Perambulating the Pentateuch
A Review of Bruce Feiler's Walking the Bible

Walking the Bible: A Journey by Land through the Five Books of Moses. By Bruce Feiler. New York, 2001, 451 pp., $26.00 (Hardback.)

Let’s be honest. Between the names (Melchizedek, Zelophehad) and the locations (Baal Zephon, Hor Haggidgad), the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch, are not exactly easy reading. Without a refresher course in ancient history and geography, or at least a glance at the glossy map in the back of a Bible, much of the text could be rendered as so much static:

“Now Abraham moved on from there into the region of the **** and lived between ****** and *****. For a while he stayed in ******…”
--Genesis 20:1.

On its surface, the Pentateuch offers little of what we’ve come to expect in a religious text: spiritual advice, inspiring rhetoric or even moral conviction.

Enter NPR contributor Bruce Feiler’s present-day oddysey, Walking the Bible: A Journey by Land Through the Five Books of Moses. A New York Times best seller, the book explores not only the geographical backdrop for the stories found in the Pentateuch, but also the way in which these stories are read. In his book, Feiler spends a year in the desert pursuing a physical encounter with the land into which the Bible was birthed.

“In the Middle East,” Feiler writes, “I realized, the Bible is not some abstraction, nor some book gathering dust. It’s a living, breathing entity unencumbered by the sterilization of time. If anything, it’s an ongoing narrative: stories that begin in the sand, get entrenched in stone, pass down through families, and play themselves out in the lives of residents and visitors who traverse its lines nearly five thousand years after they were first etched into memory. That was the Bible I wanted to know, and almost immediately I realized that the only way to find it was to walk along those lines myself.”

A fifth generation, non-practicing American Jew, Feiler sets out on his journey through the Pentateuch with both historical respect and journalistic skepticism. Noting that the biblical references he encountered in weddings, literature and current events have no context within his life, Feiler seeks to better understand the text through a relationship to its environs. The author travels through Egypt, the Sinai, Jerusalem and Petra as he, along with his extremely well connected and well-educated sidekick, visits the locales of the more famous biblical happenings. Feiler converses with archaeologists, curators, Bedouin sheepherders (of both the television-owning and non television-owning varieties), scientists, Catholic monks and politicians.

Bruce Feiler worked not to prove the accuracy of the historical accounts found within the first five books of the Bible, but “to walk in [the Bible’s] footsteps, live in its canyons, meet its characters, and ask its questions.” And this is the allure of Walking the Bible: the book tells of a man’s exploration of scriptures, lands and cultures as he allows the experience to transform his perspective. What propels Feiler through three continents, five countries, and four war zones in his quest is as much about internal topography as physical geography. And what Feiler receives for his pursuits—friendship, hospitality, awe, a new way of relating to the God of his forbearers—seems a just reward for his efforts.

Feiler’s previous works have chronicled immersions into various subcultures (information available at www.brucefeiler.com). His challenge in Walking the Bible was, of course, that he was not dealing solely with the present. After years of excavation, scholars still question the location of the events that have so impressed themselves upon western culture (stories of Noah’s Ark, the Burning Bush, the Ten Commandments) actually occurred. Theories about these sites abound, but hard, physical evidence is widely debated.

The geographical-cum-spiritual journey is a well-worn plot archetype. However, in Walking the Bible, Feiler breathes new life into the genre. Admirably, Feiler avoids painting himself as a journalistic Indiana Jones. Instead, he allows his readers to see his cultural foibles and even employs the sort of southern idiomatic “color” that lets his reader know that, even at his most immersed, he is true to his more immediate roots in the Southern United States.

Feiler’s companion, Avner Goren, though, is more/less fortunate, depending on your taste for hyperbole. A typical conversation, at this point in regard to the Babylonian and Mesopotamian creation stories as related to that found in the Bible, proceeds like this:

Goren: “So you see, in both stories, water precedes everything, a struggle ensues, and everything else emerges from that.”
Feiler: “But when Westerners imagine God creating the world, they don’t imagine a struggle.”
Goren: “Yes, but the struggle is still there…there is clearly an echo of struggle here, getting rid of evil.”
Feiler: “So how did that echo get there?
Goren: “Ah. That’s the story of the Bible. Though it was written down later, large parts of it consist of oral traditions that were passed down for hundreds of years, many with the same words.” (p21)

But even as a reincarnation of Socrates or a personification of Research, Goren is both likable and readable. The duo of Feiler and Goren, through dialog, manages to unearth and entertain many of the questions of myth, history and tradition about which the reader also wonders.

Walking the Bible is an interesting read for the spectrum of the biblically curious. Aficionados of the text will find, in its pages, a palatable retracing of familiar stories in the reality of their environs. Those who, like Feiler at the outset of his project, have no context in which to place the biblical references in film, music and literature can travel the geographical and spiritual framework with the author. For either end of the spectrum, and for those who find themselves somewhere in between, Walking the Bible is an enjoyable journey.

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