I pause to catch my breath under a leafy fig tree. Vineyards and wild grain stretch across the valley below, and as I survey it all, I breathe in the green scent of fig leaves – to me, the very smell of summer in Israel. Then I notice the fruit itself, small and round, still not ready to be eaten. In a few months, these figs will be splitting at the seams with juice and soft seeds.
There are grapes here too, wild ones lining this ancient pathway, firm and green and unripe. The first will ripen in a few weeks’ time, and I make a mental note to return on a late summer morning for a refreshing boost along my run.
This path is older than almost anything else I pass on my route. It is a stretch of Derech Ha’Avot, the Path of the Patriarchs – the old road that once ran south through the Judean hills toward Hebron, and north up toward Jerusalem. People have walked it for thousands of years, and the land carries a memory of them.
Midway through this stretch of the biblical highway, cut into the bedrock, there is an ancient mikveh, a ritual bath. Over two thousand years ago, pilgrims would have stopped here on their way up to the Temple. They would have climbed down one set of steps, immersed in the water, and climbed out the other side, so that those already purified would not brush past those still waiting their turn. I like to imagine them here in the early light – travelers from the south, dusty from days on the road, pausing at this small pool before the final ascent.
The water is mostly gone now, save for what gathers after a winter rainstorm. But the two sets of steps remain, a passageway to the past for anyone who stops to look.
I am not the first to come up through these hills with my eyes on the land. At this very season, long ago, 12 men climbed northward out of the wilderness to scout it. The Torah is careful about the timing: it was “the season of the first ripe grapes” (Numbers 13:20) – bikkurei anavim, the earliest ones, just beginning to turn. The same stage as the clusters beside me now.
These 12 men went up toward Hebron, to a valley they would name Nahal Eshkol, the Valley of the Cluster. There, they cut a single bunch of grapes so heavy that two of them held it between them on a pole, along with pomegranates and figs (Numbers 13:23). Grapes, figs, pomegranates – the very fruits by which the Torah praises this land (Deuteronomy 8:8). They brought its glory home in their arms. “It does indeed flow with milk and honey,” they told the people, “and this is its fruit” (Numbers 13:27).
But they believed it could never be theirs. “We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves,” they said, “and so we were in their eyes” (Numbers 13:33).
The cluster and the Ninth of Av
This is the part I keep turning over as I stand in the quiet. The spies held the evidence in their hands. They had walked the land, tasted it, hauled its fruit on their shoulders the whole way back. Everything they had been promised about the land’s plenty was true, and heavy, and sweet. And still they could not believe it was meant for them.
The sages tell us this story unfolded during these exact summer weeks. The spies set out on the 29th of Sivan and returned 40 days later, on the eve of the Ninth of Av. The people heard the report and wept through the night. It was weeping over nothing, the tradition says – and so it became weeping for all time. The night was fixed for mourning, the night on which, centuries later, both Temples would burn.
In the centuries that followed, when the Temple stood in Jerusalem, pilgrims walked this same road toward it, bringing their first fruits – grapes and figs and pomegranates. Over time, it grew easy for those living here to imagine the land had always been theirs, that its fields and orchards were simply the way of things. The bikkurim offering existed to interrupt that forgetting: to carry the first and best of the harvest up to Jerusalem and say aloud that the land, and all they possessed in it, was a gift.
And here I am, catching my breath. By the calendar, I am standing in the middle of the spies’ 40 days. The grapes around me are exactly as green as the ones they saw when they set out. By the Ninth of Av, when this land sits down in mourning, these same clusters will have ripened into something worth carrying.
So, I’ll come back. Not for a photo this time, and not just for the snack. I’ll stand on this old path and eat a grape straight off the vine – to taste the fruit of a land that was promised, given, and still here.
A freshly picked grape is a small thing. It is also the one thing the spies never let themselves taste – too busy shrinking into grasshoppers to notice the sweetness already in their hands.
The writer is the founder of Hiking the Holyland and the author of From Southerner to Settler: Unexpected Lessons from the Land of Israel.