Walking the Bible by Bruce Feiler

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 formations. 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. Avnertapped 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 topography 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.

    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