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was lined on one side by a mosque, and on the other by a graceful colonnade. We began to discuss Abraham. Since the Bible is completely silent on his early life, scores of legends popped up over the centuries. According to Jewish lore, on the night Abraham was born, a great star passed through the sky, devouring four smaller stars. Advisers told King Nimrod that the sign meant the newly born son of Terah would one day conquer Nimrod’s kingdom and change its religion. The king tried to purchase the boy, but Terah substituted the son of a slave and sent Abraham and his mother, Emtelai, into hiding.
    According to accounts gathered in Jewish texts from the early first millennium C.E. , even as a boy, Abraham was able to divine from the stars that there was only one God. Since the stars came out at night and disappeared during the day, the boy reasoned, they could not have created the world, as tradition held. Instead, there must be an invisible, single God above them. This view put Abraham at odds with his father, who legend held was an idol-maker. When Abraham smashed hisfather’s idols, Terah turned his son over to the king. Abraham appeared before Nimrod in a vast throne room. The boy approached the throne and began shaking it so hard that all the idols in the room came smashing to the ground. Nimrod ordered that the boy be thrown into a fiery furnace. An immense pile was lit. Abraham was stripped naked, bound, and thrown into the fire. His ropes burned, but he did not.
    In Jewish tradition, these stories take place in the Tigris-Euphrates basin. Muslims, however, altered the story so that Abraham was not born in Ur, in the southeast of Mesopotamia, but in Sanliurfa, in the northwest, closer to Harran. As Yusuf explained, in the Muslim version, when Nimrod flings Abraham into the fire, God intervenes at the last minute, turning the flames into water and the firewood into carp. The carp swimming in the pond in Sanliurfa today are said to be descendants of the originals and anyone caught eating them will go blind—a fate that supposedly befell two soldiers as recently as 1989.
    “So why do you think this happened here?” I asked Yusuf. Some twinkling lights blinked on around the pool, lending it a carousel-like atmosphere.
    “Because this was a very important city in the ancient world. Like Babylon, here many roads came together. It was a junction, a holy place.”
    “Is it still holy today?” I asked.
    He thought for a second. “I don’t like to talk politics,” he said.
    The following day was our last in Turkey, and we planned to visit Harran, the setting of the pivotal scene in which God first speaks to Abraham. We drove south out of Sanliurfa into the dustiest part of the country, on a road so straight it seemed to have purpose. Adobe houses spotted the fields. Even the army barracks had roofs of mud. On the horizon a small bank of hills appeared, beyond which the Rift Valley extended to Africa. “Drop some water here, it would probably make its way to the Dead Sea,” Avner said.
    As we sped along, I began to feel a certain pull from the landscape, and I realized that this trip had begun to affect me some place deep in my body. It wasn’t my head, or my heart. It wasn’t even my feet. It wassomeplace so new to me that I couldn’t locate it at first, or give it a name. It was a feeling of gravity. A feeling that I wanted to take off all my clothes and lie facedown on the soil. At once I recalled my grandmother’s funeral and the gulping ache I felt when they tossed a handful of soil on her coffin:“From ashes to ashes, from dust to dust.” Not until this car ride, staring at this soil, did I fully understand what that phrase meant. Adam had been made from dust; his name is derived from the word adama , earth. “For dust you are,” God says to Adam, “and to dust you shall return.” Here was the source of that soil, I realized, and at that moment I had to resist the temptation to leap out and touch