
I’m beginning work on Part II of my Exodus retelling, which takes place in the wilderness between the Land of Goshen and the Mountain of God in Sinai. For even a medium-sized group of forced laborers fleeing their oppressors, finding water on the road was essential to their escape. The Bible mentions a number of incidents involving this pursuit, including disappointment at the “bitter” (or salty) taste of well water soon after the Red Sea crossing (Exodus 15:23); an extended stay at the oasis of Elim (Numbers 33:9); and a place called Meribah where Moses struck a rock to get water (Exo. 17:7). So I assumed that some of the stories told around the Israelites’ campfires at night must have been about the plentiful water awaiting them at their eventual destination of Canaan.
But the Levant is hardly lush with greenery. So how was water accessed in the Promised Land?
Claude Mariottini, an emeritus professor of Old Testament at Northern Baptist Seminary, ticks through various ways the inhabitants of Canaan provided enough water for themselves, their fields and their animals. One source was springs, which are, Mariottini writes, “common throughout … the Holy Land.” Then there were wells – and the digging of them — mentioned several times in the Book of Genesis. There were natural and artificial reservoirs, which had the disadvantage of allowing too much evaporation during the summer, and tunnels, like the famous one in Jerusalem that connects to the Gihon Spring outside the city walls. (That tunnel, built originally by the Jebusites, was diverted to a internal reservoir by King Hezekiah — a public works project mentioned in both 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles and discovered by archaeologists in the late 19th century.)
But it was cisterns that were the most practical way to store water during the rainy season for use during the half-year or so when the heavenly spigots are closed. These water tanks carved out of stone could be enormous, like the ones I’ve stood in myself in Herod’s desert fortress of Masada, or family-sized, “built beside individual houses,” Mariottini writes. A technological advance from around 1200 BCE helped to spur accelerated settlement of Canaan: the discovery that calcium hydroxide or slaked lime, used as a whitewash on the inside of porous limestone cisterns, made them impermeable and thus more able to keep the life-giving liquid from draining away over time. “The development of better cisterns contributed to the construction of villages and cities away from the sources of flowing water,” writes Mariottini.

My book ends before the Israelites cross over into the Land of Cisterns, but it was interesting to learn about the many ways the Children of Israel managed without a plentiful source of fresh water like the Nile from whence they had come.
But there were “waters above” as well. A chapter called “The Three-Story Universe” from a book by Nick Gier, an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Idaho, details the textual evidence in the Bible for the theory that the Hebrew word often translated as “firmament” in Genesis’s creation story (Genesis 1:6) literally means that the ancient Israelites believed the sky was firm and held back an ocean above it. I found this chapter looking for their cosmology, many aspects of which they seem to have shared with sacred texts from India like the Rig-Veda, says Gier. This concept of a firmament dividing waters below and above it (Gen. 1:7) is brilliantly exploited by the speculative fiction author Ted Chiang in his short story “Tower of Babylon.” Chiang imagines a group of Elamite and Egyptian miners climbing the Tower of Babel in order to break through the firmament with their pickaxes and pyramid-honed engineering skills, with the goal of penetrating to the waters above and being closer to Yahweh.
The origin of this belief in waters above the earth might seem obvious: the phenomenon of rain. This vision gives angels the job of opening and closing heavenly sluices like winged canal operators, sliding locks in the firmament into position at the beginnings and ends of rainy seasons. But the sophistication of Egyptian medical science persuades me that ancient peoples, while lacking the tools to describe evaporation in terms of the vibration of molecules, knew perfectly well that hot water is transformed into steam — which looks like both clouds and mist and is a constituent of the same. I don’t doubt that the threat of God ordering the gates opened wide, deluging the earth below for forty days and nights, was a powerful political tool to keep the populace under the thumb of the royal and priestly classes. They could promise to exercise their intermediary services with the divine to keep everyone safe from His wrath.
After all, even with our vaunted science taking pictures of our planet from the perspective of millions of miles away in space, we can also fall prey to such myths that benefit a few at the top.
