Genesis: Abraham's Odyssey

The View from Nebo: How Archeology Is Rewriting the Bible and Reshaping the Middle East
by Amy Dockser Marcus

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Chapter 1

Now the Lord said to Avram, "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred and from thy father's house, unto the land that I will show thee. And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and be thou a blessing. And I will bless them that bless thee, and him that curseth thee I will curse; and in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed." (Genesis 12:I-3)

The history of the Israelites begins with the story of a family, the personal odyssey of Abraham, his wife Sarah, their son Isaac and his wife Rebecca, their grandson Jacob, and Jacob's twelve sons. Throughout the Bible, but especially in its first five books -Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy - we follow every detail of their increasingly complex lives, sharing their betrayals, deceptions, and multitude of sins. Only much later, after a miraculous escape from slavery in Egypt, a forty-year sojourn in the desert, and their conquest of Canaan, is it clear that somewhere along the way this family has become a dynasty and, finally, a nation.

Many of the most widely known stories in the Bible, including the story of Abraham's journey from his father's house in Ur, in Mesopotamia, to the Promised Land in Canaan, date to ancient times, some as far back as three thousand years ago. Despite the.chronological gap that exists between Abraham's life and days and our own, part of the Bible's power throughout the centuries has been the writers' ability to convince us that these events are as real as those that occurred only recently.

More than any other patriarchal figure, Abraham remains a vivid, living presence, a familiar part of the daily life -and daily politics - of the Middle East. Virtually every country through which Abraham passed en route to Canaan has its own holy site and legend associated with him, and a tourism industry eager to promote it. In Urfa, a city near the border between Turkey and Syria, locals venerate and regularly visit a cave where the infant Abraham and his mother are popularly believed to have hidden for three years after the king of Ur decreed that all newborn males were to be killed. Another tradition in Urfa says that when this same king heard of the young Abraham's refusal to pray to idols he ordered him thrown into a fiery furnace on a mountain summit. Water from a pool below the mountain miraculously rose up and extinguished the fire, and the fish living in it carried Abraham away to safety. To this day, no one will touch the carp swimming in the site designated as Abraham's pool out of the conviction that they are the descendants of the fish that rescued Abraham. Anyone who harms the fish, it is said, will go blind.

In downtown Baghdad, in Iraq, a mosque stands in the place where Iraqis believe Abraham's childhood was spent, and the faithful gather there five times a day to pray to him. On the Israeli-Syrian border, Druze Arabs maintain a site they hold sacred as the place where God and Abraham established their covenant, and where today barren women of all religions make pilgrimage with prayers for a child. On the outskirts of Hebron, in the West Bank, members of a Russian hospice carefully tend an oak tree in their courtyard garden. They believe that it was here that Abraham rushed out to greet and offer hospitality to the three angels of God who came to visit him and tell him that his wife Sarah soon would give birth. In the coffee shops of downtown Hebron, the waiters still serve steaming bowls of a lentil dish called Abraham's soup, and in Damascus, street vendors hawk Abraham's juice, made from the fruit of the tamarisk tree, which the Bible records was planted by Abraham in Beersheba. At the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, where the Bible says Abraham and Sarah are buried, Israelis and Palestinians still battle over Abraham's legacy, praying in separate sections of the divided sanctuary at the cave both claim to own.

Despite Abraham's continuing hold on the lives of so many people, a vastly different situation exists among Bible scholars, archaeologists, and historians where Abraham is concerned. They still debate vociferously the extent of David's empire and argue passionately about whether Solomon built a certain building. They mine historical texts searching for additional clues about Omri and Ahab in order to reconstruct the lives and reigns of these lesser-known kings of Israel, and parse the later books of the Old Testament in order to determine whether the writings of Ezra and Nehemiah jibe with Persian records of the same events. In their many acrimonious disagreements exists the conviction that biblical history remains open to interpretation and is a worthy subject of vigorous academic debate and scholarship. The one glaring exception to this breadth of inquiry is Abraham and his times. There is virtually no interest at all in investigating what used to be called the patriarchal age. "Most Bible scholars and archaeologists have abandoned the question of the patriarchs altogether," says Ronald Hendel, himself a Bible scholar. "They don't regard Abraham as having anything historical to say."

Until the 1970s archaeologists were bent on proving the historical accuracy of the patriarchal narratives. But the belief that it was possible for archaeology to validate such an ancient religious story instead led to serious mistakes. In 1975 Italian archaeologists digging at Tell Mardikh, the site of the ancient city of Ebla, about 34 miles south of Aleppo, Syria, stumbled upon sixteen thousand cuneiform tablets, a spectacular find. Most of the tablets seemed to be routine administrative records of the palace, including receipts for purchases and ledgers of income and expenditures. But the Ebla tablets, as they soon came to be called, caused a sensation after an Italian Assyriologist began translating them and announced that they contained the names of biblical sites such as Hazor, Megiddo, Gaza, and Sodom and Gomorrah. They even featured a creation story that read very much like the one in Genesis, at least according to a translation that was soon published. Not everyone was thrilled with the discoveries. Syrian officials asked the archaeologists to downplay the tablets' possible biblical connections, particularly the growing suggestion that the Eblaites might have been ancient Hebrews. But the major backlash came later, and from a more scholarly quarter, when more careful translations revealed that the tablets did not in fact mention biblical cities; the translation of the creation poem was also rejected.

During the same period two influential books were published by American bible scholars, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives, by Thomas L. Thompson, and Abraham in History and Tradition, by John van Seters. Both works examined the biblical text and concluded by questioning the historical validity of the patriarchal narratives. These scholars suggested that the stories surrounding Abraham and the other patriarchs had been invented as late as the fifth century b.c.e., a thousand years after the patriarchal age, when the Bible's writers wanted to explain the origins of the emerging Israelite nation-state.

Before the 1970s scholars and archaeologists had argued for the patriarchal narratives' historical accuracy based on the fact that many of their details appeared to correspond to practices recorded in cuneiform archives found in the ancient city of Nuzi, in Mesopotamia, which dated from the second millennium b.c.e. But this theory met the same fate as the Ebla tablets when it turned out that some of the putative parallels between the biblical stories and the Nuzi archives, such as personal names and family law customs, were the result of scholarly misinterpretations of the documents, or would have been equally true of later historical periods. "By the time the dust cleared from the academic battle," Hendel recalls, "people had moved on. They never looked back."

But for the first time, we now have the ability to piece together with a reasonable degree of certainty at least parts of Abraham's world. From archaeological excavations and surveys in the Judean hills of Israel, a richer reconstruction has emerged of the economic, social, and agricultural development of Hebron over a period of thousands of years, illustrating how the current political conflict over Abraham has its roots in the biblical era. New research being conducted on the Middle Bronze Age (2000-1550 B.C.E.), the period of time to which scholars still date traditions about a figure named Abraham, reveals that Abraham's actions can be best understood in the context of the changing conditions in the Middle East. Textual criticism of the patriarchal narratives further illuminates the way much of Abraham's story evolved over time.

The significance of this cannot be overestimated, especially in an area of the world where the past still has such a hold on people. Archaeology helps us understand not just the Bible, but what the Bible left out. Biblical interpretation is an ancient phenomenon, something that occurred almost simultaneously with the writing of the narratives. The scribes responsible for insuring the survival of the stories, histories, psalms, and regulations that we read today, the ones who painstakingly copied the texts as parchments aged and disintegrated, didn't simply transfer the texts word for word, comma for comma. The stories were changed, their meanings shifting slightly, or sometimes more dramatically. "By omitting some things and adding others, [an] author reshaped the past and so made it into a more perfect model of what he himself wished to prescribe for the future," writes the prominent Bible scholar James L. Kugel about the ancient biblical interpreters. He might as well be talking about the modern interpreters too. Archaeology recovers what was omitted and adds things that were never considered; in the process, it reshapes history and its consequences.

Yehuda Yaniv, an Israeli documentary filmmaker, is one of these new interpreters. He has followed the progress of the latest research and its implications for the patriarchal narratives, visiting the sites of a few digs in Israel and Jordan. In 1994, firmly believing that the Abraham who was slowly emerging from the work could be used as a bridge between Jews and Muslims, Yaniv decided he wanted to make a film about Abraham. "I was looking for a way to explore what links us, rather than what separates us," he says.

This wouldn't be an easy task, he recognized, despite the fact that both faiths venerate Abraham as a prophet. The narratives concerning Abraham that developed over the years and now appear in both the Bible and the Koran seem virtually irreconcilable. There is the famous Bible story of the sacrifice of Isaac. After years of their praying for a child, a son, Isaac, is born to Abraham and Sarah. One day God orders Abraham to sacrifice his son as an offering, proof of his ultimate fealty to his faith. Abraham is strangely silent in the face of this demand - he doesn't even plead for his son's life. He silently sharpens his knife and sets out with Isaac to the place God shows him. When they arrive at the designated spot, Abraham methodically binds Isaac, then in a chilling scene, raises his knife. At the very last moment, God stays his hand, sparing the boy and providing a ram for a sacrifice instead. In the Koran's version of this story, it is Ishmael, Abraham's older son, the child of his wife's handmaid Hagar, who is commanded to be sacrificed and then saved. After Ishmael's miraculous deliverance, he and Abraham build the Kaaba, the Islamic holy shrine at Mecca to which millions of Muslims go on pilgrimage every year. Muslims praying there walk around the Kaaba seven times, in remembrance of Hagar's circling in the desert seven times in order to find water for her child after she and Ishmael are banished by Abraham at the insistence of the jealous Sarah. The Koran says that Muhammad developed the faith that Abraham initiated, and Abraham is considered Islam's first prophet, the first Muslim.

Despite this divergence in tradition, Yaniv persisted in the notion of establishing a common religious ground. Shortly after the signing of the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan in 1994, he teamed up with a Jordanian film company and set out to retrace the route Abraham takes in the Bible. Unlike scholars who preceded him, the filmmaker wasn't interested in determining if Abraham actually stopped at every single place on the biblical itinerary. Instead, his intention was to search for Abraham the man. He wanted people to understand what it might have been like to live in Abraham's time. Yaniv hired two actors to be the narrators, a famous Jordanian comedian and stage performer named Hisham Younis, and an Israeli radio and television personality, Alex Ansky. At the Allenby Bridge, the main crossing point between Jordan and Israel, the two men greeted each other warmly, calling each other Isaac and Ishmael. They read passages related to Abraham's story from both the Koran and the Bible. For the most part, however, it wasn't easy making the film. Very few Muslim religious leaders wished to appear on camera in a joint Israeli-Jordanian project. No Jordanian professors or religious leaders took part, and only one Palestinian lecturer working in the West Bank agreed to be filmed. The majority of contributors were Israeli Jews or Israeli Arabs. Yaniv followed Abraham's route at great expense, journeying as far as Haran, on the Turkish-Syrian border, in order to visit the village from which Abraham sets out for the Promised Land after leaving his home in Ur. It was difficult for Yaniv to obtain permission from the Turks for the trip, due to the tensions with the Kurdish resistance groups that opposed the Turkish government, and goverment officials feared he might be kidnapped or killed. On his way to the village, Yaniv's driver fell asleep at the wheel of the jeep, just as a man was driving a tractor across the treacherous road. The driver was killed, the jeep went off the road and flipped over, and Yaniv and his wife were both injured. Still, he persisted, filming mosques, caves, tombs, and synagogues all over the Middle East, filming anywhere the Bible or other traditions and legends said Abraham had stopped along the way to Canaan.

The movie he ultimately prepared, called Abraham's Odyssey, is a fascinating document, though perhaps even more interesting is what Yaniv ended up having to leave on the cutting-room floor. The original film featured one scene in which Younis and Ansky stood together on Mount Nebo in Jordan, where the Bible says Moses viewed the land promised to Abraham. The two men began to argue, Ansky insisting that the promise was most important to the Jewish people. Younis protested that it had been made to all the children of Abraham, Ishmael as well as Isaac. "The expression Promised Land was too charged, and we had to throw the whole scene out," says Yaniv.

Other scenes had to be cut as well. The Jordanian producer insisted that a picture of Younis, a Muslim, wearing a traditional Jewish head covering at the Western Wall in Jerusalem be left out in order not to offend Islamic fundamentalists. A visit to a mosque in Amman that ended when a group of Islamic fundamentalists gathered and started shouting, "Kill the Jews!" was likewise dropped.

Copyright © 2000 by Amy Dockser Marcus

About the Author

Amy Dockser Marcus joined the Wall Street Journal in 1988 and from 1991 to 1998 was based in Tel Aviv as the newspaper's Middle East correspondent. She is currently a senior special writer in the Journal's Boston bureau.