“I live in the desert.” The writer and Poet, Chaim Noll begins the Preface to his great book about a world that may seem foreign. In 1954 in the GDR, born, moved Noll, 1984 in the West and emigrated in 1995 to Israel, where he found to his long-buried Jewish roots. At the Ben-Gurion University in the Negev, on the edge of the Israeli desert, he was one of the founders of the centre for German studies, and in two decades, he gathered the rich Material that is covered in the book.
With his biography, it has to do only indirectly, because it is not Noll to my own Experience, it’s the desert, which fascinated him for more than twenty years: “their Emptiness and Vastness seemed to me to be a great challenge to Survive and Write.” He wanted to know, “what is experienced by other writers, Poets, chroniclers, and writers in the times in the desert, felt and thought”. So the “literary history of a primeval landscape of the people, as it says in the subtitle of the book”.
its origins date back to the early civilizations. They are created at the edges of deserts, in “zones of Transition between the fixed territory of the Settlements and the open Land of the nomadic tail ends”. The change “from one to the other state is the actually creative Situation of the people”: Not coincidentally, the Nile Delta and the Egyptian desert to the cradle of global civilizations.
This is evidenced by a Text that is still valid today as Holy: it is The core piece of your Bible were given to the Jews as they moved from Egypt into the desert. At mount Sinai, the Tradition that says God gave them his teaching, the desert was to the sacred space and there is a pattern, the wide-branched traces followed Noll to the present day formed.
lamentations of a permanent Homelessness
First, you will find in the two other God books, which originated in the Eastern Mediterranean: the New Testament and the Koran. The Mediterranean peripheral areas, half of the culture and the Wilderness facing, remain ambivalent; in the New Testament, you are not the sphere of God, but his adversary In the wilderness, Satan comes as a tempter to Jesus, because Christianity is the Hellenistic Version of Jewish monotheism, and the desert brought the Greeks always have a deep aversion.
The actual desert religion is but six hundred years later, Islam, and Noll focuses his gaze on the pre-Islamic seal of Arab nomads tribes, to their lamentations of a permanent Homelessness. Always the men have to leave their tents through the desert, endless wars. Before Mohammed proclaimed his doctrine, had brought the rival tribes each other to the brink of destruction.
