Chapter One
Walking the Bible
The sun seems bigger in the desert. It sits in the middle of the sky, staring down at you wherever you go, like some single-eyed monster saying "I want you. I want you. You will not escape!" The idea of the sun as a friend does not exist here.
In this place, the sun is your enemy.
On a hot afternoon, I was standing on a hill, staring at the sun as it peered down on the most beautiful city in the world, Jerusalem. This ancient city -- more than 3,000 years old -- is located in the central hills of Israel, in the heart of the Middle East, the region that gave birth to the Bible. The sun is white here, not yellow, and pushes down on the hills and valleys, which are mostly brown because there's so little water. A few palm trees climb from the stones. It's my first day in the city, and I was standing with my friend Fred, who wanted to show me the many spires and domes that make up the skyline.
I grew up in the American South, in a city filled with churches and a wonderful old synagogue. I read the stories of the Bible, painted maps in Sunday school, and acted out biblical characters in plays. Yet somehow the stories always took place in some faraway land, in some faraway time that I could not entirely understand. The Bible was just a book to me.
After leaving home, I traveled around the world for years, living in Japan, England, and elsewhere. As I lived in these countries and tried to understand their cultures, the Bible became even less important to me. It was a book about the past. I was interested in the present.
Then I came to Jerusalem.
My friend positioned me in the middle of the hill. "Think back to your childhood," he said, "when you read the stories of our forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."
I did.
"Now look over there," he said, pointing to one hill. "That's a new neighborhood we're building today. Now look over there," he said, pointing in the other direction, toward the giant golden dome that marks the heart of the Old City, one of the oldest neighborhoods in the world. "That's the Dome of the Rock. And it's built on the rock where Abraham went to sacrifice his son Isaac."
For a second I couldn't speak. It had never occurred to me that the story of Abraham and Isaac -- so timeless, so distant -- might have happened in a place you could visit. It had never occurred to me that the story was so connected to the present. "You mean that story occurred in a real place," I said, "that you can touch -- today?" In the Middle East, I realized, the Bible is not just a book. It's a living, breathing entity. The stories didn't just happen anywhere. They happened here.
Suddenly I wanted to know this Bible, the one that's connected to the ground. I had an idea: What if I walked across the Middle East, visiting the places where the stories occurred, and read the stories in those locations?
Could I even find those places? Did they still exist?
Over the next few weeks, I told everyone about my idea of retracing the stories of the Bible through the desert. Few people thought this was a good idea.
First, there were simply too many stories, people said, that took place over thousands of years.
Second, these places were unsafe, my friends back home said, because they were located in the Middle East -- specifically Turkey, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and Egypt -- places that are often filled with religious tension, terrorism, and war.
Finally, there was little archaeological and historical evidence linking these stories to specific locations.
And that was all before I told my mother.
But I couldn't get the idea out of my head, so a few months later I returned to Jerusalem. I went to see an old professor, an archaeologist who had been digging up biblical evidence for nearly ninety years. He was a short, gentle man, who sat hunched in a chair in an office overlooking the same golden dome that had been built on the spot where Abraham nearly sacrificed his son. He listened politely as I told him my idea, and when I finished he told me politely that I was out of my mind. "People like me are far too busy to talk to people like you," he said. I sat back, devastated.
But the professor was a generous man, too, and that night he called me. "What you need is a man with knowledge," he said, "but also a sense of poetry. What you need is Avner Goren."
The next day I went camping in the desert, where I met some young guides. I told them what I wanted to do. "What you need is Avner Goren," they said.
So when I returned to Jerusalem I telephoned Avner Goren, who agreed to meet me. Avner Goren is also an archaeologist, and he was in charge of ancient sites in the Sinai Desert, where Moses led the Israelites as they wandered through the wilderness for forty years. The next morning he arrived at the home where I was staying driving a rickety blue Subaru that was older than Abraham. In his fifties, Avner had squinty blue eyes, a boyish grin, and curly gray hair that squiggled everywhere. His one distinguishing characteristic was a white scarf that made him look like a dashing adventurer.
We drove around the corner to a coffee shop. Avner was a charming, charismatic man, a child of the desert. I told him about my fears: Where would I go? Would it be safe? For every concern he had an answer. Finally I told him that everyone I met told me I was crazy.
"I don't think you're crazy," he said. "I think it sounds like fun."
I sat back, relieved. "Somehow I knew you would," I said. "And by the way, would you come along?"
Blessedly, he agreed.
Continues...
Excerpted from Walking the Bible CDby Bruce Feiler Copyright © 2004 by Bruce Feiler. Excerpted by permission.
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