Issue Date: March 11, 2001

Walking the Bible and other books by author Bruce Feiler
The Bible: Myth or Truth article
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Walking the Bible : A Journey by Land

Walking the Bible

By Bruce Feiler

Chapter 1
In the Land Canaan

The guard eyed me squarely as we approached his post, moving one hand from his belt to his walkie-talkie. His other arm rested on a rifle. He had gel in his hair and three stripes on his sleeve. "Yes?" he said, arching his eyebrows.

It was 9:35 on a late-autumn morning when Avner and I strode toward the security checkpoint at the Damia Bridge, an Israeli-Jordanian border crossing about thirty miles north of Jericho. We had driven up from Jerusalem that morning to start the next phase of our journey, visiting sites in the Promised Land associated with Abraham, his son Isaac, and his son Jacob. Together they form the holy triumvirate of biblical forefathers, the patriarchs, from the Greek word patria, meaning family or clan, and arch, meaning ruler. The Five Books describe several forefathers who preceded these men, notably Adam and Noah, as well as many that follow. But the three patriarchs receive special distinction because it's to them--of all humanity--whom God grants his sacred covenant of territory, and through them that the relationship between the people of Israel and the Promised Land is forged.

The story of the patriarchs takes up the final thirty-nine chapters of Genesis and covers the entire geographical spectrum of the ancient Near East, from Mesopotamia to Egypt, and back again, all within several verses. For Avner and me, this scope posed a challenge. Soon after our return from Turkey, we huddled in the living room of his home in Jerusalem and set about devising an itinerary. It was a sunny, comfortable room, with whitewashed walls, Bedouin rugs from the Sinai, and pictures of his two children, as well as the two daughters of his second wife, Edie, a Canadian who served as office manager for the Jerusalem bureau of the New York Times. Avner sat at the table with his computer, online Bible, countless topographical maps, dozens of archaeological texts, and the handheld GPS device, while I paced the floor.

Our most immediate problem was that with no archaeological evidence to relate any of the events in the Five Books to specific places, we were left to the often-contradictory claims of history, myth, legend, archaeobiology, paleozoology, and faith. There are nearly two dozen candidates for Mount Sinai, for example, and nearly half a dozen for the Red Sea. There are countless theories about which path the Israelites took through the Sinai. In addition, we faced the competing constraints of religious wars, political wars, terrorism, climate, budget, and health, as well as the desire to have fun.

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Ultimately we settled on a guiding principle: Our goal was to place the biblical stories in the historical and cultural context of the ancient Near East. Time and again, rather than focus on every story in the text, or even every interesting story in the text, we decided to concentrate on stories that could be enhanced by being in the places themselves. The story of Jacob and his brother Esau wrestling in Rebekah's womb, for example, while fascinating on many levels, struck us as not likely to be enriched by traveling to a specific location. The stories of Sodom and Gomorrah, by contrast and the crossing of the Red Sea might easily take on new meanings by visiting their settings. In Judaism, the traditional process of analyzing scripture is called midrash, from the Hebrew term meaning search out or investigate; in Christianity, this process is referred to as exegesis, from the Latin word meaning the same thing. In effect, what Avner and I undertook was topographical Midrash, a geographical exegesis of the Bible.

In that spirit, we decided to begin our travels in Israel with a bit of a long shot. Our destination this morning was Shechem, the first place Abraham stops in Canaan and the next place the Bible mentions after Harran. The text makes no mention of what route Abraham, his wife, Sarah (she's actually called Sarai at the moment, as he is still called Abram), and his nephew Lot took to Canaan. Based on road patterns in the ancient world, one of the most logical places for him to cross into the Promised Land would have been a natural ford in the Jordan River just south of the Sea of Galilee, where the Damia Bridge is located today. Though we were already in the Promised Land, we decided to ask if the Israeli Army would let us walk across the bridge to the Jordanian side, then walk back, seeing what Abraham might have seen. Avner explained this idea to the sergeant, who remained at attention. After hearing the explanation, the officer removed his walkie-talkie and relayed our request.

The border post was astir that morning. It was a small crossing--the Jordan here is narrow enough for a horse to jump--but tidy, decorated with cacti, olive trees, and oleanders. The gate was blue and white, Every few minutes a Palestinian truck would approach, ferrying oranges, honeydew, or polished limestone. The driver would dismount and hand over his papers, which the guards would stamp and return. Then the guards would roll open the gate, the truck would pass, and the whole process would start again. We were just becoming lulled by the routine, when suddenly we heard static on the walkie-talkie. The sergeant removed it and held it for us to hear: "I don't care if they write a book about the Bible," the voice said. "I don't care if they rewrite the Bible itself. But they're not going to do it in a military zone, and they're not going to do it on my bridge."

The sergeant replaced his walkie-talkie and shrugged. "Sorry," he said, "only Palestinians."

We returned to the highway and turned west toward the mountains. Shechem is located at the northern edge of the central spine of mountains that traverse much of Israel and the West Bank. Our goal today was to travel down this spine, visiting first Shechem and then Bethel, the first two places Abraham stops. The following day we would travel farther south, to the Negev, Israel's desert region and the setting of Sodom and Gomorrah. Avner suggested we use this time to discuss the historical background of the patriarchs' encounters in Canaan.

As we left the Damia, the road began to climb almost immediately, from six hundred feet below sea level along the Jordan River to two thousand feet above in less than twenty miles. The terrain changed just as quickly, from bleak desert crumbs to garden-fresh greenery. Vendors began to appear, hawking tomatoes, cauliflower, and radishes bunched like roses. My ears began to pop. Deviations like this are commonplace in Israel, a country one-quarter the size of Scotland with as much geographic diversity as the British Empire at its peak. That diversity--and the strategic challenges it poses--may also be a central factor in why Abraham came here in the first place.

For much of history, the narrow strip of land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean has been a curiosity, the foyer to the world, a place to pass through but not to stay. The Egyptians called it "Kharu," the Greeks and Romans "Palestina." The Syrians called it "Canaan." Whatever they called it, everyone coverted it, though none could control it. From its inception, the Fertile Crescent was structured like a modern American shopping mall, with two anchor stores on either end linked by a string of smaller, more vulnerable stores that were completely dependent on their larger neighbors for their economic well-being. In this case, Egypt and Mesopotamia were the archors, and as they went so went Canaan.

One reason for this dependency is that even though Canaan contained some of the world's biggest cities, these cities were never able to organize themselves into a coherent political body. Instead they were clients of the great powers, divided and conquered by their own crippling mix of mountains, valleys, coastline, and desert, as well as their lack of water. As Avner pointed out, "The Egyptians used to joke that Canaan was 'that poor country dependent on rain.'" This reality sets up one of the crueler ironies in the history of the Bible. Geography prevented the development of a great empire in Canaan, but it was that lack of an empire that may have allowed God to promise the land to Abraham. In other words, the Promised Land, a place that for three thousand years has proven notoriously difficult to control, became the Promised Land in large measure because in the preceding three thousand years no one had been able to control it either.

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Besides being true to ancient geographic conditions, the biblical story is also remarkably true to current ones. The State of Israel can be roughly divided into three sections--the head the shoulders of the Galilee; the torso, made up of the central hills, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv; and the legs and feet of the Negev. The 1937 British plan to partition Palestine gave Jews only the head and shoulders, with a bit of coast. The UN mandate of 1948 added the legs and feet. The central hills, excluding Jerusalem, were originally given to the Arabs and have been fought over ever since. Jews have based their claim to the land largely on the Bible. The central spine of the country was home to most of the major episodes in the Five Books, also called the Pentateuch, from the Greek word meaning five-book work. These sites include Shechem, Bethel, Hebron, and Beer-Sheba. The Palestinian claim was based largely on the fact that they were living in these areas before Jews began immigrating in large numbers in the nineteenth century. In recent years, some Palestinians have shifted their claim, saying they were also on the land before the patriarchs arrived in the nineteenth century B.C.E. Palestinians, they now say, are direct descendants of the Canaanites.

About an hour after we left the Damia we arrived at the checkpoint outside Nablus, the Arab name for Shechem, which was handed over to the Palestinians in the mid-1990s. As one of the first cities in the nascent state, Nablus has been a constant site of tension and, after canceling two trips to the area over safety concerns, we decided to rent a car from a Palestinian company in East Jerusalem to save ourselves from being stoned. Our car had Palestinian license plates--white instead of yellow--and several stickers with Arabic writing. They seemed to work. The Palestinian border guide was much friendlier than the Israeli had been and sat on our hood and smoked a cigarette while Avner telephoned our escort. "The Palestinians are just so appreciative that an Israeli came to visit," Avner said.

In a few moments we were joined by Suher, an official at the local tourist authority who was one of the Palestinian tour guides Avner had trained inn Jewish history. She was demure, and a little nervous. She had been sent to town seven months earlier. "I don't consider living in Nablus living," she confessed. "It's very different from Jerusalem. Gossip here is at a very high level." She drove into town, which was crowded with white concrete slab buildings bedecked with rugs hanging out to air. Fruit trees dotted the central square, which was bustling and well manicured, though the telephone boxes had no telephones. Across the street was a large institutional building that had been the British headquarters, then the Israeli headquarters, and was now the Palestinian headquarters. An enormous portrait of Yasser Arafat hung from the roof, giving the town the feel of a place poised between democracy and dictatorship.

After a few minutes we arrived at the site of ancient Shechem. Compared with other archaeological sites, this one was fairly run-down, with grass growing over untended mounds of dirt and a graveyard of old auto parts encroaching on the city wall. Excavations show that Shechem was a thriving community as early as the fifth millennium B.C.E., but wasn't fully developed until the nineteenth century B.C.E., reaching prosperity a few hundred years later. The lack of significant remains from the time of Abraham has led some to speculate that Shechem might have been added by later editors of the Bible.

Either way, Shechem's prominence for biblical writers is clear. After arriving in Canaan, Abraham passes through the land "as far as the site of Shechem." Which is located alongside the "Terebinth of Moreh." a term usually interpreted to mean "wise oak tree." God once again appears to Abraham and renews his promise: "I will give this land to your offspring." Abraham expresses his appreciation by building an altar on the site.

We walked around for a few minutes, and Avner pointed out the city gate and a number of storehouses, as well as a temple and altar from the early second millennium B.C.E., the time of the patriarchs. The Canaanite altars were in town, he noted, while the mention of the oak in Genesis suggests Abraham camped outside the walls, a position consistent with his status as a migrant. The existence of several altars inside the city walls suggest that seminomadic clans might have been welcome inside the city, the two communities--Canaanites and proto-Israelites--living side by side. For Suher, this was welcome news, archaeology that could be used to mend, not divide. But even she couldn't avoid drawing political conclusions.

"We believe this is a very important place, a Canaanite place," she said. We believe that Canaanites, they are Arabs. That supports our rights on this land.

"So you believe the Arabs were here before the Israelites," I said.

"We believe that, very strongly."

"How do you make the connection?"

"The Canaanites are Arabs, from Saudi Arabia, from Hejaz. I know that we, the Palestinians, are also from the Arabs."

Though historians don't necessarily agree on this point--most say Canaanites were drawn from all over the Near East, not just Arabia--I asked her if this idea would have an impact on the future.

"I don't know if we can make real peace," she said. "I don't know if we will ever settle who was here before the other. But we can live together. We are human. The land is for those who build it. For those who live on it. The Romans were here, but it's not their land. They went back to their country. If we leave the land, we don't deserve it."

"In other words, the Israelites left, so it should be your land."

"Yes, but the Jews are much more clever than we are. They believe in this land more than we do. I don't know why. They, their children: they are very serious about this place."

"So what's your dream for Shechem?"

"I love this place." She said. "I don't know why. I would love to clean it, to bring more people here. To bring children here. It's a feeling. Maybe because we are raised to love this place, to love our history. It's a history of pain. This place has seen a lot of pain. I hope it will go away."

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We said good-bye at our car and turned south toward Bethel, the site of Abraham's next layover. We were passing through one of the poorest pockets of the West bank, a rocky, agricultural no-man's land. Small trucks and taxis choked the road, which was dotted with mosques and coffeehouses that blocked the view of ageless olive groves. The taxis came in a variety of shades--Mello Yello, mango, Tang--everything around, but not quite, New York City yellow-cab yellow. The road signs were all in Arabic--no Hebrew, no English, no neon. Drenched in sun and dust, the landscape looked like paper, toasted, its edges signed by fire.

In time the hills became more rolling and the olive green a bit more plentiful. We veered around Ramallah on an Israeli bypass road and rolled to the gate of Bethel, a modern Jewish settlement in the midst of Arab domain. Such communities are the tinderbox of the Palestinian--Israeli relationship, an ever-shifting frontier of faith that triggers passions and hatreds that could only be aroused by the potent braiding of faith, family, and text.

We waited for the yellow gate--twice as big as the one on the border with Jordan--and proceeded inside the community. Suddenly we were in Israel again. The buses were red, the signs were in Hebrew, the children wore Kippahs, or skullcaps, on their heads. Yet the place felt different, tense. The school, the playground, even the bus stops were protected by fences. The entire place was swathed in barbed wire. It was a voluntary ghetto, a Wild West outpost of choice, not force.

We drove up the hill and decided to stop by the director's office, which was in a Quonset hut. The secretary, whose hair was hidden in a net as per Orthodox tradition, looked at us skeptically, as if to say, "Are you for us or against us?" After a brief negotiation, the director agreed to meet us for five minutes. We stepped into his office, which was lined with maps and blueprints. He had a grimace for a face, and a scar across his cheek. I asked him why he was here. "We are here because of the Five Books," he said. "We are living in Bethel, on the road of the patriarchs, and this is our contract." He placed his hand on the Bible, which sat prominently on his desk. Of all the places Abraham visited, why did he stop here, I asked. "I cannot tell," he said. "It's not a high place. It's difficult to defend. If there's a possibility to ask Abraham why, we will ask."

Back in the waiting room, Avner remembered that he knew an American couple in town. The husbank, a guide, was working but his wife invited us to stop by their home. It was a modest home, barely large enough for the couple, their five children, and several thousand books. "They're my husband's" explained Fern Dobuler, who, like him, grew up in a moderate Jewish household on Long Island. "When we first became religious, I had all these questions, every time Abby couldn't answer one of them, he went out and bought a book."

Fern was garrulous and gesticulative, in a Catskills-real-estate-broker sort of way. A phys-ed teacher by training, she balanced her athleticism with her religious need for modesty by wearing a long skirt made of sweatpant material and covering her head with a New York Yankees cap. She met her husband in college in New York, where both were active in a pro-Zionist group. One year Yizhak Rabin, then the Israeli ambassador to the United States, paid a visit. "If you really want to help," he told them, "move to a settlement and be a pioneer." Others delivered similar messages. When Abby's grandmother was dying, she made them promise: "Don't forget you're Jews. Don't forget Israel." A week after she died, Fern gave birth to a daughter and slowly the couple embraced a more traditional brand of Judaism--saying daily prayers, resting on Shabbat. Eventually they came to Israel for a summer.

"We had three children at the time," Fern said. "We rented an apartment in the Old City. It was fabulous. My kids went to the Western Wall by themselves. You could smell history in the air. We came back to New York and every single Friday night Abby would start to cry. 'I wish we could live in Israel. A Jew belongs in Israel.' It was like Chinese water torture. He just wore me down."

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The following year they sold their house, their two cars, their real estate business, and moved back. "At first it was very hard," she said. "We had to learn how to put on gas masks. My oldest son sat in school for a year unable to understand anything. I kept saying, 'What did I do to my kids? It was hard for me, too. I missed my friends. I missed my house. I missed my central air-conditioning. I lay on my bed at night, saying, 'I can't do this. I can't do this.' My father thought Abby had brainwashed me."

Worse, their money soon ran out and they had to flee the high prices of Jerusalem. "We drew a circle with a half-hour radius." She said, "and started looking at communities. We knew it had to be religious. We wanted something established enough to have teenagers. We wanted a place new enough to have young children. We wanted diversity. This place just fit the bill."

"There's one thing you didn't mention," I said.

"I know," she said. "The Bible is not the reason we came to Bethel, but once we were living here, every time Bethel was mentioned in the weekly Torah portion, only then did I feel part of the community. Part of the extended Jewish people. I remember the first time they read the part where Abraham builds an altar in Bethel, and I thought, that's where I live!"

The feeling only grew, she said, once they realized the grave political situation. "Until they had the bypass road, there wasn't a day we would drive without being stoned. It was extremely unpleasant. Once, when my sister-in-law was here, somebody dropped a cinder block on the car. Not a rock, a cinder block. The whole ceiling on the passenger side caved in. I had been sitting in the back with my sister-in-law, who fell to the floor, shaking. If I had been sitting in the passenger seat I'd probably be dead."

I suggested that she seemed remarkably free of anger.

"I don't hold the anger," she said. "You can't live that way. You have to live a normal life. I just don't want to give up any more land. I don't want to give up my home."

"Do you feel living here has brought you closer to God?"

"Yes. Because I see purpose in our living here. If I didn't, it would be very hard. I wonder how anybody who's Israeli and not religious can stand it. If they don't have that connection to God, with all the aggravation and hardship, why stay here?"

"Why do you stay here?"

"I stay here because Jews belong in the land of Israel. God gave us this land, and it's not up to us to give it back. When we stood at Sinai as a Jewish people and said, 'We accept the Torah,' we didn't just do it for that generation in the desert. We did it for all future generations."

"Tell me about the land. Do you have a different relationship with it?"

"There are many things about living in Israel that are wonderful. One of those is the land. When my kids used to go on field trips in America they went to a museum, to the Empire State Building. Here when you go on a field trip they drop you off in the middle of nowhere and you walk, for hours and hours and hours. A field trip is seeing the land, connecting to the land. You don't have to see a thing. There's an expression, 'To walk in the land of Israel is a holy thing to do."

We pulled out our Bibles and began to discuss the sections that take place in Bethel. After Abraham leaves Shechem, he travels south to the hill country "east of Bethel," where he once again builds an altar to the Lord. Later Abraham revisits the place on his return from Egypt. After that, Bethel only grows in importance, becoming, after Jerusalem, the most frequently mentioned place in the Bible. Jacob, during his flight from Beer-Sheba to harran, sleeps there and has his famous nocturnal vision of angels ascending and descending on a ladder. He awakens and erects a pillar to mark the place, calling it Bethel, house of God. Years later, on his way home from Harran with his wife and children, Jacob again stays in the place. Fern began to read this passage, from Genesis 35.

"And God said to Jacob: 'Arise, go up to Bethel and remain there; and build an alter there to God.' "Jacob responds, instructing his family, "Rid yourself of the alien god in your midst, purify yourselves, and change your clothes. Come, let us go up to Bethel, and I will build an alter there to the God who answered me when I was in distress and who has been with me wherever I have gone. " Jacob hides the idols under the same terebinth tree in Shechem that his grandfather used. Then he travels to Bethel, where God again invokes the name he earlier gave Jacob: Israel, meaning Striven with God. "And God said to him, 'You whose name is Jacob, you shall be called Jacob no more, but Israel shall be your name.' Thus he named him Israel."

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As she was reading, Fern began to choke up. She closed the book. "Maybe it was my destiny that I ended up in Bethel." She said. "There are such special people here." She got up and walked to the one shelf that wasn't covered in books, where she retrieved a large framed photo of a mother and her son. She handed it to me. "They were killed about two years ago now. They were gunned down on the way back to Bethel from a family gathering. When we first came to Bethel they were the first family that had us over. I didn't speak Hebrew. She didn't speak English. But there was such warmth there, and welcome. Just very special people. We went to their funeral. We went to the funeral of a kindergarten teacher. We went to the funeral of a young man in his early twenties. My children go every six months to someone else's funeral. When I lived in America the only funerals I went to were for old people."

"So why do you keep her picture?"

"Because I don't want to forget them. It's part of our life here. We have a cemetery. It's filling up!"

"And that doesn't make you want to say less?"

"It makes me want to stay more. It strengthens my pride for this place. Not only was Abraham here, and Jacob. But now I've been here, and my children, too. Not only did they make sacrifices. We made sacrifices, too. And we did it for the same reason. We believe God."

Avner and I were quiet for much of the way home. Once again an impromptu meeting had produced a connection to the Bible so profound--and so personal--that I felt it in my gut. I was struck by how physical Fern's experience was: First she felt a longing for her biblical roots, and then she came to Israel, then she felt as if she had become a part of the story herself. It's as if the act of going through those steps had taken her closer to God. Was there something inevitable about that process?

For the time being, I was focused on more tangible issues, specifically trying to figure out what Canaan was like when Abraham got there. The Bible is strikingly unhelpful in this regard. Abraham's initial encounters seem almost hurried over in the text. The account of Abraham's travels from Shechem, to Bethel, to the Negev is covered in only four verses. The absence of any details raised a question, which I asked Avner the following day: Is there a connection between what we were seeing and what Abraham would have seen? "Let's take a drive," he said.

We turned south from Jerusalem toward Beer-Sheba along the same route Abraham would have taken, the Patriarchs' Road. The original path would have been three or four feet wide, Avner noted, a stone-riddled trail winding around the mountains to avoid steep climbs. The Romans later widened it and paved it. Today it's a four-lane highway, with regulation shoulders, guardrails, light poles, the longest tunnel in Israel, as well as the longest bridge. At a scant two hundred yards, the bridge doesn't even cross a river; it crosses a ravine. "It's a small country," Avner said apologetically.

The road has other Israeli idiosyncrasies. The first is that almost every driver--including Avner--was cradling a mobile phone. Also, every car had at least one bumper sticker, mostly on political topics, like GIVING UP TERRITORY IS DANGEROUS FOR JEWS, some were emotional, like SHALOM HAVER, or "Good-bye Friend." Which is what President Bill Clinton said at the funeral for slain Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. "We're drawn to written things," Avner said, explaining the stickers. "We're still a people of the Book."

We zigzagged along the mountains for an hour while Avner began to sketch what Abraham would have found in Canaan. Though today the central hills are a mix of coffee-colored ridges, butterscotch boulders, and caramel soil--blended with groves of olive trees--the land wasn't always this parched. In the patriarchs' time, Canaan was a leafier wheat and barley. Canaanites built their cities in areas flush with trees, and thus water. Specifically this meant the Mediterranean coast, the Galilee, and the foothills of the central mountains. Abraham may have stopped in these areas, but when it came time to settle more permanently he moved farther south, to the threshold of the desert. "Wandering tribesmen didn't need areas to cultivate." Avner said. "They also didn't want conflict with cities. They wanted to be on the edge of civilization."

After several hours we neared the edge ourselves. The browns and beige's dissolved into a chalky moonscape of ashen hills, cracked mounds, and mesas that jab the air like fists wrapped in gauze. Suddenly Avner steered the car over, jumped out, and plopped down in the dirt. "You need a geology lesson," he said.

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As he started constructing a model in the sand, I pulled out my Bible. After Abraham arrives in the Negev from Bethel, a severe famine strikes the land and he is obliged to seek relief in Egypt. This excursion inaugurates a new, much more detailed part of Genesis, in which Abraham finally emerges a more fully realized character, with feelings for his wife and nephew, and the foundations of a code of conduct centered on right and wrong. As Abraham is about to enter Egypt he says to Sarah, "I know what a beautiful woman you are. If the Egyptians see you, and think, 'She is his wife,' they will kill me and let you live. Please say that you are my sister, that it may go well with me because of you, and that I may remain alive thanks to you." Events transpire as he predicted. The pharoah takes Sarah into his possession and pays Abraham a rich dowry, including sheep, oxen, asses, and camels, as well as male and female slaves. But God intervenes before the pharoah has relations with Sarah, and she is released. Abraham and Sarah, now further enriched with gold and silver from the king, return to Canaan.

Once they arrive, tensions arise between Abraham and his nephew, Lot, who also became wealthy in Egypt. "The Land could not support them staying together," the text says, "for their possessions were so great." Their herdsmen start to quarrel. Abraham, in a touching act of generosity, tries to assuage the problem, saying to Lot, "Let there be no strife between you and me, between my herdsmen and yours, for we are kinsmen. Is not the whole land before you? Let us separate: if you go north, I will go south; and if you go south, I will go north." Lot surveys the land, noticing how well watered the land of Jordan is, "like the garden of Eden." Lot, naturally, chooses the nicer land, :the whole plain of Jordan," while Abraham is left with the deserts of Canaan. Soon, though, God appears to compensate Abraham for his munificence. "Raise your eyes and look out from where you are," God says, promising to give

Abraham all the land he sees, including Jordan. "I will make your offspring as the dust of the earth, so that if one can count the dust of the earth, then our offspring too can be counted."

While Abraham's offspring may be entitled to the entire area in the long term, in the short term Abraham is confined to a narrow, almost uninhabitable patch between the central mountains and the Dead Sea. "That's where we are now," Avner said. While I was reading, he had a molded a mound of sand into a strip, like a baguette. "These are the central mountains," he said, pointing to the model. "These mountains were old, worn down over time. Then, about two million years ago" -- he gestured toward a ravine he had dug alongside the mound -- "the Rift Valley was created." The rift, a giant scar across the face of the earth, extends from Lake Victoria in Central Africa, up through the Sinai and Jordan, all the way to the Euphrates. It reaches bottom at the Dead Sea, 1,300 feet below sea level, the "lowest spot on earth."

Once the rift appeared, the eastern side of the hills dropped off far more dramatically than the west, creating a geological oddity. When rain clouds from the Meditterranean reach this ridge, they suddeny get hit with a thick wall of air. The air is denser here because the Dead Sea is so low. The lower the ground, the more atmosphere there is. The more atmosphere, the more pressure in the air. One consequence of so much pressure is that it sucks the moisture out of the air. "It's like if you press your lips against your sleeve and blow," Avner said, "your sleeve becomes hot. That's how this desert was created. It's the private desert of the Dead Sea. I hate to say it, but it's the smallest desert on earth."

"How many superlatives do you have?" I said.

"Let's see, Jericho is the lowest city on earth. The Sea of Galilee is the lowest freshwater lake on earth. The Dead Sea is the lowest-"

"I get the idea."

"Do you?" he said, smiling. He gestured for me to follow

We got back in the car and made the steep descent to the Dead Sea, continuing to read. Suddenly at this point in the story, Genesis 14, Abraham gets drawn into a war, indicating, if nothing else, that he is growing in stature: A mere shepherd would not attack a large army. Four kings from Mesopotamia who have come to the Negev, possibly for the copper mines, terrorize the region. Eventually five kings from the city-states of Canaan, specifically the Jordan River region where Lot is living, engage them in battle. The Mesopotamian kings triumph, seizing the wealth of Sodom and Gomorrah, and taking Lot prisoner. When Abraham learns of his nephew's plight, he pursues the kings, defeats them, and rescues Lot. "Your reward shall be very great," God tells Abraham. How can that be, the octogenarian Abraham protests, "seeing that I shall die childless?" Fear not, God says, your offspring shall be as numerous as the stars.

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Sarah, seeing her husband's frustration, follows Near Eastern custom from the time and offers him her Egyptian maidservant, Hagar, as a concubine. When Hagar gets pregnant, though, Sarah grows jealous and banishes her to the desert. An angel rescues Hagar, who then gives birth to a son, Ishmael. God reappears when Ishmael is thirteen and asks Abraham to follow another Near Eastern custom: circumcise himself and his son. This act is portrayed as a sign of the everlasting covenant between God and man, but for a God torn between acts of creation and destruction, it's also a fitting emblem: forever branding a man's source of creation with a mark of destruction.

One day, when Abraham is sitting at the entrance of his tent, the Lord visits in the guise of three men. Abraham, who doesn't know that the men represent God, follows bedouin tradition and orders that they be given food and water. "My lords, if it please you, do not go on past your servant. Let a little water be brought; bathe your feet and recline under a tree. And let me fetch a morsel of bread." Abraham hastens to Sarah and asks her to prepare a meal of choice cakes and curd. He then slaughters a calf, "tender and choice," and serves it, too.

After eating, the men ask Abraham where his wife, Sarah, is. He tells them, and one of the men announces, "I will return to you when life is due, and your wife Sarah shall have a son!" Sarah, who is then ninety and no longer having "the periods of women," is listening and laughs out loud. She adds, to herself, "Now that I am withered, am I to have enjoyment -- with my husband so old?" "Why did Sarah laugh?" God asks Abraham. Sarah grows frightened and denies she laughed, but God repeats, "You did laugh."

At this point, the men suddenly decide to leave and Abraham escorts them out. Along the way, God decides to reveal himself and the purpose of his visit. "Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?" he asks. God then announces that he intends to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, because "their outrage is so great, and their sin is so grave!" No explicit sin is given. Abraham, in the first instance in which he stands up to God, protests, saying, "Perhaps there are fifty righteous people in the city." The two negotiate the number down to ten -- another sign of Abraham's growing stature--and God departs.

In Sodom, Lot also welcomes the visitors warmly, but that night his neighbors demand the right to have sexual relations with the men. Lot resists, but the people of the town insist. "Where are the men who came to you tonight?" they ask Lot. "Bring them to us, that we may be intimate with them." This is a clear reference to homosexuality (and the origin of the word sodomy) and God responds by destroying the city, using what the King James Bible calls "brimstone and fire," and what modern translations often call "sulfurous fire." Before this happens, though, God instructs Lot and his family to flee, but not to glance behind them. When Lot's wife does look back, she becomes a pillar of salt.

Avner and I had now reached the bottom of the descent and he pulled to a stop once again. We stepped out of the car at the southern tip of the Dead Sea into a mixture of sulfurous air, oppressive heat, and deceptively inviting turquoise waters. The climate here is like an anti-greenhouse, with all the moisture sucked out of the air. Because of the heat, water evaporates at a faster rate here, meaning the sea contains 25 percent solids and a retching 7 percent salt -- six times saltier than the ocean. People are said to be able to float in this brine, but that's not quite floating, not quite sinking, and covered in a fatty soup. There is one benefit to this otherwise deadly place. The thicker atmosphere prevents ultraviolet rays from reaching the ground, which means, Avner said, that the Dead Sea is the "best place to get a suntan in the world." The sun, coupled with minerals from the water, is so effective against psoriasis that German and Austrian health plans actually pay patients to fly to Israel rather than stay at home applying lotions.

In the ancient world, the Dead Sea, which the Bible calls the "Salt Sea," was less of a novelty and more of a frightening marvel. To explain, Avner led me on a short hike up the cliffs. We scrambled over rocks so brittle they sometimes broke loose in our hands. After a while, we crawled through a narrow opening into a formation called the Cave of Two Chimneys. It was a cylindrical chamber about the size of a spiral staircase with matching two-story knobbly pillars that looked like drumsticks. Only these towers weren't made of wood. They were made of salt,

"Entirely of salt?" I asked

"Lick it," he said.

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These columns proved to be the most unexpected sideshow of the lowest place on earth. Because water evaporates so rapidly here, the floor of the Dead Sea is lined with a layer of minerals several miles thick. With so much atmosphere, the air actually pushes down on the water, which in turn pushes down on this layer of minerals, squeezing out the salt, the most malleable of the minerals. The salt is forced deeper into the earth and eventually out toward the shore, at which point it pushes up through the ground into assorted asparagus-like formation. The two chimneys were striking examples, and when we scampered to the top of the hill we saw several more. The process continues to this day. Avner told me that when he came here as a boy there were gas-station pumps near the road. When he returned a few years later, the mountain had expanded so much its outer edge had overtaken the pumps. "It's a living mountain," he said.

Which brought us back to Avner's model in the sand. We were sitting now atop Sodom mountain, overlooking the Dead Sea. There were no cars, or people, for miles.

"Sodom is the first example of biblical storytellers taking an actual place," Avner said, referring to salt flats around the Dead Sea, "and using a story to explain how it developed. With the Flood, or Mount Sinai, the Bible tells the story and we can try to match the place or not. Here we know the place, and the Bible tells us what it means. Every schoolkid today calls these formations Lot's wife."

"But why such a violent story?"

"Because to them, this was a place of death."

He pointed me back to the text. After his wife dies, Lot and his daughters flee first to Zoar, then to a cave in the high country. Avner tapped me on the arm and pointed across the Dead Sea. "That's Zoar," he said. As the Bible describes, it was green, and above it was a range of mountains. "And before you get to the dirty part, let me tell you that in those mountains is a cave, which the Byzantines identified as Lot's." Once settled, Lot's daughters, concerned by the lack of men, get their father drunk and commit incest. The elder daughter has a son, who becomes father of the Moabites; the younger has a son who becomes father of the Ammonites. Both nations settle across the Jordan River, adjacent to the Promised Land. "Do you see those mountains?" Avner said, pointing above Zoar. "That's Moab. Further north is Ammon."

"So the writers knew what they were talking about," I said.

"Oh, they knew, deeply. They also knew that Moab and Ammon would later become rivals of Israel. This is a retroactive justification for why they were the enemy: They were conceived in incest."

"It's almost as if the Bible's a Baedeker," I said. "It's certainly better than my guidebooks."

"It's better because of the story," he said. "It's very literary, yet very obvious. It's good versus evil. Anybody who hears this story can immediately tell you which side is good. That's the reason so many of these stories work: The moral is very clear."

Back in Jerusalem I lay awake that evening, dazed and enthralled by our early experiences. I had no idea that even gentle pushing on the topograhy of the region would yield such immediate results. I felt as if I'd entered some virtual reality game and reemerged in a parallel world four thousand years ago. In particular I was surprised by how the stories and the places seemed so intimately connected as if each carried the memory of the other deep within it. Bring them together, as we were doing, and both were enhanced.

But for all the added texture, I still felt somewhat removed from the central figure. Who was Abraham? What motivated him? What did he look like? I went back to see Professor Biran, who invited me to accompany him on a trip.

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It was 7:00 on a Friday morning when we left Jerusalem on our way to Israel's northern border and Biran's ongoing excavation in the biblical city of Dan. At eighty-eight, Professor Biran sat in the passenger seat while his longtime secretary, Honey, drove. A native of Palestine who grew up along the Nile, Avraham Biran was certainly a pioneer. An archaelolgist by training, he was also the first postwar governor of Jerusalem, a consul general to the United States, head of the Israeli Department of Antiquities, and, after retirement, one of the most productive excavators of his era. He was a compact man who favored a mathematician's clothes--short-sleeved shirts and polyester pants--but also managed to be effortlessly urbane. He reminded me of Burgess Meredith as the avuncular trainer in Rocky.

"I never liked the name Avraham," he said. "But I like the name Abe even less. I went to Los Angeles and they asked me my name. 'Avraham,' I said. They had to think about it, but after a while they said, 'Oh! Ab-raham. We'll just call you 'Abe.' And I said, 'Oh no you won't.'"

Despite this ambivalence, Professor Biran had a deep affinity with his namesake. Abraham, he noted proudly, was a man of breadth-- a shepherd, a warrior, a diplomat, a husband, a father, an uncle, a judge--the world's first Renaissance man. Based on contemporaneous images, he would likely have worn a knee-length pleated wool skirt, probably brown, with a long felt shawl draped over one shoulder. To this he would have added a bronze belt and sandals. His shoulder-length hair was likely parted in the middle, and he probably had a pointed beard and no mustache. As for skills, carpentry was popular, as was minstrel music and storytelling. With Abraham in particular, we know that he was wealthy, with large herds and enough status for pharaohs and kings to negotiate with him. The fact that he came from Ur of the Chaldeans is intriguing. In antiquity, Chaldea was famous for one thing: astronomy. This explains why some suggested Abraham used his knowledge of the stars to divine that there was only one God. Josephus went further, suggesting that Abraham taught astrology to the Egyptians, who then taught it to the Greeks, which would make Abraham the father of not just western religion but also western science.

Abraham was also a frequent traveler, meaning he probably touched countless sites in the Promised Land, including Dan. After more than three hous we neared the site, a sprawling, tree-shrouded mound of about fifty acres within shouting distance of the Lebanese mountains. These sites, called "tels," are the staple of Near Eastern archaeology, layer cakes of history in which each generation built on top of the previous one. Tels are particularly common in this region, because with no rivers, cities were constructed in the few places with reliable water, in this case a spring. Originally called Laish, this site was later renamed Dan, after One of the twelve tribes, and lent its name to the vivid expression of Israelite unity, "from Dan to Beer-sheba."

Professor Biran explored his excavation for a while, checking to see what his graduate students had recently uncovered, while Honey showed me around the ruins, which mostly date from the first millennium B.C.E. Around noon he met us and announced he had something to show me. We hiked uphill, until the dense canopy of eucalyptus and avocado trees unfolded, revealing a brilliant blue sky. Biran was using a cane, which attracted the attention of a flock of white butterflies.

"Now I have a question for you, my friend," he said. "Who invented the arch?"

I thought for a second, a series of images flickering through my mind; stones, columns, keystones, slaves. "The Egyptians?" I said.

He looked at me, disappointed. "The Romans," he corrected. "You learned in school that it was the Romans. That's why I didn't believe what I saw when I first came here. We were working two thousand years earlier than the Romans--at the time of the patriarchs."

We rounded a corner and from out of the trees a large mound of rubble interrupted the path. Instead of thick underbrush, the area was clear, dominated by piles of dirt and stones.

"One thing about digging for the Bible," Brian said. "You have to put your faith in accidental discoveries." He was particularly interested in how ancient cities protected themselves. In Dan, his team discovered that the southern wall was held together with columns.

"The conclusion would be that they built all ramparts in this manner," he said. "But we weren't satisfied with that answer." They pushed toward the north, where they found walls built on a slope, with no columns. Next they moved west, where they found a third technique, walls supported by buttresses. Finally they pushed east. "And there we didn't find a stone wall at all," he said. "We found packed mud." More important, within the mud construction was the outline of a gate.

As he relived the experience, Biran grew more animated. He began scurrying over the edge of the cliff. With arms, legs, and cane working in impressive tandem, the years seemed to peel from his body. When his team uncovered the gate, which they left attached to the mud bank behind it, Biran insisted his draftsman draw the structure. The draftsman refused. The dig had run past its closing date; he wanted to go home. Biran insisted, and hours later the man came sprinting. "You've got to come look at this," he said. When Biran reached the site, he found the traces of an arch.

"Now this is what people come from all over the world to see," he said. We'd arrived at the base of the structure. The pile of rubble at the top had unfurled into a three-story arch with the outline of a semicircle on top. It looked like an entrance to a coliseum, except that it wasn't made of marble but of crumbling, loaf-sized bricks of mud. It was two thousand years older than any arch known to exist.

"What's remarkable about this," he continued, "is that you can't find a building built years ago of mud brick that's still standing. It's impossible."

He turned to face me. "And this is where Abraham comes in," he said. "This is why I brought you here. In Genesis 14, before Sodom and Gomorrah, you read about Abraham pursuing the kings who took Lot prisoner. And the text says, 'He came as far as Dan.' It was called Laish then, but that doesn't matter. My point is that the king of this place, seeing how Abraham had won a great victory, invited him to walk up these steps. This is as close to the physical steps of Abraham that you will ever get.

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He was caught by his own statement and for a moment abandoned his academic distance. As he did, I finally caught the glimmer of humanity in the text I'd been looking for. The chapters of Genesis devoted to Abraham have two prominent themes: how God acts toward the patriarch, and how the patriarch acts toward God. In the beginning, Abraham willingly accepts God's promise of land and descendants. He leaves Harran for Canaan without question. He arrives in Shechem, hears God's promise, and builds an altar. He does the same in Bethel. Even the famine in Canaan, which drives Abraham to Egypt, was a test of his devotion, which Abraham pursues admirably. Eventually, though, he tires of the tests and empty promises. When will he have descendants? he asks God. When will he see a physical manifestation of God's word?

It was through this struggle--so human, so understandable--that I first felt a connection to Abraham. Like him, readers of Abraham's story are expected to accept the words of God as true. Here's what God did; here's what he said. Embracing those words is a matter of faith. For me that task was difficult. Perhaps it was my concrete nature, or my natural obeisance to science, reason, or skepticism. Maybe it was fear of entering a realm that I couldn't control or see. But I found myself wanting more. Before I could consider what the biblical characters feel toward God, I needed to feel a connection to them. I needed something to touch, a physical manifestation of their lives.

And here it was. Here was a way, however abstract, to touch Abraham and through him, to touch his world. Leading me up the short flight of stairs, Professor Biran took my hand and placed it against the wall, which was crumbly like stale bread. "Do you feel that?' he said. He was referring not to the texture, but to the surge of excitement.

"Every time I come here I feel the same thing," he sad. "And I say to myself, that's what Abraham must have felt. It's a sense of history."

I withdrew my hand. A dusting of dirt came off on my fingers. "And if people say, 'You've got no evidence of this. You're making this up'?"

"I say, You're right. I have no evidence the Abraham walked here. I would never publish it. But in a lecture, on a tour--tou you--I would say it, because people are familiar with Abraham, because it makes his story more real. And because even though I'm a scientist, I can still have faith." He smiled, and for the first time all day there was a touch of mortality in his voice. "And because it's my name as well. So what the hell? I want to feel part of the Bible, too."

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Bruce Feiler's previous books include "Dreaming Out Loud" and "Learning to Bow". He writes often for "The New Yorker" and "The New York Times Magazine" and is a regular contributor to National Public Radio's "All Things Considered".