Bruce Feiler - Where God Was Born, Abraham, Walking The Bible

Where God Was Born
Tuesday, February 6, 2007

Today is publication day for the paperback of my latest book, WHERE GOD WAS BORN: A Daring Adventure Through the Bible's Greatest Stories. A 10,000-mile adventure through the heart of the Middle East -- from the Garden of Eden to the rivers of Babylon -- WHERE GOD WAS BORN visits biblical sites unseen by Westerners in decades and explores the little-known origins of Judaism, Chrsitianity, and Islam.

In honor of the publication and the launch of this blog, I've received special permission to post a few excerpts in the coming weeks. Today, a slightly abbreviated version of the opening pages. Enjoy.

----------
I feel the tension before I know its source. My legs begin to quiver, then shake. Soon my whole body is quaking with vibration, or is it fear? Up above, the whir begins to build into a thudding bass beat. Cold air blows through the cracks and up my spine. I’m shivering. My feet are trembling. “Are you ready?” The sound in my ears is crackling, and a bit wicked. I nod. Within seconds, the shaking becomes overwhelming, the thumping dense, and the pull so strong it seems ready to suck my head off. I feel as if I’m in a full-body migraine. And then, just as suddenly, quiet. The sound dissolves, my body relaxes. I’m in the air, in a war. I’m at peace.

The helicopter pauses for a second, then accelerates into a gentle glide. Down below, the landing pad disappears, and rows of orange and avocado trees poke up toward the sky. I see the hairs on a donkey’s ears. Our nose is tipped, we’re flying, yet we’re not moving very quickly. Lifting off in a helicopter is like drifting off to sleep: You leave one realm and shift into another; the features seem dreamily unfamiliar; you want to touch what you see, but you can’t.

We bank toward the Mediterranean. Voices in my headphones interrupt. “This is the Air Force. Identify yourself! Do you have permission to be here?” Boaz, the pilot, smiles. We did have permission, garnered over the preceding six months, from three government agencies, but the flight was still risky. War was raging – between the Israelis and the Palestinians, between a fragile coalition and Iraq, between the pluralist West and Islamic extremism. Ripples were reverberating around the globe. The Cradle of Civilization – the tiny, fertile crescent of land that stretched from Mesopotamia to North Africa – had once more seized control of the world’s destiny and the future of civilization seemed to be at stake.

The bloody clash of faith and politics that filled front pages at the beginning of the new millennium seemed surprising, coming at the end of a century that seem to mark the end of God as a force in world affairs. Hadn’t Nietzsche declared at the end of the previous century (1882) that God was dead? Hadn’t science, capitalism, and the World Wide Web rendered faith a quaint hangover from the past?

History wasn’t ending, of course; it was finally coming home. The collision of politics, geography, and faith has dominated nearly every story in the Middle East since the birth of writing. It also dominates the greatest story every told. Jews and Christians who smugly console themselves that Islam is the only violent religion are willfully ignoring their past. Nowhere is the struggle between faith and violence described more vividly, and with more stomach-turning details of ruthlessness, than in the Hebrew Bible.

Yet nowhere is this conflict conveyed with more humanity and hope.

And so, I thought, what better way to confront my doubts about religion and consider the future of faith than to travel to the land where God was born? And what better guide to read along the way than the text that defines identity for half the world’s believers?

I would journey to the flashpoints in the new world war over God – Israel, Iraq, and Iran – and bring along my Bible. And I would begin my quest with the second half of the Hebrew Bible, at the moment when the children of Israel, sprung from Adam and Eve, descended from Abraham, and freed by Moses, face their harshest challenge. “Conquer the Promised Land,” God says to Joshua, Moses’s successor, at the start of the books of the Prophets. “Destroy the pagans who live on the land,” God commands. “Seize the future for yourselves – and for me.”

------------
"Breathtaking ... Goes from cover to cover, from one eye-opening story to the next, without a letup." Boston Globe

"Feiler is a real-life Indiana Jones." Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Labels: Biblical Archaeology, Middle East

Posted by B Feiler at 8:18 AM
Permalink Digg this Post Email this Post

0 Comments: