The hardest part of retelling the Exodus with the hindsight of modern archaeological science, which has been my historical fiction project for 15 years, is finding the progenitors of the religious culture we call Judaism. Although I am Jewish by birth and consider myself moderately well-versed in its practices, I remain on the outside: I neither believe in the god of the Bible nor define the divine the way most religious or even a lot of secular Jews would. So how can I guess at the faith of my ancestors, or the forms that faith took in their daily lives? More importantly for me as a novelist, how do I imagine they felt about God?
The main tenet of my own artistic faith is that there is nothing humans do, feel or think that humans cannot understand. It takes a disciplined and determined effort of imagination sometimes, a discipline and determination that all artists share, but with enough information as food it is always possible. If the acts of a Hitler or a Mother Theresa or a neighbor who shoots up the local school seem incomprehensible, it’s not because their psyches are inherently opaque; it’s because we don’t know enough about them to feel our way into their hearts. But as any archaeologist will tell you, we can dig up the artifacts but we cannot really know what they meant to their makers or users.
Ancient Israelite religion is unfathomable to us moderns in many ways — its monolatry, its inscrutable sacrifices, the iterative, endlessly interrupted storytelling of its sacred texts. Still, when I think about the Jewish world of my characters, what I find most intimidating to imagine are its nomadic underpinnings. The history of the Jews for more than two thousand years has been the longing to be sedentary in the Promised Land after endless rounds of wandering, trauma and expulsion, wandering, trauma and expulsion . . . And yet that yearning for a single place somehow developed out of a thousand years of purposeful travel in “lovely” tents, as the prophet Balaam cries in the Book of Numbers (Num. 24:5). Why — or, more critically for a fiction writer, how — did a civilization of wayfarers make settlement in the land of their ancestors into a vision of heaven on Earth?
In my research on this question, I was excited to find this recent article about hunter-gatherers in the Congo who refuse to become sedentary despite the multifarious delights of 21st century living — and whose lives, the author argues, have been misconstrued by a century’s worth of anthropologists. “From [the classic anthropological] perspective, ‘simple’ hunter-gatherers are . . . vestiges of humanity’s past. They might enjoy some advantages . . . but because they live in small, mobile bands, they will forever lack the benefits of a large complex society” (Padilla-Iglesias, 2024).
The author of the article, who is a post-doctoral researcher of the Evolutionary Ecology Group at the University of Cambridge, questions the “inevitability” of sedentarism once agriculture was developed in Africa and then migrated throughout what would become the Levant. “Even in the Fertile Crescent, where agricultural societies are believed to have first settled,” she writes, “there is a yawning 3,000-year chasm between the earliest evidence of cultivated wild cereals and the appearance of the first domesticated crops. This gap becomes even more striking when repeated experiments have shown that, under simulated Neolithic conditions, crops could be reliably domesticated . . . in as little as 20 to 30 years. Why did foragers, living in an area so prone to agriculture, take 3,000 years to accomplish a 30-year endeavor?”
Padilla-Iglesias theorizes that developing a geographically ample and genetically complex society is at the heart of what makes the hunter-gatherer lifestyle so attractive. She writes about a 2014 study of two hunter-gatherer groups, one in Tanzania and the other in Paraguay. “Individuals from these populations knew others living between 80 and 150 km apart, and . . . visited each other’s camps to participate in collective rituals, hunt together, share food and news, and learn from one another. This movement resulted in the creation of large social networks, distributed across a vast territory.”
In a way, my Jewish family still experiences this. A few dozen of us, all related to the six children who were the first in our family to be born in the U.S. after the Jewish exodus from Eastern Europe, come together annually from all over the country to participate in the collective ritual of the Passover seder. We share food and news, and learn from one another; the little ones even hunt, kind of. Is this a remnant of our itinerant past, a turn of the circle bringing us back from ghettoization and the shtetl to our migratory roots? Maybe. But it is definitely a path into the powerful sense of kinship I share with people I only see for a few hours each year, making it easier for me to find a similar feeling in my characters.
According to Padilla-Iglesias, a Stone Age nomadic lifestyle probably afforded more leisure time than agriculture. “Unlike ‘serious’ farming, which would have involved intensive soil maintenance, weed clearance, threshing and winnowing after harvesting, this opportunistic strategy allowed people to grow seeds only when the ground was naturally fertile. The time and energy farming required could instead be dedicated to wild food collection, craft production, rituals or storytelling [emphasis mine].”
That last verb opened a door into ancient Judaism for me: the image of far-flung families sitting and singing around bright fires, regaling each other with tales of plagues and miracles, floods, towers and Paradise. Some tribes might have settled into territories and yet maintained regular and intimate contact with clans who still traveled, trading and seeking fresh hills for their flocks. Perhaps a few tribes got stuck in Egypt after a famine and a change of pharaoh, unable to leave but still longing for the open road or the mountains where they would hold their reunions. I could even see glimmers of gatherer societies in the biblical description of the Garden of Eden: “Out of the ground the LORD God gave growth to every tree that is pleasing to the eye and good for food” (Genesis 2:9). The best place in the world is where the harvest is always effortless.
I have no idea whether or not it really happened that way. Luckily for me, neither does anyone else. But it speaks to me; it sings to me. That’s all I need to keep going.
So fascinating, as usual!
Thank you!