The Nomadic Alternative – Page 111

Conversely Moses died the traditional death of a nomad. He disappeared.

Feeling the wind of death upon him, he walked away from the herds, and, like some aged animal searching for a hidden cleft, crept off to a desert wadi to die - "in a valley in the land of Moab over against Beth-peor: but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day." Deuteronomy 34.6.

The nomad's agnosticism should not surprise us. He lives closer to the actualities of life and death than the settler. But the attitude of the settlers towards the nomad does demand an explanation.

Orthodox believers in any of the great religious systems revile the wandering disbeliever. Yet he obsesses them. Their liturgies, feasts, fasts, ceremonial processions and sacred journeys are all cast in the symbolism of the Way and reproduce in mime the annual events of the pastoral cycle. The Sacred Cow of the Hindus is but a reflection of the Indo-Aryan cattle breeding tradition: their sacred bathing places, such as Benares, remember a river crossing once forded by the herds. A title of the Buddha was "He who knows the Field." Zoroaster said "He who is not a herdsman shall have no share in the good news." Judaism and Christianity are saturated with pastoral practices, and Mohammed said "No man becomes a prophet who was not first a shepherd." The reason for this obsessive pre-occupation with nomadism can hardly be fortuitous. The audience of the great preachers consisted of wandering peoples who had been trapped and disoriented. Religions are strategems for settlement. Their ceremonial plugs an information gap between confinement and the lost freedom of nomad life.

"I that am the Lord thy God from the Land of Egypt will yet make ye dwell in tents as in the days of the solemn feast." Moses 12:9.

When the Israelites escaped from Egyptian bondage, they resumed migrations. Moses had quit the suffocating atmosphere of the Egyptian court, had felt the harsh freedom of the Midianite nomads "in the backside of the desert" and had returned to liberate his people. They left "with flocks, and herds and even very much