Walking the Bible by Bruce Feiler Page B

put your faith in accidental discoveries.” He was particularly interestedin 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.”

    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