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WALKING THE BIBLE : A JOURNEY BY LAND THROUGH THE FIVE BOOKS OF THE BIBLE By Bruce Feiler; Harpers, New York, 2001. Reviewed by Cynthia Zirkwitz Shortly before we left for the Philippines in the Fall of last year to see our son married, I was in a local book store checking out travel books. My eyes lit upon “Walking the Bible,” and I was temporarily distracted from my scan of books to do with traveling in Southeast Asia. The gathering together of two personally fulfilling and intimately exciting words in the title captured me right off: walking, the one physical activity that inspires me to keep aiming for youthful fitness, and the Bible… you know what my feelings are about that. Just before we left, our son, Phil, mentioned in an email how much he wanted to go to the Holy Land, if not on their honeymoon, then later with his sweet young Filipina wife. The bureaucracy was daunting though. Marylen would require papers that would require hours, maybe days, of standing in line to process. They had other ideas for the honeymoon, but he still hoped that they would someday travel to Jerusalem and Egypt. I told him about the book I’d seen. He had already read it. His aspirations were partly based on this book. “You’ll enjoy reading it Mom.” At the outset I must confess that I thought that the book was written by a Christian who was going to describe his pilgrimage, along the lines of tele-journal documentaries presented by various evangelicals. Bruce Feiler is Jewish. He hooks up with renowned Holy Land archaeologist, Avner Goren, and they set out on an odyssey that takes them through Turkey, Israel, Palestine, Egypt, the Sinai and Jordan. Avner’s vast knowledge of the Bible lands, and his excellent reputation, provides access to a pantheon of experts. Avner is a humble fellow, in spite of his world renown, and has endeared himself to the Bedouin, amongst whom he lived during various facets of his work in the desert. Feiler has opportunities to interview these people of the desert, and to learn about their Arab spiritual feelings and connections to Moses. Walking the Bible is a densely packed travel guide-spiritual exploration. I am the original ‘armchair traveler’ and doubt very much that I would enjoy the sand-gritty air, or the extreme heat of the Holy Land. I do, however, enjoy the opportunity to ‘go along with’ Bruce Feiler and Avner as they climb mountains, ride camels, drive in jeeps and buses, and walk in the much-storied lands. I am excited by the insights and scholarly chunks that will enhance my reading of the Pentateuch. I didn’t expect to learn about T. H. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), for example, but I did. I was also thrilled to read Feiler’s brief but positive account of an Adventist archaeologist from Walla Walla. I also learned some interesting information about today’s Suez Canal, but I won’t give that away. Now that I am finished poring over this tome (it is long), my husband is planning to read it. In our house, with our fairly polarized ‘takes’ on literature and movies, this is a real recommendation of their being ‘something for everyone’ in these pages. I found this book in our local library. You might also want to read more about it on the website at http://www.harperacademic.com/catalog/book_xml.asp?isbn=0380807319
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