Set as this episode was back in the distant reaches of time, and in the wilds of a tenantless desert, it might have been thought hardly the kind to have left much behind in the way of proofs. Christians, however, knew better. The echoes of the voice of God could never truly fade. When, in the fourth century AD, monks ventured into the barren wilderness that stretched to the east of Egypt, they arrived in due course at a narrow valley beneath the granite crags of two steepling mountains. They had not hesitated to identify this spot, from its palpable holiness, as the very place where Moses had seen the burning bush. Not only that, but they even discovered, in a yet further and clinching miracle, the bush itself, “still alive and putting out shoots.”17 The monks, confident that they were walking across rocks trodden by Moses, duly installed themselves in caves at the head of the valley. Over time, they added a small church, complete with a garden in which the bush itself, naturally enough, enjoyed pride of place. Two centuries later, with Justinian on the throne, the renown of the bleak and distant valley was secure across the Christian world. The emperor himself, nobly resisting the temptation to have the holy bush dug up and carted off to Constantinople, opted instead to stamp his mark on the desert by restoring and enlarging the monastery. In addition, at the base of the mountain, he built “a very strong fortress, and established there a considerable garrison of troops.”18 A touch of Roman power had been brought to the depths of the desert.
The ostensible justification given for this show of strength was the need to intimidate bandits. The walling of the bush served a further purpose, though: no one could see the fortifications and doubt that the hallowed earth enclosed within them was indeed impregnably Christian. This mattered: for Christians were not alone in laying claim to Moses as their own. The Children of Israel, whom the great prophet, in obedience to God’s instructions, had redeemed from slavery and led from Egypt, amid the thundering of flame-lit wonders, signs and deadly plagues, still had their descendants in the present: none other than the Jews. To the rabbis, Moses was both the fountainhead and the model of all their learning: the ultimate rabbi. Great though his achievement had been in securing the exodus, or “emigration,” of his people, even that had not been his most awesome feat. Leading the freed slaves through the desert to the east of Egypt, he had arrived at a mountain named Sinai; and “on the morning of the third day there were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mountain, and a very loud trumpet blast, so that all the people who were in the camp trembled.”19 Nothing daunted, Moses had vanished into the fiery depths of the cloud; and there, high on the peak of Sinai, he had spoken again with God, “face to face.”20 The fruit of this conversation was the Torah itself. Portions of it were inscribed on tablets of clay and placed in a transportable chest named an “Ark,” which then accompanied and guided the Children of Israel on their journey through the desert. Other portions, though, were not written down, but instead kept hidden by Moses and taught exclusively to Joshua, his favourite pupil. This, at any rate, was what the rabbis taught—and as proof, they could point to the Talmud, which was, in their opinion, nothing less than the final revelation of the Torah that Moses had received on Mount Sinai, and which had been handed down, via assorted elders, prophets and scholars, directly to themselves.
Should Justinian ever have had this notion of a secret Jewish wisdom brought to his attention, he would doubtless have snorted with derision. Yet, he would also surely have been confirmed in his sense of just how urgent was the need to identify Moses, and all the prophets of the Old Testament, with his own faith. Above the valley where God had spoken from the burning bush there rose a particularly barren peak. The monks who lived in its shadow had long since decided that this was none other than Mount Sinai itself. The fort built at its foot ensured that no one could approach its summit without the knowledge of the monks themselves. Just in case there were any who might still miss the implications of this, they could always visit the church built by Justinian and admire a mosaic of the prophet pointing in awe at Christ. “On the mountain of the Father,” as an early enthusiast for the monks of Sinai exulted, “there stands a monument to the Son.”21 Moses was best commemorated not as a Jew, let alone as a rabbi, but as a Christian.
It was this that underpinned the monks’ claim to the scene of the prophet’s greatest triumph; just as it also gave to the universal Church its tenant’s stake in an even more precious prize. Moses himself had never made it to Canaan, the land that God had promised to Abraham; but the Children of Israel, after forty years of aimless wandering in the desert, had swept down upon their birthright to take possession of the land itself, and all its milk and honey. It was the story of what had happened next that constituted the greater part of both the Jewish and the Christian scriptures: the “Books”—or Biblia, in Greek. Unlike Mount Sinai, which it had required a band of intrepid monks to track down and identify, many locations with a starring role in the “Bible” had never been lost. Take, for example, Jericho, the first Canaanite city to be captured by the Children of Israel, after Joshua, their leader in succession to Moses, had ordered them to blow their trumpets and bring the walls tumbling down. Then there was Bethlehem, the birthplace of David, a shepherd boy who, in addition to rising to rule as king over all the tribes of Israel, had composed some of the most haunting passages in the Bible: songs and poems known as “psalms.” Most luminously of all, there stood Jerusalem, a city captured by David to serve him as his capital, and which had remained the stronghold of his dynasty until the calamitous descent upon Judah of the King of Babylon.
Yet all this, so Christians knew, had been only the opening acts of an ongoing drama. The Old Testament had been succeeded by the New, and ground trodden by Abraham, Joshua and David had been hallowed a second time by the footsteps of Christ Himself. In Jericho, He had healed a blind man, and in Bethlehem He had been born in a manger, and in Jerusalem He had been crucified and buried, and after three days had risen from the dead, and then, from the Mount of Olives, just outside the city, ascended to the heavens. Well, then, might Christians have felt proprietorial towards the scene of such cosmos-shaking events. As the self-designated heirs of Abraham and as the followers of Christ, they could feel themselves to have a double claim on it, after all. The land promised to God’s people was theirs, triumphantly theirs: a Holy Land.
Admittedly, there were many Christians, anxious about “restricting to a narrow strip of earth Him whom the heavens cannot contain,” who remained profoundly uncomfortable with this notion. The presence of God, so they sternly reminded the faithful, might be experienced in even the remotest, the most barbarous of lands: “Access to the courts of heaven is as easy from Britain as it is from Jerusalem.”22 Nevertheless, it is telling that the monk who issued this admonition—a translator of the Bible originally from the Balkans by the name of Jerome—did so from a cell outside Bethlehem. The year was 395, and already, as exemplified by Jerome’s own presence in the Holy Land, something unprecedented was afoot. Never before in history had so many pilgrims, from such a wide variety of starting-points, travelled such gruelling distances to the same destinations. Christians, unlike pagans, did not limit themselves to visiting their native shrines. Instead, from the moment when Constantine’s conversion had rendered the Holy Land safe for them to visit, a steady stream of Christian tourists had begun to head there from every corner of the Roman world. Pre-eminent among these had been the emperor’s own mother, Helena, who had set the trend for later pilgrims by virtue of being female, fabulously wealthy and obsessed with collecting relics. She herself, as befitted her imperial rank, had headed straight for Jerusalem, where she had scooped the most glamorous trophy of alclass="underline" the very cross and nails used in Jesus’s crucifixion. But this sensational find represented only a starting point: for it had not taken locals long to wake up to the opportunities that might be provided them by the sudden arrival in their neighbourhood of a well-heeled Christian lady. Boom time for tour guides; and especially for those who knew where the bones of an Old Testament prophet might be uncovered, or perhaps an exercise book used by the infant Christ, or a robe once worn by the Virgin. The consequence of all this treasure-hunting had been not merely to fill the voracious reliquaries of Constantinople to bursting, but also to provide visitors to the Holy Land with an ever more impressive list of must-see destinations. After all, while a relic could be packed off easily enough to the capital, the same was hardly true of the site of its discovery. Once again, it was Helena who had most trail-blazingly demonstrated the implications of this. Rooting around in the foundations of a pagan temple after the True Cross, she had uncovered the sepulchre of Christ, no less: a thrilling example of just how spectacular the fruits of archaeology in the Holy Land might be. Two centuries later, with the seam of top-grade relics long since exhausted, there was barely an episode in the Bible that had not been identified with some specific pile of stones or patch of dust. It was hardly surprising, then, that pilgrims from every corner of the Christian world should have flocked to tour a landscape so imbued with the numinous. What had once been a trickle of visitors had swollen to become a flood. Their appearance in the Holy Land marked the arrival of a revolutionary new notion—that a specific place might be holy to peoples everywhere, no matter their place of birth.