The Land, the Bible, and History: Toward the Land That I Will Show You (review)

This work of two priest residents of Jerusalem, one of them an Israeli, complements the treatments of the Land in English by Protestant scholars Philip R. Davies and Gary M. Burge, Catholic scholar Robert L. Wilken, and Eastern Orthodox scholar Edward W. Said, the last named a Palestinian who was a professor of English literature at Columbia University. The two authors write as scholars of the Bible unconcerned to frame arguments over modern Israel and Palestine but hoping that their factual presentation may contribute to the near silent dialogue on peace in that Land. Called Holy in traditional Christian speech, the Land has known little peace except for the quiescent period between the last crusade and the British mandate. In those centuries the small population of Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived peacefully side by side.

The opening section is a retelling of the books of the Old Testament (the rabbinic canon, not the Septuagintal) in paraphrase and occasional quotations that feature the Land (aretz). The same is done with the fewer New Testament passages. No distinction is made in the former between saga and chronic1e, narrative and law, poetry and prose, nor is the way the New Testament draws on the Old a special feature. That waits for a later warning against reading either Testament of Scripture fundamentally and an exposition of the important difference critical scholarship has made in the understanding of this sacred literature. Along the way the authors, in discussing the recurrent rereadings within the Bible (the French relectures), make clear the times the Land is spoken of as a specific area of earth and otherwise spiritualized as an ideal (thus, Jerusalem, Zion).The latter concept is what the books of Hebrews and Revelation make of the Land, which is notably different from the concern of the gospels and Acts to record the sites of Jesus' activity and that of the earliest Church. The authors make the important point that the Land is an integral component of the religion of Israel that became Judaism and of Islam (with the Prophet's Night Journey to and heavenly ascent from Jerusalem), as it is not of Christianity.

The writing is good on the discontinuities in both the Scriptures and the history of the Land represented by God's deed in Christ. The brief account of anti-Judaism of the Church Fathers that became, over time, the secular anti Semitism of the nineteenth century will not be new information for many readers. Early Zionism, which was a movement of secular Jews centered on peoplehood without a religious component, is handled as if it were the fruition of the rabbinic dream of a return to the Land. The early opposition of observant Jews to the Zionist movement because it was of man, not of God, is faithfully recorded. In similar fashion, the Nazis' attempt to exterminate European Jewry is assumed without discussion to be the logical outcome of centuries of Christian Judenhass.

The later chapters, like the earlier retelling of the Bible, make the point quickly but consistently that there were other peoples in the Land when the Hebrews first arrived and again later as the Israelites returned from Egypt; that they never went away; and that the land was far from empty as Zionism grew and flourished. The creation of the state of Israel in 1948 is treated largely by silence as the peaceful culmination of decades of Zionism.

Avoidance of any discussion of twentieth-century political realities is the price the authors pay to make the major point of their recital of the adventures of a Land and its peoples. This is that the Christians who now remain in the Land after massive emigration to escape violence, plus their diaspora since Palestinian Christians, more of them Orthodox than Catholic, are now everywhere on the globe, may serve...