chapter two THE LAND OF THE BIBLE
chapter two
THE LAND OF THE BIBLE
Why is it important that we know the geography of the history of the people in the Bible?
God’s purpose to call out from the world a people for himself began to unfold on a particular part of the world’s surface and during a particular period of the world’s history. It is not possible to understand its meaning, therefore, without some knowledge of its historical and geographical setting.
Yet the very mention of history and geography, especially Bible history and Bible geography, is enough to switch some people off. They shudder as they recall boring Sunday school lessons, with date-lists of dreary Israelite kings to memorize and Paul’s interminable missionary journeys to plot on a map. If you feel like that, I sympathize with you. I suffered that way too. So evidently did the theological student who was required in an exam to distinguish between the prophets Elijah and Elisha. As he did not have the slightest notion which was which, it is rumored that his essay began: “Let us not haggle over the differences between these two truly great men. But let us rather give a list of the kings of Israel and Judah in their chronological order.”
Some folk who have no taste for either history or geography may ask rather impatiently why God did not give us instead a simple set of dogmas to believe and rules to obey. Why did he have to reveal himself in a rather remote historical and geographical context, so that we have to struggle to understand the context before we can grasp the revelation? One reply might be: “Because God chose to do it that way” and “Stop asking impertinent questions.” But the questions are perfectly proper ones.
A better answer would be that the living God is a personal God, who made us as persons in his own image and insists on treating the persons he has made as persons. So the whole process of revelation has been the self-disclosure of a Person to persons, to real persons like ourselves who actually lived in a certain place at a certain time. In saying this, I am not denying that God has revealed his truth in words. I am rather asserting that his revelation has been “personal” and “propositional” at one and the same time. That is, the truths he has revealed have not descended from heaven by parachute. They have not appeared in disjointed form as “The Thoughts of God,” comparable to Chairman Mao’s. They have instead been made known in and through the living experience of human beings, culminating in his own Son, the Word made flesh.
Moreover, if God had simply supplied us with a systematic catalogue of dos and don’ts for everyday belief and behavior, it would have been far too abstract to be useful. And if such a list had been expressed in the idiom of one age or generation, it would have been largely meaningless to others. But as it is, God revealed himself in personal situations, which, being human, are concrete and readily intelligible in every generation. Their record in Scripture enables us to “see” for ourselves.
God’s dealings with the nation of Israel and with individuals are recorded, we are told, “to teach us” (Rom. 15:4; 1 Cor. 10:11). The instruction they give consists of both encouragement and warning.
“The encouragement of the Scriptures” (Rom. 15:4) is tremendous. Even the great men of the biblical story, it is emphasized, were “like us” (see Jas. 5:17; Acts 14:15). Yet we watch them overcoming in their struggle with temptation and doubt; refusing to bow down to idols and willing to accept death rather than compromise their allegiance to the living God; believing the promises of God in spite of every evidence to the contrary; standing alone in an age of prevailing apostasy; loving and serving their own generation; and bravely bearing witness to the truth.
Scripture contains warning as well as encouragement, for it refuses to conceal the faults even of its great men. It tells us frankly how righteous Noah got drunk; how Abraham, the giant of faith, fell so deeply into unbelief that he was ready even to expose his wife to moral danger in order to save his own skin; how Jacob schemed and Joseph boasted; how Moses, the meekest man on earth, lost his temper; how David found favor in the sight of God, yet committed theft, murder and adultery in a single surrender to passion; how Job, “blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil” (Job 1:8), under the provocation of great adversity, cried out in bitterness and cursed the day that he was born; and how the whole nation of Israel, despite its many unique privileges, broke the covenant of God. The Bible is equally candid with its New Testament characters. They too were men of flesh and blood like us, who gave way sometimes to unbelief, compromise, boastfulness, indiscipline and disobedience. “Now these things occurred as examples” (1 Cor. 10:6, 11).
God wants to deal with us in our situation of time and place, as he dealt with the biblical characters in theirs. So to understand his ways with us, we must understand his ways with them. And to understand this, we must know something of both where and when it all happened. We must be able to visualize it. So our look at the land of the Bible in this chapter and at the story of the Bible in the next two becomes a fascinating, even indispensable, study. For this history and this geography constitute the arena in which God chose uniquely to speak and to act.
It used to be seriously argued by Christian geographers in the Middle Ages that Jerusalem was the center of the earth. Their maps illustrated their belief. And in the ancient Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (which is built over the supposed site of the burial and resurrection of Jesus) a stone is set into the floor to mark what was thought to be the precise spot.
Of course this is sheer nonsense, geographically speaking. Theologically, however, Christians would defend it as true. To them Palestine is “the Holy Land,” a region distinct from all others. It is also the center of the world’s history and geography in the sense that here lay “the promised land,” which God pledged to Abraham some two thousand years before Christ; here the Savior of the world both lived and died; and here the Christian mission was born, which was to outlive the Roman empire and change the course of world history.
Further, Christians believe in the providence of God. We cannot therefore imagine that the choice of Palestine as the stage for the drama of salvation was an accident. One of its obvious features is that it acts as a kind of bridge between three continents. Europe, Asia and Africa converge at the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean, and their citizens have always mingled with each other on its trade routes by sea and land. Consequently, not only has Palestine been invaded and subjugated by armies from all three—first Egyptian, then Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian, and finally Greek and Roman—but it became an admirable springboard for spiritual counterattack, the soldiers of Jesus Christ marching north, south, east and west to the conquest of the world. “You will be my witnesses,” his last words to them had been, “in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). Strategically, therefore, God has set Jerusalem “in the center of the nations” (Ezek. 5:5). If Christ’s witnesses had taught more clearly the Middle Eastern origins of Christianity, one wonders if the gospel would ever have become so closely associated in the minds of Africans and Asians with the white and the Western world.
“Palestine”—the word came originally from the Philistines who occupied a small western section of it—is itself only a part of the arena of Old Testament history. The wider scene has often been called the “Fertile Crescent,” because it sweeps round in a semicircle from Egypt to Mesopotamia, from the Nile valley to the alluvial plain watered by the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, enclosing the arid Arabian desert. In order to understand the history of God’s people, one needs to keep this crescent in mind, and not least the two great rivers which form its extremities. For God called Abraham from Ur of the Chaldees, situated only nine miles from the River Euphrates in Southern Iraq, and Moses from Egypt where he had narrowly escaped drowning as a baby in the River Nile. The very words “Egypt” and “Babylonia” reminded Israelites of the saving initiatives of their God, for these countries were the scenes of their two bitter captivities, from which their God had delivered them.