Walking the Bible (40 page)

“Peace.”

I let Avner and his friend continue their conversation and stepped out to the ridge. A late afternoon haze had settled over the mountains. The sun was still yellow despite the dust. As I looked out over the plain—the mountains, the sand, the Gulf of Aqaba, which was now becoming visible on the horizon—I was struck by the similarity of what the engineer from Vienna and the bedouin from the desert had said. Both enjoyed the mountain for its silence, for the feeling of being alone. And yet both were drawn here by others—in the case of the
engineer, by the many people who made a similar trek over the centuries, making it such an accessible holy place; in the case of the shopkeeper, by the thousands who continued to come, looking for a moment of peace. And it’s that tension—between being with others and being alone, between reaching salvation within a sometimes unruly community and seeking enlightenment on your own—that lies at the heart of the story of Mount Sinai.

At the beginning of Exodus, Moses goes into the desert to escape his community (and his own murderous behavior), but God, speaking to him from the burning bush, at the base of Mount Sinai, sends him back to lead his community. Once he arrives back at the mountain, with the people in tow, the pattern continues. Moses goes off alone, encounters God, then returns to convey God’s message, and bring the people along. Once, twice, three times this happens, before the people, thinking Moses has abandoned them, abandon him. And at that moment comes the test. Will Moses follow God’s wishes and abandon the people? Will he go off alone and father another great nation, as God offers? The answer, glorious, is no. Moses knows, even more than God seems to know at that moment, that a leader, no matter how great, is nothing without his people. That an individual cannot reach salvation without a community. That the only way for the story to work is for Moses to lead—to inspire—both the people and God. And in that way, the triumph of Mount Sinai is that Moses, in the end, becomes the mountain himself, the link between humanity and the divine.

Equally stunning is that today, three thousand years after the events on Mount Sinai, the legacy of that encounter still manages to thrive on a mountain in the southern Sinai peninsula. In the Bible, Mount Sinai is a physical place that serves as a spiritual emblem. Jebel Musa, regardless of its archaeological pedigree, is the same thing, a physical place that serves as a spiritual symbol. That symbolism is only deepened by the layers of devotion that enshroud the mountain: the monastery at the base, the hermit caves on the side, the chapel on the summit. And perhaps it’s those shrines, perhaps the memory of Moses, or perhaps the lingering presence of God, but the place does have a spirit. It’s the spirit of the people who came here, struggled to survive, and managed to find a way to believe.

And deep into my trip now, I realized that spirit was unlocking something within me, something that I hadn’t even known existed. It was the feeling of the land reaching up to me that I first felt in Turkey. It was the feeling of myself reaching out to the land that I first felt in Karnak Temple. It was the feeling that the spirit in the places and the spirit in me were somehow colluding with one another to circumvent my better judgment and bring me to an entirely different place, a place that seemed, if nothing else, beyond my control. Where was this place?

At the moment, standing on that mountain, staring out at what a pilgrim once called the “sea of petrified waves,” I had no idea. I also, for the first time, felt any fear of that place drift away. I watched, instead, oddly comforted, as the sun set behind me and the shadow of the mountain stretched out before me, drawing slowly, slowly, over the cliffs, onto the sand, and finally to the water’s edge, pointing ever so slightly toward the northeast, and to the promise to come.

1. Wandering

F
irst, you get thirsty. You wake up thinking about water. You go to bed thinking about water. You walk, talk, and eat thinking about water. You dream of water. You wonder, “Do I have enough water?”“Am I drinking enough water?”“Where is the water?” But you stay calm. You know water. You know how much water you need. Twelve liters a day. Or is that thirteen? And what if it’s hot? Does that mean more? What if it’s windy, does that mean less? Just drink. Drink when you’re thirsty. Drink when you’re not thirsty. Because
“If you’re thirsty, it’s too late.”
And you’re thirsty. So that’s bad. But you know yourself. And you know water. So you tell yourself, “I can go longer than most people.” But you’re wrong. Everybody needs water. Needs it now. Go wandering in the desert, for days, weeks, or forty years at a time, and water becomes the most important thing, the only thing. Water becomes life. Becomes salvation. “The fountain of wisdom is a flowing stream,” says the Proverbs. “With thee is the fountain of life,” adds the Psalms. Or, as God puts it, in Isaiah 55, “Oh, all you who thirst, come to the waters . . . incline your ear and come to me.”

Next, you get hungry. And you stay hungry. Your first few days in the desert, you have remnants of the city, a bit of chocolate, a cookie, an apple. You eat these in diminishing portions, and with increasing relish. You’ve outwitted the desert. You’ve brought the fleshpots with you. But then the desert wins. That piece of chocolate you’ve been saving melts. The cookie crumbles. The apple rots. You’re left to the ground, which is
a cruel resort. You’re left to your provisions. You eat breakfast—bread, cheese, tuna, honey. You eat lunch—honey, tuna, cheese, bread. You eat dinner—the same. Traveling in the desert would be ideal for five-year-olds: Every meal you eat is identical. Inevitably, though, the routine tires. The sameness grates. It’s then, as with water, that food becomes more. It becomes metaphor. “They asked, and he brought them quail,” says the Psalms, “and he gave them bread from heaven.” Food, like water, becomes a way to salvation. As Philo notes, “The soul is fed not with things of the earth, which are perishable, but with such words as God shall have poured like rain out of that supernal and pure region of life to which the prophet has given the title of ‘heaven.’ ”

Finally, you get tired. You get tired of the heat. You get tired of the cold. But mostly you get tired of the sand. Sand is relentless. It goes through your shoes, through your socks, and lodges in between your toes. It seeps through your pants, through your underwear, and gloms on to places it ought never to see. It penetrates your windbreaker, gets under your shirt, and sticks to anything with hair. It infiltrates your food, sticks onto your teeth, and passes eventually into your stomach. And as a result, whenever you expel anything from your body, it comes with a blasting of sand. Sand in the desert is like rain in Britain: Sometimes it storms, sometimes it sprinkles, but most of the time it just hangs in the air and waits for you to walk into it. Thus, sand, like water and food, becomes cause for misery. And out of this agony comes meaning. “The wilderness is the most miserable of all places,” the sages said. “Having received the Torah there, Israel could take it to the deprived of the earth, and from lowliness ascend to the heights.” Who preserves the Torah? the sages asked. “He who makes himself like the desert: set apart from the world.”

Spend enough time in the desert, and you begin to see that nothing is quite what it seems to be. Water becomes wisdom. Food becomes salvation. And sandstorms become poetry. Everything, in other words, becomes grist for allegory. As Moses tells the Israelites near the end of their journey: “Remember the long way that the Lord your God has made you travel in the wilderness these past 40 years, that he might test you by hardships to learn what was in your hearts.” Today, almost three thousand years since those words were written, the appeal of the desert
remains the same. By its sheer demands—thirst, hunger, misery—it asks a simple question: “What is in your heart?” Or, put another way, “In what do you believe?”

Those questions would dominate the last half of our trip, as they dominate the last half of the Pentateuch. The final three Books of Moses—Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy—tell the story of the forty years the Israelites spend in the desert following their receiving of the Ten Commandments. These books contain far less narrative than Genesis and Exodus and far more discourse on how to behave. Leviticus is given over entirely to a seemingly interminable litany of laws covering such topics as how long a woman must remain segregated after giving birth—seven days for a boy; two weeks for a girl—to how one should dispose of a bull after sacrificing it to the Lord:“The priest shall remove all the fat from the bull: the fat that covers the entrails and all the fat that is about the entrails; the two kidneys and the fat that is on them; and the protuberance on the liver, which he shall remove with the kidneys. The priest shall turn them into smoke on the altar of burnt offering.” But the hide of the bull, it continues, “and all its flesh, as well as its head and legs, entrails and dung, he shall carry to a clean place outside the camp, to the ash heap, and burn it up with wood.”

The Bible, in other words, which contains some of the most moving narrative passages in the history of literature, suddenly slows to a dead stop, a filibuster of legislative minutiae. As commentator Everett Fox has written:“It is as if a history of the American Revolution contained all of the debates on and drafts of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, as well as accounts of battles and biographies of key personalities.” That such an approach parallels neither Homeric epic nor other ancient texts is precisely the point, Fox concludes. “We have here a new genre of great complexity and richness, in which narratives exemplify laws and laws follow narratives. The result is truly a torah, a ‘teaching’ or ‘instruction.’ ”

The narrative resumes in Numbers as the Israelites depart Mount Sinai and begin the long trek toward the Promised Land. Our plan on
this leg was to follow this path by moving north from Jebel Musa into the central zone of the Sinai, the so-called Wandering Plateau, before proceeding into the Negev. We left Jebel Musa at dawn and began our gradual drive northeast. The mountains, bulging like potato sacks, began to thin and shorten a bit. The big sky returned, once more dominating the landscape like one of those children’s drawings with sky and clouds covering most of the page and a thin line of ground along the bottom. Close to midday now, and several hours from Saint Catherine’s, we pulled to a stop on a charred plateau just off the highway. Small pieces of flint covered the ground like debris cast off from the carving of an oversized sculpture. Avner picked up a piece, which was smooth on the top and sharp on the edges, like an arrowhead. He tossed it about twenty-five yards toward the open terrain. It landed with a tinkle and came to a stop. “See anything special there?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Look again.”

Stepping forward, I began to detect a gathering of large, standing stones emerging out of the landscape like a family of deer materializing out of the brush. The five stones averaged about six feet tall, with the middle one slightly taller, and were arranged in a half circle like basketball players waiting for the tip-off. The effect was like Stonehenge, only smaller. “This is a cult corner,” Avner explained. “It’s probably a sacrificial site for people who buried their dead nearby.” But for our purposes, he said, it’s even more important. These stones are what the Bible calls
matzevah
(or
matzevot,
in the plural), which translations refer to as stelae or pillars. They appear in various places throughout the Bible and embody one of the more vexing struggles in the biblical narrative: the battle between monotheism and paganism.

The delivery of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai has always been understood as the crowning achievement of monotheism, the final sealing of the bond between the people of Israel and their God. But like all matters related to the Bible, the truth is not that simple. As many commentators have noted, a close reading of the text suggests there were two principal phases in the development of Israelite religion: the patriarchal phase and the Mosaic phase. In the first phase,
the patriarchs most likely viewed their god, Elohim, as being similar to El, the primary god of Canaan, who appears to the patriarchs as a friend and sometimes even assumes human form.

The God of Moses, by contrast, whom the text refers to as Yahweh, is a much more violent and stormy deity, who appears in the guise of smoke, fire, and lightning. While the God of Abraham destroys the city of Sodom, the God of Moses reaps havoc on the entire
country
of Egypt, later gives the Israelites permission to do the same in Canaan, and in between is forever threatening to vanquish the Israelites and begin anew with a different people. Several times he exacts a demanding purge on his own chosen people.

There is another change from the patriarchs to Moses. Whereas Genesis makes no mention of tensions between the patriarchs and their neighbors over religion, Exodus explicitly says that God is in competition with other gods. With the plagues, for example, the war on paganism becomes paramount, as God promises to mete out punishment to the “gods of Egypt.” This conflict is deeply embedded in the Ten Commandments, which clearly assume the presence of other gods. As God states:“You shall have no other gods beside Me. You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them.” There would be no need for this commandment if this practice were not common at the time.