Walking the Bible by Bruce Feiler Read Free Book Online Page A

communities, Harran has been mostly abandoned since the Crusades. T. E. Lawrence discovered an eighth-century mosque here, and its broken pillars and tower are still frozen in time, like a shipwreck under water. Even the village itself seems arrested in its development. Half the homes have beehive roofs, circular domes made of mud that serve as a flue to remove heat in the summer. A few satellite dishes did little to lessen the feeling of desolation.
    We walked around for a few hours before climbing to the top of the ruin and pulling out our Bibles. After Abraham arrives in Harran, God—unexpected and unannounced—suddenly starts speaking to him, saying, “Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house, to the land that I will show you.” It’s one of the most famous passages in the Bible, and the one I read during my Bar Mitzvah. “I will make of you a great nation,” God says, “and I will bless you; I will make your name great.”
    Though there were no walls around, the words still seemed to echo a bit. It was late afternoon by now. The sun, off to the west in Syria, set the dust on fire, with plumes kicking up behind a herd of goats. “Why are those words so famous?” I asked.
    “Because they’re the beginning of everything,” Avner said. “Of monotheism, of creating the Jewish people. Leaving this place is leaving behind the old faith, the old pattern of life, the fertility—for a new start.”
    “So why did he do it?”
    “The Bible doesn’t say. As far as the text is concerned, God says to do it, so Abraham goes. That’s it. But Jewish tradition says that Abraham was the first person to recognize that this was the one God.”
    “But he had never heard God before. He didn’t know who or what God was. He didn’t see God. And suddenly, this voice says ‘Go,’ and he goes.”
    “The concept in the Bible is that the voice was such a powerful thing that Abraham had no doubts. He had faith.”
    “So what would have been the biggest change from the world he left to the world where he was going?”
    “The biggest difference would be leaving an area that was the coreof civilization to a place that was just emerging. It was not the heart of everything.”
    “But because he went, it became the heart of everything.”
    “And that’s the point,” Avner said. “Abraham begins a new cycle.” All through the Bible, he noted, the text follows a pattern of creation, followed by destruction, followed by re-creation. First God creates the world, for example; then, unhappy with how humans are behaving, he destroys it and begins again with Noah. Abraham marks the start of a new cycle, one that will continue throughout the Five Books of Moses. Even more important, God’s decree to Abraham to leave Harran and go to the Promised Land, which overlapped much of Canaan, marks an end to the phase of Genesis that takes place in Mesopotamia. As a result, it also brings to a close the part of the story that was dominated by Mesopotamian imagery, specifically water as the chief source of creation.
    “Do you want to know the real difference between here and the Promised Land?” Avner asked, not waiting for a reply. “There are no rivers. There are no floods. Canaan was settled. It had some rain. But the water wasn’t predictable, or plentiful. In saying lech l’cha ”—go forth—“God changed the history of the world. He gave Abraham the power of fertility, the power to create a great nation, which up to now had belonged only to the rivers: the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Nile. From now on, people—not water—would control the world. People who believed in God.” We sat silently for a few moments and watched the sun slide out of sight, leaving a pink glaze on the horizon. The herd of goats had disappeared. The dust had completely settled. For the first time since we started, I felt a sense of contentment—and peace. No matter the difficulty of what we were trying to do—regardless of my