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Not the place for a quiet life

by
27 March 2012

John Rogerson reads a book to make Holy Land visitors think

Blessed: the traditional location of the Sermon on the Mount, a plateau on a hillside (harmonising Matthew and Luke), in one of many photos from the highly illustrated The New Lion Bible Encyclopedia by Mike Beaumont, aimed at all levels of Bible student, with maps, timelines, and diagrams, too (Lion, £25 (£22.50); 978-0-7459-5526-1)

Blessed: the traditional location of the Sermon on the Mount, a plateau on a hillside (harmonising Matthew and Luke), in one of many photos from the h...

Holy Land? Challenging questions from the biblical landscape
Andrew D. Mayes

SPCK £9.99
(978-0-281-06466-3)
Church Times Bookshop £9

FROM 1981 to 1997, the reviewer took groups of students on study visits to Jerusalem and other biblical sites almost every year. On one occasion, the group walked the seven miles to one of the possible sites of Emmaus, El-Qubeibeh. Today, Andrew Mayes explains, because of road closures, this journey would extend to 20 miles, through underpasses beneath the roads of new settlements and to take account of the Security Wall.

For anyone contemplating a visit to the Holy Land today, this is an indispensable work of orientation and explanation of what the visitor will encounter. In particular, it describes the problems faced daily by Palestinians and by non-Palestinian Christians as they try to cope with the political realities of the area, although it also includes space for Jewish voices and opinions.

For those who have arrived in the Holy Land, this is not a guide to the history and topography of biblical sites. Of course, it mentions the most obvious ones: Bethlehem, sacred sites in Jerusalem, Mount Tabor (traditionally and probably wrongly identified as the site of the transfiguration), Emmaus (wherever that was), the Jordan valley, the Mediterranean, the desert, and so on. Its emphasis is on spirituality, however, not history or geography, and it relates the sites and land­scapes to aspects of the Christian life. In a land where there are so many bitter memories of suffering, on both sides, the question of forgiveness and of overcoming the past looms large.

Each chapter ends with questions for meditation and discussion, and suggested further reading. The use of the Bible is distinctly non-critical, and there are occasional errors of detail. The most serious is the claim that the name “Palestine” was first used by Hadrian (in the second century AD), and that it was not used officially until the establish­ment of the British Mandate after the First World War.

In fact, a Semitic form of the name was used in Assyrian records from 800 BC, the Greek form was first used by Herodotus in the fifth century BC, and the name is well attested from the fourth century AD. In the 19th century, it was regularly used by writers who visited the area, such as in A. P. Stanley’s classic Sinai and Palestine (1856).

The exact boundaries of Palestine have been, and remain, a conten­tious issue. This apart, if I were taking a party of students to the Holy Land today, I would certainly put this book on their preparatory reading list.

Canon John Rogerson is Emeritus Professor of Biblical Studies at Sheffield University.

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