The Holy Land

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The Holy Land is the name given, across three religions, to the strip of country between the Mediterranean coast and the river Jordan — the land of ancient Canaan and Israel, with Jerusalem at its center. The term marks not a single border but a claim: that a particular piece of ordinary ground is set apart, charged by the events believed to have happened on it. The strip is small — a day’s drive end to end, narrower than many provinces that never drew a pilgrim — and that smallness is part of the matter. Three of the traditions that shaped half the planet’s religious life all turn, when they turn toward earth, toward the same handful of hills above the same valley, and none of the three will yield the ground to the others. What follows takes each claim in its own terms before weighing the thinner, harder thing the spade and the inscription can establish.

Eretz Yisrael — the promised ground

For Judaism the land is Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, and the oldest layer of the claim is a covenant. In the Torah the land is given by God to Abraham and to his descendants after him — the Covenant of the Parts in Genesis 15 fixes its reach in a single sweeping clause, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates, a horizon far wider than any kingdom that later stood there. The promise narrows as it descends: refined through Isaac, then through Jacob, who is renamed Israel and gives the people and the land their name. It is a land settled before it is entered — walked by the patriarchs, buried in at Hebron, bought field by field — and then lost, the family carried down into Egypt, so that the return becomes the spine of the national story. The Exodus generation’s whole journey is oriented toward it. The wilderness wanderings of the Book of Numbers are a forty-year approach to a border the first generation is forbidden to cross; the conquest under Joshua is the crossing finally made, the Jordan parted, the cities taken, the territory divided by lot among the tribes. The land in this telling is not a setting for the covenant but a term of it — held on condition, forfeit by disobedience, promised back after exile.

At the center of the center stands the Temple in Jerusalem, built by Solomon, destroyed by Babylon, rebuilt after the return narrated in the Book of Ezra, enlarged by Herod, and razed by Rome in 70 CE. Its ruin did not end the sanctity but concentrated it: the surviving western retaining wall of the platform, the Western Wall, became and remains the holiest place at which Jewish prayer is customarily offered, a wall that is not the Temple but the nearest standing stone to where the Temple stood. Rabbinic tradition holds that the divine presence never wholly departed the site, and the long centuries of exile kept the land present in the absence of it — turned toward in prayer three times a day, invoked at every wedding and every Passover, a geography carried in the liturgy when it could not be walked. The specifically textual and mystical Jewish dimensions of that attachment belong to their own treatments; what holds here is the shape of the claim: a particular people bound to a particular ground by a promise older than any of its cities.

The land mapped onto a life

Christianity received that geography and added its own, laid directly over it. This is where Jesus was born, taught, was crucified, and — the Gospels hold — rose; the land of the old covenant became, for the new movement, the stage of a single life and death. Yet for its first three centuries the church was strikingly indifferent to the soil. The earliest Christians expected the end soon and looked to a heavenly Jerusalem rather than the earthly one; the physical sites went largely unmarked, some of them deliberately buried under the pavements of Roman Aelia Capitolina, the colony Hadrian raised over the ruined city after 135 CE.

The turn came in the fourth century, and it came from the imperial house. After Constantine’s conversion, his mother Helena traveled to the region around 326-328, and under her patronage and his the remembered sites were excavated, cleared, and crowned with basilicas: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre over the rock held to be Golgotha and the tomb, reportedly beneath a demolished temple of Venus; the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem; a church on the Mount of Olives. A life lived three centuries earlier was, within a generation, mapped onto actual streets and hillsides, and the mapping drew traffic. The earliest surviving Christian pilgrimage account, the Itinerarium Burdigalense, records an anonymous traveler from Bordeaux reaching Jerusalem in 333, listing the biblical places he was shown in and around the city; later in the century the pilgrim Egeria left a far fuller diary of the liturgies she followed station by station through the holy week of a city now organized around its sacred topography. What had been a backwater of expectation became, in the space of a few decades, a destination — the land of the Bible made into a place one could go and touch, and through touching, the historian Robert Wilken has shown, a place Christians came not only to visit but to inhabit and to claim as their own.

Al-Quds — the farthest mosque

For Islam the land holds Jerusalem, al-Quds, the Holy, the third holiest city after Mecca and Medina. The claim is anchored in a single Quranic verse, the opening of the seventeenth sura, which speaks of a night journey carrying the servant of God from the Sacred Mosque to al-masjid al-aqsa, the farthest mosque — read by the tradition as Jerusalem. From the rock at the summit of the Temple Mount, the Haram al-Sharif or Noble Sanctuary, the Prophet Muhammad is held to have ascended through the seven heavens on the night of the Mi’raj, the Isra carrying him there and the Mi’raj carrying him up. For a brief early period the first Muslims turned toward Jerusalem in prayer before the direction was fixed toward the Kaaba at Mecca — so that the city stands at the origin of the qibla even after ceasing to be its object. The built claim followed fast: around 691-692 the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik raised the Dome of the Rock over the summit, one of the oldest works of Islamic architecture to survive intact, and the congregational mosque to its south took the name al-Aqsa from the Quranic phrase. The precinct entered Islamic eschatology as well as devotion: a strand of tradition sets the gathering of the dead and the final judgment at Jerusalem, and the Mahdi, the rightly guided figure expected at the end, is woven by some accounts into a geography in which the holy cities of the Hijaz and the Holy City of the north answer one another across the last days. The detailed sanctity of the platform itself — its layered architecture, its competing custodianships — is the business of the Temple Mount and the buildings that crown it; what holds here is the third claim’s shape: a city of the Prophet’s ascent, set among the holiest cities of the faith.

What the ground itself yields

What the historical record establishes is thinner and more contested than any of the three sacred histories, and it is worth keeping the two registers apart. The documentary layer is real and datable. A people called Israel appears for the first time in any surviving record on the victory stele of the pharaoh Merneptah, around 1208 BCE, counted among the defeated of Canaan — a name inside the land before it was a name over it. Centuries later the Tel Dan stele, an Aramaic inscription recovered in 1993-94 and most likely raised by an Aramean king, names the bytdwd, the House of David, the earliest external attestation of David as a dynastic founder. The broad outline of the Iron Age kingdoms — a northern Israel and a southern Judah, their kings, their capitals, their wars and tribute — is confirmed by excavation and by the inscriptions of their neighbors.

The biblical narrative draped over that frame is where the argument runs hot. The scale and manner of the conquest, the existence and reach of a united monarchy under David and Solomon, the historicity of the patriarchs and the Exodus, the precise location of named events: each is weighed text against trowel by scholars who seldom reach agreement. At Jericho no collapsed Late Bronze Age wall has been found to match the account in Joshua; in the influential reading of Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, the conquest narrative is better understood as an ideological program of late-seventh-century writers in the court of Josiah than as a record of events at the end of the Bronze Age, and the grand united monarchy as a projection backward of a later kingdom’s ambitions. Maximalists answer that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and that the texts preserve real memory; the dispute is unlikely to close, in part because the most contested ground of all — the rock beneath the Dome — cannot be excavated, its sanctity having made the spade impossible for as long as anyone has wanted to use it.

The crucial point for the land’s sacred character is that the sanctity is not a finding of that research and was never going to be. No excavation makes ground holy; the holiness is a conviction the traditions brought to the ground and have defended on it for millennia, often against one another. The historian Jonathan Z. Smith put the principle generally in To Take Place, taking the Church of the Holy Sepulchre among his cases: a place is not holy in itself and then ritually acknowledged, but made holy by the ritual attention paid to it — humans, in his phrase, do not find themselves placed so much as they place. The Holy Land is the largest standing demonstration of that claim. Its sanctity is a thing done to it, repeatedly, by three peoples who will not stop doing it.

Pilgrimage, war, and the reading of earth

Out of conviction grew pilgrimage, and out of pilgrimage a habit of mind that reaches well beyond this one region: the sense that space itself can be holy, that some places lie nearer the divine than others and are worth crossing the world to reach. The three traditions wore the same roads smooth. Jewish travelers came to mourn at the wall and to be buried within sight of the Mount of Olives; Christian pilgrims followed the stations of a remembered week through the city’s streets; Muslim pilgrims prayed at the Haram and folded a visit to al-Quds into the longer devotion of the Hijaz. The overlap was never tidy, and it was not always violent; for long stretches the shrines were shared and the roads kept open under whatever power held the country.

But the overlap could harden into war over whose pilgrimage would govern the ground. The medieval Crusades were, among other things, exactly that: a contest, fought across two centuries, over which faith’s relationship to the holy places would be enforced by arms — armies marching east under the sign of pilgrimage, the taking of Jerusalem framed as the recovery of a patrimony, the loss of it as a wound to be answered by another army. The same ground that drew the pilgrim drew the besieger, and for the same reason: it was held to matter more than other ground.

The pattern — a sacred center, radiating routes, a topography read as scripture written in earth — recurs far from this valley, from Mecca to Mount Kailash, the unclimbed Himalayan peak that four religions circle without ascending. The Holy Land is where the Western imagination first learned to read it: to look at a hill and see not geology but covenant, not a road but a way of the cross, not a rock but the place from which a Prophet rose. The reading has outlasted every empire that tried to settle who owned the page.

Texts, scholarship, and the study of a contested ground

The Holy Land sits at the intersection of three textual traditions and several modern disciplines, and the literature is correspondingly vast; a few works mark the turns of the argument. On the very idea that place is made sacred rather than found so, the indispensable theoretical statement is Jonathan Z. Smith’s To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (University of Chicago Press, 1987), which builds its case in part from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the temple envisioned by the prophet Ezekiel. On how, in particular, the Christian sense of a holy land arose where for three centuries there had been little, the standard history is Robert L. Wilken’s The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought (Yale University Press, 1992), which traces the conception from the Hebrew Bible through the basilica-building of the fourth century to the Muslim conquest, with attention throughout to the Jewish response to the land’s Christianization.

On the archaeology and the historicity debate, the most widely read synthesis is The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman (Free Press, 2001), which argues that the conquest, the Exodus, and the united monarchy reflect the world of their seventh-century authors more than the events they narrate — a position contested in detail by maximalist scholars but unavoidable as a starting point for the discussion. For the external attestations that anchor the documentary frame, the Merneptah Stele, bearing the earliest known mention of Israel by name, and the Tel Dan stele, bearing the earliest known mention of the House of David, remain the two fixed points around which the rest of the argument turns. The primary record of the land as a destination begins with the Itinerarium Burdigalense of 333, the Bordeaux pilgrim’s bare list of stops, and broadens with the diary of Egeria a generation later — between them the first surviving Christian descriptions of the land mapped and walked as scripture made ground.

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