Teaching Series 1 - About the Bible

Part 5: Location Is Everything

thought about beginning this article by saying," Even as I write this, the Middle East is in crisis."  But I think that it would be more accurate for me to tell you that the Middle East has always been in crisis.  Having said this, we can now examine why it is so.

The first factor in understanding the geography of the Bible is to understand that the first recognizable civilizations (the ones that left records that we could trace) were founded next to the great rivers.  The oldest evidence comes from the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, a channel that is now known as the Shat Al-Arab, and back upstream on both rivers.  The next oldest evidence comes from the Nile River valley.  These two areas form the eastern and western borders of the "Fertile Crescent." Both ends of the crescent are the places that tribes of people would travel to during times of draught and famine.  In better times, both areas would be prosperous enough to make it possible for people to express their beliefs in concrete forms; scrolls, pyramids, communal buildings and meeting places.

The middle areas of the Fertile Crescent included the valleys formed by the smaller rivers.  While the Jordan River is the best known of these, there are other small rivers that sustained communities such as the Yarmuk, Jabbok, Arnon, and Zered Rivers which are western tributaries of the Jordan and the Dead Sea, and the Kishon and Orontes Rivers which flow west into the Mediterranean Sea.

It is significant that while the names of countries and cities change with the empires that move in and out, the names of the rivers stay the same.

The second factor in understanding the geography of the Bible is to note that this small strip of land is the land bridge to the continents of Africa, Europe, and Asia.  To control who could travel through a place the size of the state of New Jersey was to control wealth and trade.  Add to this the technology to dig tunnels and wells that open into protected heights of land buttressed by stone walls and earthworks, and a city such as Hazor or Megiddo (Har Megiddo, "Armageddon") could successfully survive a siege. In the southern reaches of what was first called Canaan, the city of Beersheba was known as an oasis for the nomadic tribes that traveled the desert then and still do today.  In fact, the Bedouin of the southern desert today are loyal to the people of Abraham because they believe that he was first a desert nomad.

The third factor is to understand the geographic language of the Bible.  Distance is measured by the number of days it took to walk from one place to another.  Abraham's journey to Mount Moriah to sacrifice Isaac was three days, one way.  And it is important not to confuse Hollywood with the Bible.  The movie "The Bible" has Abraham and Isaac traveling from Beersheba to Mount Moriah by walking through the devastated city of Sodom.  The best scholarship today places Sodom and Gomorrah on the opposite side of the Dead Sea, across from Beersheba. Something of a major detour, I think.

"Up" and "down" refer to elevation, not direction.  People are characterized as going down to Jericho and up to Jerusalem.  Jericho is actually east-northeast of Jerusalem, but Jericho is about 1300 feet below sea level (the lowest city on earth) and Jerusalem sits atop a mountain ridge.  The cardinal points of direction (north, south, east, and west) are referred to accurately in the Bible.  When you view a map of the Middle East, please note that all standardized maps orient the top of the map page with the direction north. 

Many study bibles include some maps of the Middle East.  They are primarily maps that show the political divisions during different times in history.  Some of the places that are named on ancient maps are known today, but some are not.  Cities that were destroyed in one period may not have been rebuilt because those conquerors saw no strategic value in maintaining the place.  It was not until the nineteenth century that many of those cities were even searched for, and the debates on which ruins are which city continue to this day.  One example of this discussion is the city of Ur, the ancestral home of Abraham.  There are three locations that make that claim, one in southern Iraq and two in northern Iraq. 

There are also atlases and individual maps that show other important data, such as topographic maps and even weather maps.  Understanding the different elevations and the normal weather patterns for different parts of the area can help us understand where people were able to live.  These maps are also useful in understanding how the biblical generals made strategic decisions about warfare.

Some places in the bible are not even recognized by many people as places.  Ebenezer, which means "stone of help" is a battleground referred to in 1Samuel, three times. Other places have modern names that do not help us understand the history without a little literary digging.  The people of the modern occupied territories of Israel call themselves Palestinians.  When the Romans destroyed Judah and Samaria, which they had earlier named Judea and Samaria, they further insulted the Jews by renaming the whole place Palestine.  "Palestine" is Philistine in Latin.  To rename the Promised Land after the most dangerous of the enemies of the Jews is a terrible insult.  In reality, the people of the Promised Land before the Jews were primarily Canaanites.  The people of the Gaza strip are really ancient Philistines. (Gaza is the name of one of the most prominent cities of that small piece of land.  Israel has only conquered it once [King David] and has never occupied it.  The people of Lebanon are ancient Phoenicians.The people of Syria are ancient Hittites, Assyrians, and Syrians.  The people of Iraq and Iran are ancient Medo-Persians.  The original people of Jordan were Ammonites, Moabites, and Edomites.  The current Jordanian kingdom is none of these.  The Jordanian monarchs are Hashemites, cousins to the princes of Saudi Arabia and put in place by the British and French at the end of World War I.  Most of Kuwait was filled in slowly by the rivers over the last three millennia.  It simply wasn't there in ancient times. 

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that when we compare the Biblical and modern landscapes we find that the names change but the battles don't.  In fact, the Bible tells us  that the battle will continue until the end of time.   In Judges 1 and 2, we are told that because the Israelites did not remove the original people from the land, that those people would not be removed by God.  Those people would become a thorn in the side of the Israelites for all time.  Only God will fix the problem permanently.  In the meantime, the rest of us have lots of work to do.  We still have to show the whole world what living in the Kingdom of God looks like. 
 
Next time: About the Bible - What's In A Name?