zodiac6 Dec 2005

I had a problem with the first stanza, either because 1. it wasn't really desert then, 2. people are used to desert here (the place where this happened is about two hills over from where I'm sitting now), 3. although metaphorically it's cool, there's no biblical basis for them following him into the desert to the "extreme point of hunger", and/or 4. they're used to pretty extreme hunger. Odds are they were a couple hours walk from the next town (ie, no biggie in Middle Eastern terms) and didn't want to go back for food and miss the preacher. They surely knew they'd be back in their own houses by that night.

That said,
"The fringes of their deserts were strewn with broken faiths. It was significant that this wrack of fallen religions lay about the meeting of the desert and the sown. It pointed to the generation of all these creeds. They were assertions, not arguments; so they required a prophet to set them forth. The Arabs said there had been forty thousand prophets: we had record of at least some hundreds. None of them had been of the wilderness but their lives were after a pattern. Their birth set them in crowded places. An unintelligible passionate yearning drove them out into the desert. There they lived a greater or lesser time in meditation and physical abandonment; and thence they returned with their imagined message articulate, to preach it to their old, and now doubting, associates."
- T.E. Lawrence