For a little while, the world of my everyday was the place where the religious go to confront their genesis. I walked ancient lands of ageless beliefs where the patriarchs and pariahs, the messengers and messiahs, the baptized and the baptizers, once lived and loved and died. I met the modern-day Philistines — the people of Goliath — and the descendants of the Assyrians and Nubians. I stood in the Red Sea and the Dead Sea.