Life at the Crossroads

And Moses sent them to spy out the land of Canaan, and said unto them, Get you up this way southward, and go up into the mountain: And see the land, what it is; and the people that dwelleth therein.

--Numbers 13:17-18

To the borders of Canaan, Moses sent twelve men headed by Joshua, son of Nun. Last week a scouting party of about the same size left almost the same place near the Sinai border of Israel to spy out the same land, Israel's forbidding Negev desert. Ten were amateur archaeologists and crack rifle shots from Israeli frontier villages. The eleventh and leader was Dr. Nelson Glueck, 59, president of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, an archaeologist-rabbi as lean and as leathery as Joshua. His purpose: to uncover traces of people who inhabited the Negev back to Moses' time and before it, and through them study ways of colonizing that sun-beaten land.

Population: 100,000. The Negev, at the strategic crossroads of three continents, has obvious value to Israel and the West. Yet few parts of the world qualify better for the name "badlands," the desert so scarred by erosion and so parched by drought (less than 2 in. of rainfall in some areas) that many engineers believe only water pipelines from the north can make it habitable--and then on a minor scale. Glueck disagrees. He argues that the Negev once supported a fairly dense population, possibly 100,000 or more people, and that now it can be made to support at least 2,000,000.

For proof, Glueck cites his own studies. Though he was ordained a rabbi at the age of 23 and today stands as spiritual leader of U.S. Reform Judaism at Hebrew Union, Glueck spends more time as archaeologist than as minister, has roamed the Holy Land for 30 years. During World War II he was director of the American School of Oriental Research at Jerusalem --a "perfect cover," says Glueck, for his real job: boss of the cloak-and-dagger OSS in Transjordan. After the war, he set out to explore the Negev, each year since 1950 has gone deep into the wasteland.

Using the Bible as a guidebook, Glueck traced the wanderings of the Children of Israel in their exodus from Egypt, searched for relics of the Edomites, Naba-taeans and other long-vanished peoples. The jaunts were no picnics; the temperature touched 113DEG, and Arab guerrillas infested the wild country. "It's a little less dangerous than it used to be," says Rabbi Glueck. "In former years we traveled with machine guns and grenades. Now we have only rifles."

In his book Rivers in the Desert (Farrar, Straus & Cudahy; $6.50), Glueck presents a wholly new concept of the ancient Negev. It was never a well watered land where agriculture was easy. But Glueck has discovered no fewer than 450 sites where civilization flourished, some dating back to 6000 B.C. The ebb and flow of history was tough to piece together because the cities were not built one atop the other (as they were farther north) to form easily recognizable flat-topped hillocks or "tells." War on the Negev crossroads was apt to be total, explains Glueck. and he quotes the Bible to show what happened to many an ancient city: "And he took the city and slew the people that was therein, and beat down the city and sowed it with salt" (Judges 9:45). When new settlers entered the Negev, they had to start from scratch.

Walled Wadies. The scouts of Moses probably found the central Negev almost as desolate as it is now, but after centuries revival came. Patient farmers guided by unlettered engineers threw stone walls across the wadies, or dry stream beds, so that the waters from the occasional flash floods could be trapped. So successful were the dams that villages became cities, and the Judaean kingdom built by David and Solomon had many colonies in the Negev. King Solomon's lost copper mine and his seaport on the Gulf of Aqaba (see map) were discovered by Glueck just before World War II. Today Israeli miners are busy exploiting copper lodes that Solomon's men passed over as too lean for their primitive smelting methods.

Solomon's cities went down before

Babylonian invaders in the 6th century B.C., and the Negev fell back into wilderness inhabited only by Bedouins. About the 2nd century B.C., the Nabataeans moved in from Arabia and built a thriving civilization made possible by thousands of cisterns (some of which are still watertight), also cleared hilltops of stones to make rain-catching areas, like gigantic roofs. Still later, the Byzantines used the same successful methods until the Moslem conquest of the 7th century A.D. laid bare the earth and returned it once more to nomadic Bedouins.

Archaeologist Glueck does not believe that the Negev will flow with milk and honey, but he is certain that it can be made at least as productive as in Judaean or Nabataean times. Last spring he flew over the Negev after a series of rains. Water was everywhere, sparkling in the wadies, rushing past the clogged intakes of ancient cisterns. "If it were up to me," he says, "the Israelis would clean out these cisterns and put them back into use. Today we lay pipelines. But as an old OSS agent, I know that in a time of trouble five men could blow up all the main pipelines in the Negev."

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