, or anyone else in the Bible. Up to now, God has created the world; he has formed the Garden of Eden, then banished Adam and Eve; he has flooded the world, then salvaged Noah; he has commanded Abraham to “go forth.” But here he openly tests Abraham’s faith, and, by extension, the faith of the readers. The
akedah
is the first truly interactive moment in the Bible, the first time the reader is forced to ask:“What would I do in this situation?”
In asking that question, I realized how removed I had been keeping myself from the text, how distant I still was from the human emotion at the heart of the stories. I also realized, in forcing myself to consider an answer, that the places, the atmosphere, even the archaeology of our trip—however impersonal at times—had been getting to me. Before starting this journey, I probably would have doubted Abraham’s resolve. I would have questioned whether he truly would have killed his son on orders from an invisible god. Now, at a minimum, I believe he might have done it. In the context of his life (God, after all, had allowed his wife to give birth to Isaac after she stopped menstruating)—and his time—I believe he might have done it. As for me, I doubt whether I
would have shown such resolve. I doubt—in the context of my life—whether I could have taken the horrifically real step of sacrificing a child in deference to an order I couldn’t verify was real, from a source I couldn’t prove existed. Still, far more significant to me at the moment was how seriously I was prepared to consider the question. If anything, part of me
wanted
such resolve, craved such faith.
As for Avner, a father of two? I turned to him. We were sitting on a stone bench overlooking the Mount of Olives. The sun was directly overhead now. The tree above us provided little shade. “So would you have done it?”
He thought for a second. “Many times I have imagined how awful it would be to be a father in this situation. But I don’t know. I don’t know if Abraham would have done it either. That’s one of the mysteries of the story.”
It’s the same with the mountain, he said. “We don’t know where it happened. But I don’t think it matters. I think there’s an attempt here, like with Mount Sinai, not to point to the actual place, not to create a place that people can worship. The point is to create the message of being devoted so deeply to God.”
“And it works,” I said. “This is one of the great stories in the Bible.”
“It’s like a crystal. You can look through it and see a hundred different angles, but none is more beautiful than the stone itself.”
W
e were lost.theIt was several days after our trip to the Temple Mount and Avner was driving his clankety blue Subaru through labyrinthine streets of Rehavia, Jerusalem’s toniest neighborhood. Compared with the Escher-like madness of the Old City, the more elegant sections of “New” Jerusalem are posh with citrus trees and bougainvilleas, stately 1930s stone apartment buildings, and arched mansions with vine-covered walls housing foreign consulates. Rehavia, in particular, contains the prime minister’s residence, the president’s residence, and many of the city’s intellectuals—the Bloomsbury of Zion. “Martin Buber lived in that house,” Avner said. “Einstein stayed around the corner.” It’s also a place where the roads are rarely contiguous and even an experienced desert tracker like Avner can easily get lost. “Excuse me, could you tell me where the other road with this name is?”
We eventually found the apartment building and rang the front bell. The garden brimmed with gardenias, honeysuckle, and cherry-red geraniums. “Are you looking for Professor Malamat?” the woman said. “He’s around back.”“Are you looking for Monsieur Malamat?” a man in back instructed. “He’s just up the side.” Eventually we found the door. “Ah, now I remember,” Avner said. “I haven’t been here in twenty years.” He pressed the buzzer.
Soon we would be leaving for the more pioneering part of our journey—traveling down the Nile in search of Joseph, who was sold
into slavery by his brothers; then retracing the Exodus through the Sinai. But first we had to examine the stories of Jacob. Since most of the places Jacob went were places his father and grandfather had already been (and thus we had already visited), we decided to step off the road for a few days and explore some of the questions we had been delaying: namely, What is the Bible? Who wrote it? And how do we know whether it’s true? To help, Avner suggested I meet a few of his colleagues. The first was Avraham Malamat, a historian, the patriarch of biblical scholars, and Avner’s teacher.
His wife greeted us warmly and led us into the den, a sunny room lined with cushioned benches where students had been gathering for decades in a lively salon. On the coffee table were three bowls filled with chocolate-covered almonds, chocolate cookies, and chocolate bon-bons. Professor Malamat had a smudge of chocolate on his lips, which his wife wiped off when we arrived. He had been unwell in recent months, and his pale hair was drawn over his pink forehead in wisps, his face plump like a mango. He had a cane, which only served to accentuate his authority when he pounded it on the ground after each of his proclamations. I had yet to meet a timid Bible scholar.
“Welcome to my home,” he said, gesturing grandly and noting that he had 10,500 books in his personal library. “How many about the Bible?” I asked. He seemed surprised by the question. “Ten thousand five hundred.” It was the largest private collection in Israel, he said. Avraham Malamat had come to Jerusalem in the 1930s and spoke Hebrew, German, French, Arabic, English, and assorted Mesopotamian dialects. He had studied at Oxford, lived in America, and traveled around the world. “I’m from Vienna,” he said. “Do you know where that is?” Feeling a bit disparaged, I was eager to prove I knew a bit about the world, too. “So, did you know Freud?” I said, cockily.
“Dr. Freud!” he said, pounding his cane. “He was my neighbor! He lived at 19 Berggasse. We lived at Number 12. I used to see him every day. When he came back from the country on weekends, his little white poodle would run down the stairs and leap into his arms.”
I was flabbergasted, but at this point committed. “So,” I said. “Did he ever ask you about your
mother
?”
“Just the opposite,” Professor Malamat said. “Whenever my mother would walk me by his house she’d say, ‘If you don’t behave, Dr. Freud will put you on his couch.’ ” He paused. “I don’t even think she knew what a couch was.” He tossed a bonbon onto his tongue.
Sufficiently in his grasp now, I moved on to the topic at hand. One thing that fascinated me about the Bible was how it came into being. There are thirty-nine books in the Hebrew Bible. The books are divided into three categories: the Law (
torah
), the Prophets (
nevi’im
), and the Writings (
ketuvim
). The Hebrew term for the Bible,
tanakh,
is an acronym for these groups. For Jews, the first group, containing the Five Books of Moses, is the most sacred. According to the Bible, these books were written by God and revealed to Moses at Mount Sinai. They contain about half narrative, half religious instruction. In Hebrew, the first words of each book serve as its name, thus Genesis is
bereshit,
or “At the beginning,” and Exodus is
we’eleh shmoth,
“Now these are the names,” and so on. In English the names come from early translations into Greek.
Genesis, from the Greek word
geneseosis,
or origins, tells the stories of Creation, Noah, and the patriarchs. Exodus, from the Greek word
exodos,
or departure, relates the escape of the Israelites from slavery. Leviticus, from the Greek word meaning priestly, and Numbers, a reference to the numerous censuses in the book, intersperse stories of the Israelites’ sojourn in the desert with more than six hundred
mitzvot,
or laws. Deuteronomy, from the Greek term for repeated law, focuses on Moses’ farewell address to the Israelites on the brink of the Promised Land. These books were later coupled with the other thirty-four to make the Hebrew Scriptures. Early followers of Jesus added five narratives, twenty-one letters, and a book of visions. Originally these were viewed as addenda to the Hebrew Scriptures, but as they gained in importance, Christians began calling the earlier books the “Old Testament” and the supplement the “New Testament.”
One lesson I quickly learned was that one’s view of the Bible often
depends on which Bible one reads. Christian Bibles, for instance, arrange later books in the Hebrew Scriptures in a different order than Jewish Bibles. Catholic Bibles, in both their translations and their content, differ from Protestant Bibles, which differ from Anglican Bibles, which differ from Greek Orthodox Bibles. This discord began in antiquity. The term
bible
is derived from the Greek
biblia,
meaning “books,” which in turn comes from the word
byblos,
or papyrus, a plant from the Nile that produced early paper. The oldest complete version of the Hebrew Bible is the Septuagint, a series of Greek translations from the third century
B.C.E.
that differed slightly from the original Hebrew, mostly by including the books known as the Apocrypha. The term
septuagint,
which means seventy, comes from a legend that seventy-two elders did the translating. The Septuagint is the best source of information on the pre-Christian Bible and is the Bible quoted in the New Testament. The definitive Hebrew version of the text dates much later—to around the first century
C.E.
—and is known as the Masoretic, or Traditional, Text.
While seemingly insignificant, these translations have had enormous impact on how we view the Bible. For example, the original Hebrew text had no vowels, since Semitic languages originally had none. Also, the text had no chapters, which were added in thirteenth-century England, and no verses, which were added in sixteenth-century Geneva. It wasn’t even on paper, but on papyrus, parchment, even leather. When I asked Professor Malamat how he viewed the text, for example, he said, “The picture in my head is scrolls.”
What I most wanted to know from him was how to view the content of these scrolls. As William Dever, the American archaeologist, has written, “We must constantly keep in mind the fact that the Bible is a garment of a very ancient literature in a dead language, until the discoveries of modern archaeology, the sole relic of a long-lost culture, and the product of an ancient world totally foreign to most of us.”
For my purposes, this raised a question: How reliable is the Bible as history? I began by asking Professor Malamat how much we now know about the period the Pentateuch describes.
“We know very much about certain pockets,” he said. “For example,
about the eighteenth century
B.C.E.
we know
very
much. More than the Middle Ages. At Mari, we found thirty thousand documents that describe what people bought, what they sold, what they ate. I was having dinner in Oxford once and I sat next to a woman who studied medieval Europe. She envied me. I said we had ten thousand Assyrian menus. She said, ‘The entire continent of Europe doesn’t have ten thousand menus from that time.’ ”
“But only pockets,” I said.
“Right. We know a lot about Mesopotamia. We know a lot about Egypt. But we have less material for here. The one question I cannot answer is, ‘Why didn’t Palestine yield as much material?’ ”
“So why didn’t Palestine yield as much material?”
He smiled. “I think because it was written on papyri, and papyri deteriorate. Or maybe it’s because you have so much oral tradition. Maybe there’s a law that if you don’t have much written tradition you have an oral tradition.”
I asked him how long oral traditions could survive without being written down.
“
Very
long,” he said. “We fool ourselves. They could survive for two thousand years, easily. You must have heard of the Niebelungs, the German story of Siegfried. The oldest kernel is from 800
C.E.
, but it has survived another twelve hundred years and was only written down for part of that. Also, everyone, including Hitler, tried to put in his own stuff.”
I suggested we look at one story, Jacob, and see how accurate it is. From a narrative point of view, the story of Jacob marks a significant increase in psychological complexity. Unlike Abraham, Isaac appears infrequently in Genesis and is mostly seen as a transitional figure, with little distinctive personality of his own. His twins, however, seem to make up for his lack of charisma; both are born with specific personalities. “The first one emerged red,” the text says, “like a hairy mantle all over, so they called his name Esau,” which means Rough One. “Then his brother emerged, holding on to the heel of Esau; so they called him Jacob,” which means Heel Holder. These initial characterizations are clue enough to their characters, but the text goes even further. “When
the boys grew up, Esau became a skillful hunter, a man of the outdoors,” while Jacob was a plain man who stayed in camp. “Isaac favored Esau because he had a taste for game; but Rebekah favored Jacob.”
One day Jacob is cooking lentil stew when Esau returns from hunting. Esau says to Jacob, “Give me some of that red stuff to gulp down, for I am famished.” The text says this exchange is why Esau later gives birth to the land of Edom, across the Jordan river, implying a connection between Edom and
adom,
the Hebrew word for red. But Jacob insists that Esau first sell his birthright as the elder son, which entitles Esau to succeed Isaac as the head of the family. Esau responds, “I am at the point of death, so of what use is my birthright to me?” But Jacob insists, “Swear to me first,” and Esau does. “Thus did Esau spurn the birthright,” the text says, implying that he was not entirely tricked. My first question for Professor Malamat was did such birthrights exist?