So for me this story is one of the most powerful of all in the annals of language. It is the one and only time in history that a language has been successfully resurrected from the dead, not just as a museum piece but as a fully functioning modern tongue.
In West Jerusalem, the new city, there’s a museum that holds the Dead Sea Scrolls. When I went to see them, I merged behind a group of people on a tour. Not that I like organized tours. It was just a cheap way of getting a free guided commentary.
The little guide was a passionate fellow, and at one point we stood in front of a large fragment of the Scrolls. Most of the group’s members were Israeli, I think, and could read ancient Hebrew. The guide told us to go ahead and read the fragment, and I studied it solemnly as if I could actually decipher it.
“What is this text?” he finally asked after a few moments of silence. Some keener in the crowd said it was from Isaiah, and the guide beamed. “That’s right. This piece of sheepskin is two thousand years old. It’s almost a thousand years older than any previously known copy of the Book of Isaiah. And what do you notice about it?”
Again I stood shamefaced, hoping the guide wouldn’t notice I didn’t have a clue. Those around me seemed a bit confused, as well. “Do you remember,” he continued, “when you were children and played the whispering game?”
The whispering game?
“Yes, where children get in a line and the teacher gives something to whisper in the ear of the first. That first child whispers to the next and then that one to the next. The fun is when you see how much it changes. ‘I want French perfume for my birthday’ eventually becomes ‘I wore frog pajamas that burned my dog.’ Now what do you notice here?” His hand swept over the glass-enclosed manuscript. He paused dramatically, then answered himself. “There’s no change. Two thousand years of copying and there’s no change at all. Look, you can read it yourself.”
The first Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered by a Bedouin shepherd named Muhammad Ahmed el-Hamed. One of his goats climbed into a cave along the Dead Sea to escape the searing heat, and he picked up a rock and threw it in to get the animal out. When he tossed in the stone, he heard the tinkle of pottery breaking. Up there in the caves he found the Scrolls hidden in ceramic jars. This, our guide told us, happened on the same day the United Nations created the State of Israel. “Now you can believe whatever you want about such a coincidence,” he said, “but I know what I believe.”
My last day in Jerusalem was a Friday which, as it happens, is when Franciscan monks walk in procession down the Via Dolorosa, the Way of Sorrows. Arno and I got our cameras ready, Berhitte sighed, and off we went.
The winding path of the Via Dolorosa leads from the Temple Mount to a Crusader church built over the site where it’s thought Christ was crucified. On July 15, 1099, the knights of the First Crusade entered Jerusalem and slaughtered almost all of the inhabitants. Forty thousand people, Jews and Muslims alike, were cut down until the streets were knee-deep in blood. And then the Crusasders built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre over the place where Christ was said to have died for humanity’s sins — one more profoundly ironic bit of history in Jerusalem where meanings easily become tangled, where belief sometimes obscures reality.
There are some wonderful accounts of the Muslim reaction to this First Crusade. There was a sense of confusion and dismay. The city had been open to everyone and was peaceful for five hundred years. One Muslim writer, in an attempt to make sense of these acts of barbarism, set out to understand what had happened, so he read the Christian books. In Islam, of course, there’s only one god, but in reading about the Holy Trinity, it seemed to him that the Crusaders worshipped three divinities: a father, a son, and a holy ghost. Moreover, Christians appeared to cannibalize their god — eating his body and drinking his blood. To top it off, this same god created his own mother who then created him … immaculately. No wonder the scholar was confused. All of this demonstrates how difficult it is to truly understand the nuances of another culture. It doesn’t help, either, when that new culture is intent on slaughtering you and all of your family.
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is somewhat gaudy, which I admit is a terrible pun, but it’s true. The building is ornate to a fault and is run by six different sects, which is a big problem. The different sects are often not on speaking terms, and the church is strictly divided into areas of influence. Changing a light bulb or even moving a carpet a few centimetres can spark fistfights between monks from the different groups. Up on the roof, out of the fray, is the Ethiopian sect. It laid claim to the top of the church and has, in fact, lived in crumbling wooden shacks on the roof for more than a hundred years.
Christ himself spoke a language called Aramaic. It’s neither Hebrew nor Arabic but a cousin of the two. Salam in Aramaic, for example, is shela’m (the apostrophe denotes a glottal stop, a sort of gulping pop of breath). Aramaic began as a pidgin language in the Middle East a few hundred years before Christ and had become the standard tongue in Jerusalem by the first century of the current era.
On the main floor of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is a little grotto. Visitors line up to go into it because only a half-dozen people can fit at a time. It was dark when I entered. Candles flickered in the shadows, and an old priest, Greek Orthodox by the look of his clothes, stood guard. Behind him was a small rocky space, smooth with all the hands that have reached out for it. It is said to be the tomb of Christ. I waited for a moment, hoping for a revelation. I waited for the light of understanding to hit me, but there was nothing. Not for me at least. I still couldn’t feel a thing.
Later that same afternoon, sick of the crowds, dirt, and heat, I went for a walk outside the old city walls. There, up ahead, was a garden, almost a park. I could see the tree branches poking above the dusty walls, and in this desert land I was drawn toward the greenery. The only problem was that an old nun was standing at the gate. What belief system was she going to foist on me? I wondered. I walked up, still desperate to sit among the flowers, and she smiled and simply said, “Welcome.” That was it. I actually hesitated, expecting her to say more. Didn’t she want to ask if I’d found Jesus in my heart? Didn’t she want to tell me that fire and brimstone would rain down on me for eternity?
Well, apparently, she didn’t. She invited me in with a graceful movement of her hand, didn’t say another word, and continued to smile.
The place is called the Garden Tomb. Charles Gordon, a British general, discovered it in 1883. He had come to Jerusalem with some doubts about the true location of the religious sites. Golgotha, in ancient Hebrew, means “place of the skull,” and Gordon couldn’t help but notice a strange rock formation outside the old walls several hundred metres from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. And here, in the Garden Tomb, I saw it, too. On a little rise there is a tumble of rocks and a crevice that looks like the eye sockets and jawbone of a skull. At the bottom there is, indeed, another small tomb carved out of the rock. There is no church here, only a garden, but of all my time in Jerusalem, this was the first occasion I actually felt something click. That was what I’d been waiting for. Not enough to make me become celibate perhaps. Not enough to inspire me to wander into the desert for forty days and forty nights. But there it was.
Something, finally, had touched me. For all the anger and turmoil of this holy city, for all its guns and wars and violence, for all its crowded, desperate clawing for territory, there is something grand here. Something like the sense of wonder a child feels gazing into a starry sky for the first time. Jerusalem really is like no other place on the planet. Elie