SOME QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

"There's an old saying in the Middle East: With a trail, the best way to keep it alive is to walk on it, because every time you walk on it, you create it again."

-- Avner Goren (p. 393)

• What most surprised you in reading Walking the Bible? Why?

• Why does Bruce Feiler "walk the Bible?" What is he searching for? How does he and his understanding of the Bible change as a result of his adventures?

• To what extent did Feiler’s book help you to look at the Bible differently?

• Feiler: "The Bible may or may not be true, it may or may not be historical, but it is undoubtedly still alive." (p. 26) Comment. What is the Bible? Is it the lead character in Feiler’s account?

• Analyze the relationship between place, time and story as explored in Walking the Bible.

• What role does the desert play in Feiler’s book and in the Bible itself? What did you find most revealing about Feiler’s encounter with the desert?

• Analyze the role that mountains (egs. Mount Ararat, Jebel Musa [Sinai], Jebel Haroun [Petra] and Mount Nebo) assume in Feiler’s adventures.

• To what extent does it seem that the stories of Noah, Abraham and Moses are etched onto the Middle Eastern landscape in different ways? What significance would you attach to this?

• Feiler: "You can’t understand the Bible without understanding Egypt." (p. 195) What does Feiler’s time in Egypt add to his account? How do you think Egyptian civilization most influenced the Bible?

• What did you learn about the Exodus from Feiler’s adventures?

• What did you find most interesting about Feiler’s time in Jordan? What did this add to his account?

• What does the Bible mean for the people Feiler meets in his journeys? How would you begin to generalize here?

• What did you learn about Judaism from this book? How would you describe Feiler’s relationship with his Judaism? What did you find most interesting about the various ways in which the other Jews included in Walking the Bible both defined their Judaism and responded to the Bible?

• What did you learn about Islam from this book? To what extent is Feiler successful in crossing the divide to have deep conversations with Muslims about their sacred stories and sacred geography? How would you account for his apparent difficulties in doing this?

• Feiler argues that there is no archaeological evidence to connect events in the first Five Books of the Bible to specific places and thus suggests that we are left to "the often-contradictory claims of history, myth, legend, archaeobiology, paleozoology and faith." (p. 40) How, in your own opinion, should we best approach exploring the relationship between these competing claims?

• Examine the Israelites’ years in the desert from the perspective of each of the approaches listed in the previous question.

• How would you describe the God portrayed in Walking the Bible?

• How has our relationship to the Bible changed in the last two centuries? What has been lost and what has been gained? What is most important about the history of Biblical archaeology? What is the Documentary Hypothesis and how does it attempt to account for Biblical authorship? (pp. 101-103)

• What significance do you attach to the multitude of folktales Feiler learns about that involve Biblical characters and places but which are not included in the Bible itself?

• What can one learn "walking the Bible" that one cannot learn merely from studying the Bible?

• Listed below are a series of individuals who Feiler either met during his travels or who are mentioned as historical figures. Pick at least three or four of these individuals and analyze what was most interesting about their relationship with the Bible and/or their conversation with Feiler.