Authors: Bruce Feiler
Within seconds of greeting us, the women insisted we stop for tea, and we walked the short distance to their small huddle of homes. Having invited us, however, the women promptly disappeared out of custom, and we proceeded toward the fire, where a small handful of men, ranging in age from forty to seventy-five, were gathered in evening senate. Their faces were rich with weather and age, with skin the color of cordovan, and whiskers that sprouted black and white in thinning mustaches or faint goatees. None had more than a few teeth. We shook hands, kissed on the cheeks, and sat down. Dusk enveloped us.
Though desert gatherings like this happen spontaneously, they still have a strict choreography, as nuanced as a Japanese tea ceremony. The oldest man in the group, with black sunglasses held together by a rubber band, picked up a few glasses that were slightly larger than shot glasses, though more ornate, the shape of morning lilies. He tucked the glasses in between the fingers of his left hand, plucked the teakettle from the fire with his right hand, and poured a small bit of tea into one of the glasses. After replacing the kettle, he rubbed his callused fingers around the rim of one glass to clean it, then poured the backwash tea into successive glasses, repeating his ablution like an elaborate fountain-cum-dishwasher that in its ability to keep the glasses apart and not spill the tea seemed akin to baton twirling. When he finished, the man splashed the used tea onto the sand and handed me an empty glass. “Don’t pass it,” Avner whispered. I held it just above the sand and waited for the others to receive theirs, at which point the man reclaimed the kettle from the fire and began to pour the tea, starting with me and moving in the same
direction as he had distributed the glasses. The kettle was made of brass, lined with tin, and was dented in various places. It was also entirely covered in soot, the color of perpetual use.
When each of us had his serving, the old man replaced the kettle on the fire, mumbled a brief blessing, and we drew the glasses to our lips, sipping the piping hot liquid, which had the consistency, and taste, of maple bouillon. Molten manna would not be sweeter. Since no one could tolerate more than a few sips at a time—either for the heat or for the sweetness, I could never tell—the older man buried his glass a half inch in the sand and the rest of us followed. For twenty minutes no one spoke. Instead we just watched, and listened to, the fire. It was the most economical fire I had ever seen, with two wormwood logs the size of hot dog buns, flaked with white charcoal like dandruff, and barely concealing a searing red core that instead of emanating heat seemed to draw us closer, as if drawing heat from us. If most fires seem confident, this one seemed tentative, as if to ask, “Will I make it through the night? Do you have enough wood for me?”
The answer, of course, was not really. Wood, like most resources in the desert, is almost impossible to find.
The life of the bedouin in the modern Middle East—in the Sinai, the Negev, and Arabia—is a study in what it means to exist in the breach between urban and desert environments, and may be as close as contemporary observers come to understanding what the Israelites must have experienced during their two generations in the wilderness. The bedouin—who number about sixty thousand in the Sinai, one hundred thousand in Israel, and more in Saudi Arabia—are pure Arabs, descended from tribes of the Hejaz, the western region of the Arabian peninsula along the Red Sea. Traditionally, they move in tribal groups, search for grazing areas in the desert for their animals, and settle around oases. They’re not pure nomads, who wander continually without pattern. Instead they’re pastoralists, who move into the desert following the spring rains, when there is more vegetation for their goats, then drift back into settled areas in autumn, when they must rely on stable sources of water.
As Emanuel Marx, Israel’s leading expert on bedouin life, explained
to me, the bedouin are entirely dependent on settled areas for trade, income, and many of the staples of their daily life, especially the grains that make up the bulk of their diet. If anything, they are urban satellites, he said, more accurately viewed as tangents of city life than residents of the wild. In some cases they sell their meat and wool to the cities in return for provisions. In other cases they actually work in economies that link the desert to the settled areas, such as tourism. “You think that these are people living in the desert, which they aren’t,” he said. “You think that these people are only raising animals, which they don’t. You think that these are people who are self-sufficient, but they’re not.”
Because of their intimate relationship with the land, the bedouin view of the desert is much different from ours. “What they call the desert,” Professor Marx said, “is a place where resources are in different places. You walk in one place. You graze in another place. You raise date palms in a third. They think of the desert as a place they can always fall back on. It has a lot of range, and a lot of resources.”
“So the Western notion of the desert as emptiness would seem to them . . .”
“They would consider it very strange,” he said. “Even the Hebrew term
midbar,
which is translated as wilderness, is derived from the word for grazing. So in bedouin terms, the desert is a land where you graze animals. If you translate it as savanna
,
it would make much more sense.”
“So you’re saying that the bedouin term for desert is closer to the English word
savanna
?”
“In terms of inner meaning, yes.”
“But when I think of a savanna I think of a grassy plain. Certainly none of the places we’re talking about—the Sinai, the Negev—is a grassy plain.”
“We also call savannas places where there are trees, spread widely over an area. In this part of the world, that’s a desert.” This cozy feeling toward the desert exists, in part, because the bedouin have developed extraordinarily sophisticated ways of thriving in that environment. In effect, the bedouin have learned to read the desert. Hares and foxes lead them to water; jackals and hyena lead them to higher ground. They also know how to whittle the environment into
daily tools. Goatskins make good canteens; hyrax skins make good curdling bags; almond, castor, and quince wood make good camel saddles. Desert plants also produce powerful medicine. Boiled lavender tends to eye infections; wild mint balms earaches; wormwood broth is good for headaches. Perhaps the most elaborate desert cure is that for rheumatism, which the bedouin address by cooking the meat of hyenas. The full treatment involves enclosing the patient in a tent in which hyena meat and bones are burned. The patient drinks the broth of the meat, covers himself in blankets until he sweats profusely, then emerges twenty-four hours later, able “to climb mountains with ease.”
Perhaps more important, the bedouin respond to the harshness of desert conditions with a fulsome tradition of hospitality. As one bedouin saying goes, “Had I known that you would honor me by walking this way, I should have strewn the path between your house and mine with mint and rose petals.” The bedouin philosophy of hospitality is simple: host first, ask questions later. This custom is reflected in several places in the Bible, notably in Genesis just before the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, when Abraham invites the three unknown visitors into his tent and asks his wife to welcome them with provisions. Not until later does he realize they are emissaries from God.
Bedouin hospitality customarily lasts for three days (which today are sometimes simulated with three glasses of tea). The first stage is called
salaam,
or greeting; the second
ta’aam,
or eating; the third
kelaam,
or speaking. Though this welcome mat is laid out without condition or prejudice, before the rising of the morning star on the fourth day hosts help their guests prepare for departure. Tarriers who linger beyond the drying of the dew are “as welcome as the spotted snake.” Such openness, inevitably, comes at a cost, particularly with precious resources. When our hosts that afternoon insisted we stay for dinner, Avner would agree only if they promised not to slaughter a lamb, a traditional but costly expression of respect. The men insisted, Avner remained firm, and fifteen minutes of peacock preening later, they finally agreed to his request. Dinner was a large platter of rice, with mushrooms and vegetables, which we plucked with flatbread, using only our right hands. “You eat like bedu!” the men cheered.
And sleep like them, too. By the time we finished dinner the familiar chill of the desert had returned, and we all had reclined somewhat in our places, drinking our bottomless glass of tea. The circle had expanded somewhat, with several more men and some boys joining us for dinner, as well as Yusuf, our driver. The women remained out of sight. Nearby, a few camels were eating barley out of sacks around their necks. Eventually, when we made noises about driving a few miles away to a campsite, one of the men, Ahmed, insisted we stay with him. Again a brief Kabuki followed, but this time Avner agreed. We said good night to the others, walked the short distance to Ahmed’s home, and began to unload our bags. As we did, Ahmed went inside to inform his wife.
For generations, bedouin lived exclusively in goat-hair tents, called
beit shaar,
or “house of hair,” which they took with them as they migrated from location to location. Women have traditionally been responsible for the tents, their weaving, striking, packing, and erecting. In bedouin divorces, the husband keeps the animals, the wife keeps the tent. In recent years, some bedouin have been taking the money they receive from work as migrant laborers or in the tourist trade and begun building modest homes. Ahmed’s home was a prime example of this shift toward more permanent habitation. It was small, about the size of a two-car garage, but well constructed, using unpainted concrete blocks and tin roofing. Half the house was taken up by an open-roofed living area that had only sand for a floor, and the other half taken up by a small kitchen area and two raised bedrooms, one for the man and his wife, the other for their five children. This area had a cement floor and a tin roof.
After rooting out the kids and sending them to a neighbor’s, Ahmed sat with us on the step to his bedroom and discussed his masterwork, now just two years old. He was a slight man, wearing flip-flops and a thin white robe. He wore one white kaffiyeh around his head, and another around his neck, as a scarf. I asked him how he had chosen this spot.
“I had a house next to my father, in another area,” he said. “About ten years ago there was a strong flash flood and the whole valley flooded to the level of two meters. Lucky for us, it came during the daytime and
no one was home, or they would have been washed away. If it had come at night, we would have died.”
Ahmed decided to move, and chose this spot because it was high enough that it would not be imperiled in a flash flood. He marked the area, laid out the walls, and brought a builder to help construct it. He built a foundation of limestone, on top of which he placed cement, which he purchased in forty sacks from the city and mixed with water from the well.
“It’s become more and more expensive to build in the open valley, away from the cities,” he said. “A house like this costs two thousand Egyptian pounds,” or about $750.
Every house has the character of the person who designed it, I suggested. How did his house reflect his character?
“In the old days, when my father was young, there were no houses. Only tents. Tents meant moving from place to place. They were not a stable place to stay:Today you were here, tomorrow you were there. But now you have a stable, sturdy place. I think we are a more stable people.”
“But is that bedouin?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “Being bedouin is not about moving all the time. It’s about being open to nature. It’s about being open to people. Look at this house. It’s open. In the morning and the night it is open. In the summer and the winter it is open. We are always open.”
“So what feature of this house are you most proud of ?” I asked.
He chuckled. “Maybe you understand,” he said. “If you have such a house, your wife is pleased, so you are pleased. I think it’s the same everywhere you go.”
We spent the night on the floor of Ahmed’s second room, and the following morning lingered over a traditional bedouin breakfast—bread, cheese, honey, tea. They seemed not to favor canned tuna; or maybe we had depleted the Sinai’s reserves. Either way, by the time we viewed the inscriptions of the Written Stone, which early scholars also attempted to attribute to the Israelites (although its inscriptions turn out to date from much later), it was nearing noon. We were late getting started for a
daylong hike that Avner said might be an elaborate detour, but proved to be an unexpected looking glass through which to catch a glimpse of ancient Israel.
While he was chief archaeologist of the Sinai, Avner initiated a variety of projects. Many involved excavating and restoring known archaeological sites like Serabit el-Khadim, the pharaonic temple near the turquoise mines. A few involved preserving historical sites like Saint Catherine’s. On one occasion, though, he discovered a site of such profound historical and archaeological importance that it not only challenged conventions about the Bible and the ancient Near East, but also raised provocative questions about the course of human evolution.
The discovery almost never happened. One day some bedouin whom Avner knew in the area came to him and announced, “We have found this magical place.” With the bedouin, of course, this could have meant almost anything—a mountain, an oasis, a cave—but Avner knew enough to follow their hunch, and the place they led him to proved to be an unknown gem of early man, overlooked by hundreds of years of explorers. Petrie, the great Egyptologist, had been two hundred yards away, but had never made it to the cliffs overlooking an isolated plateau. It’s possible the bedouin knew of the site for decades but waited to tell someone they trusted. By the time we arrived, I could understand their protectiveness. Even after weeks of inaccessible sites, this was one of the more inaccessible. The terrain had a dusting of chipped stone, like burnt almonds, similar to the ground around the
matzevah
. In late afternoon, the sky had a pearl sheen to it, like the inside of a shell, light along the horizon, darker on the top.