Science: 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 113°, 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."