How did the Holy Land come to be holy?

Holy Land: Edition I

“The Land of Israel is the centre of the world; Jerusalem is the centre of the Land; the Holy Temple is the centre of Jerusalem; the Holy of Holies is the centre of the Holy Temple; the Holy Ark is the centre of the Holy of Holies and the Foundation Stone, out of which the world was founded, is before the Holy Ark.”

— Midrash Tanhuma, Kedoshim 10 (c. 8th-9th centuries)

“The sanctuary of the earth is Syria; the sanctuary of Syria is Palestine; the sanctuary of Palestine is Jerusalem; the sanctuary of Jerusalem is the Mount; the sanctuary of the Mount is the place of worship; the sanctuary of the place of worship is the Dome of the Rock.”

— Thawr ibn Yazid, Fadail (8th century)

Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives — Frederic Edwin Church (1870) Public Domain.

At the far southeastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea lies a land that has had many names.

Canaan, as it was known in the distant past, is more familiar to us now by two other names: Israel and Palestine — both of which come to us burdened with the heavy weight of history, religious identity, and bloodshed.

From the sea edge stretches a wide coastal plain — the south-westernmost region of the Fertile Crescent, which saw the advent of agriculture some 12,000 years ago. In the east, the plain is bounded by a chain of hills that rise into snow-capped mountains at their north, and hide the lush Jordan Valley beyond. In the south, the lone and level sands stretch far away to become the Sinai Desert, while in the north the hills curve away from the Jordan River and make for the coast. There is one passage through these northern hills, guarded still by an ancient citadel called Megiddo.¹

Marking the hinge between Africa and Asia, this area was once of vast geopolitical importance as the sole land-corridor between the two largest continents. As such, in its long history, any autonomy its inhabitants briefly enjoyed was always as a tiny player in a world of giant empires; over the millennia, this small square of habitable earth among otherwise parched sands, has seen rule by Egyptians, Assyrians, Akkadians, Hittites, Babylonians, Persians, Macedonians, Ptolemaics, Seleucids, Romans, Byzantines, Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatamids, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans, and the British. Today, its significance lies less in its geography, and more so as a site of supreme spiritual importance to three major world religions and the 3.8 billion souls they count among their followers.

For the Jews, this area is the Promised Land, given to them as part of a covenant with the god who has no name, YHWH (“I AM WHO I AM.”).² Although united under King David, after the death of his son, Solomon, the area splintered into two rival kingdoms: Judah in the south (from whom the Jews take their name), and Israel in the north, who arrogated the name of the whole for their half.

For the Christians, it is known as Terra Sancta, the Holy Land, made so by the fact that Jesus Christ was born, lived, and died here. His death on a cross outside the city of Jerusalem (sometimes called Zion after its citadel) birthed the world’s largest religion, with its church spires now dotting the world from Alaska to Patagonia, from South Africa to Svalbard, from Rome to Kamchatka.

For Muslims, this area is most often known as Palestine — a term which comes from the name of a Greek seafaring people who left the Aegean to settle the coast of the southern Levant: the Philistines. It was to Al-Aqsa, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, where the Prophet Muhammad is said to have travelled on the back of Buraq, before ascending to heaven and back on his Night Journey. As such, the Temple Mount is the third most sacred site in Islam, another stratum to the layers and layers of spiritual significance of a land already dripping in holiness.

No other place on Earth has the cultural, political, or spiritual resonance as that land we call ‘Holy’. Overlaying the real — the geographical area known as Israel/Palestine — are almost 5000 years worth of the irreal: stories, scripture, prayers, the most spectacular art, culture, literature, myth, and religious devotion. Nowhere else on Earth holds such power over the collective imagination of so many people, most of whom have not, and never will, lay eyes on it for themselves. 3.8 billion people with 3.8 billion different visions of the same place.

Whether we consciously think in these terms or not, the physical settings in which we find ourselves, or associate with abstractly, shape our sense of self. An Englishman is an Englishman because of an association with a physical place called England, and the intangibles — values, identity, myth — with which we associate it. The same is true of those who identify themselves with any nation, any city, any place. In a religious context, this identification with a small corner of earth is felt all the more keenly.

For a Jew, thirty-seven acres at the centre of Jerusalem is the most important place in the universe. For a Christian, the land that Jesus lived and died on — places with names like Bethlehem, Nazareth, Golgotha — were and are central to the story of humanity’s salvation. For a Muslim, the beautiful gold-plated dome atop the Temple Mount in the Holy City marks the spot of one of the greatest miracles in all history.

To ask the question of why this is the case is to ask what makes a human being, a human being. We are story-making machines. Mortal beings born conscious into an unfathomably vast cosmos, what are we to make of our finite existence in an infinite, eternal universe? The stories we tell of ourselves, of the world, of creation — these are how we attempt to make sense of this strange paradox at the heart of our being. One might be tempted to wonder why people choose to die for a physical patch of land, or an intangible construct like a nation or a theology, but when it’s put in the proper context — that a sense of place is integral to how we define ourselves and our place in the world — we can come closer to understanding what makes us, us. And nowhere else has this link between land and meaning more profoundly shaped the course of global history than here.

This then, is the opening shot of the first major project of

Cosmographia

in 2024. In our Holy Land series, we will be exploring the question: How did the Holy Land come to be holy?³ We will examine: how a single deity emerged from a pantheon of gods; the site of the Garden of Eden; the Flood myths; the Patriarchs; Exodus; the Birth of Israel; the House of David; Solomon’s Temple; Babylonian Exile; the one they call Christ; the Night Journey; the emergence of the Caliphate; the Crusades; attempts to build a New Jerusalem; and Armageddon itself.

I hope this work will allow readers to stand back from the horrors of contemporary politics for a moment, and reflect on why the Holy Land looms so large in our collective consciousness, and see its origins as a profoundly human, if not humane, story.

Nowhere else on Earth holds greater sway over the hearts and minds of human beings than the Holy Land. The stakes feel higher here than anywhere else. Emotions more fraught.

For this is the Kingdom of GOD.

1. No wonder then, that Christians know Megiddo as Armageddon — the site of the future clash between the forces of heaven and hell for cosmic supremacy.

2. The Hebrew block script of “יהוה‎” is transliterated as “YHWH”, which is then latinised as Yahweh.

3. I choose the term ‘Holy Land’ for the title of this series for its neutrality in the face of the present day conflict.

Bibliography:

Esposito, John L.; et al. (1999). The Oxford History of Islam

Hourani, Albert (1991). A History of the Arab Peoples

Hoyland, Robert G.; Williamson, H.G.M.; et al (2018). The Oxford Illustrated History of the Holy Land

Holland, Tom (2019). Dominion

MacCulloch, Diarmaid (2009). A History of Christianity

Makintosh-Smith, Tim (2019). Arabs: A 3000-year History of Peoples, Tribes, and Empires

Montefiore, Simon Sebag (2011). Jerusalem: A Biography