For some, Avdat proves there are lies in the Bible. Avdat, a Nabatean city, under King Obodas I. We know this from petrified ostrich shells, ibex bones, and troves of shattered arrowheads spent hunting for fat sand rats. Before that, Mousterian Neanderthals lived here (90,000 years ago): the first anatomically modern humans. If I said incense route, or, Arabian spice trade, would you think of blustery gray stratus, sandstone columns, or contemporary camel-crossing signs? Byzantine monks, too, carved bookshelves, benches, and crosses into cavern walls, vandalized by Bedouins in 2009. But when a couple kisses behind a pillar; when he takes a picture of her, doing a High School Musical jump near the canyon’s cliff edge—so that she appears to float above an entire horizon; that’s when I know: we are still hungry. We’ve never had enough to eat. 

Isaac James Richards researches and writes about religious memory in the Middle East. He spent a semester abroad at the Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies and dug for a season with the Huqoq Excavation Project in Israel. His work has appeared in LIT, Amethyst Review, Constellations, Stoneboat, Red Ogre Review, El Portal, Minyan Magazine, Oxford Magazine, The Journal of American Culture, and several other venues. He is also a Pushcart Prize nominee and will begin a PhD program in the fall at the Pennsylvania State University. Find him online at https://www.isaacrichards.com/.