The Nomadic Alternative – Page 110

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But Jehovah is the projection of a stock-breeder's unfulfilled dream of masculinity. The word of the virile Almighty reverberated as his Chosen People lapsed into settlement and sensed their own inadequacy and dependence. A taste of the fleshpots had debilitated them. Guilt gnawed them. They were fine candidates for religious experience. True nomads, however, whose perpetual wandering is untainted by the malaise of settlement, are unmoved by such pre-tensions of authority and display a cavalier indifference towards the supernatural. Almighty God is an exaggeration. In his account of a Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia Palgrave recorded this studied coolness towards the Godhead in one of his Bedouin friends. "We will go up to God and salute him, and if he proves hospitable we will stay with him, if otherwise we will mount our horses and ride off."

A true nomad does not fear a natural death. If he has ideas of the world to come, he hopes it will be an exact replica of this world. A bereaved family simply hopes "Allah will replace him who has died." The Sumerian city folk expressed their horror of the Amorite nomads who didn't bury their own kinsmen. Jackals, vultures and the melting sun simply dissolved the corpses. The Zoroastrian Towers of Silence remember the ancient nomad custom of leaving the dead and passing on.

Abraham, already affected by the customs of settlers, disdained this practice. He approached the Men of Heth - Hittite settlers in Palestine - and bought from them a rock cut tomb or cave to bury Sarah in the Field of Mamre: "I am a stranger and sojourner with you; give me possession of a burying place, that I may bury my dead out of my sight." Genesis 23.4. Persian nomads continue the practice today. Frederik Barth says they reserve and pay for a section of a village cemetery, and this possession of the dead by the villagers