Heart of the Holy Land: 40 Reflections on Scripture and Place

To Diane, with signposts of our shared journey.

Getting Ready

This book is about an ongoing journey—your journey, and mine as well. Its setting is the Holy Land, where my wife and I have been privileged to live for nearly a quarter century, time enough to learn to hear its heartbeat and sense its call to life. The name Holy Land is descriptive, but also handy. It’s descriptive because it speaks of a God-trodden land. The phrase God-trodden land comes from a pilgrim’s inscription found in ancient Amaseia in Pontus, now north-central Turkey, which mentions places where God became imminent—present—to the men and women of the Bible. And it’s handy because it is a single term that embraces not only the land of ancient Israel but the lands of Israel’s near neighbors as well. Ammon, Moab, Edom, and the wilderness of Sinai were also scenes of activity in the biblical story. Today these lands fall within the borders of several countries: the modern state of Israel with the Palestinian territories, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and the Arab Republic of Egypt. Together, they claim the title lands of the Bible.

The focus of our shared journey is the Dan to Beersheba heartland of the biblical story, with Jerusalem the center. To here is the inward journey of Abraham; from here the outward journeys of the apostles. Whether you’ve been to the Holy Land or not, you already roam the land vicariously whenever you read the Bible, a book that is immersed in the landscape of ancient Israel, jam-packed with geographical language and imagery. But if you have already come, you’ve also encountered it personally and embraced something of its living reality—its storied landscapes; actual remains, now excavated, from Bible times; and people whose ancestral roots in these lands reach back hundreds if not thousands of years.

I often hear the claim, When I visited the Holy Land, the Bible came alive! That discovery is palpable, but not exactly accurate: according to Hebrews 4:12, the Bible already is alive, living and active. What happens is that we become more alive to it, more aware of its texture, its color, its feel, and its tug. The reality has been there all along; we are the ones who have moved (see Isa. 40:8; 55:11). Like the apostle John, we become eyewitnesses for having heard and seen and beheld realities concerning the Word of Life

(1 John 1:1).

On these pages you will find forty reflections on the Holy Land. Each one weaves a biblical or modern event into the landed context in which it took place. These are places that you, too, can explore on your trip to the Holy Land. But you don’t actually have to be in the land to benefit, since each also touches aspects of real life—your life, my life, the lives of people we know—that are common to our experiences wherever we live.

The reflections are organized by place, starting with introductory topics such as climate, roads, and the fertility of the land. Then they zero in on Jerusalem, the highpoint for most visitors to the lands of the Bible. From Jerusalem, they will lead you down to Jericho and the Dead Sea, into the southern desert, all the way to Mount Sinai, up into Galilee, out to the Mediterranean coast, and over to Jordan. Some of the sites that you will encounter on your journey through these pages are common to normal Holy Land tour itineraries. Besides Jerusalem, I include, for instance, Caesarea, Nazareth, the Sea of Galilee, Dan, Megiddo, Jericho, and Bethlehem. Others, such as Mount Gerizim, the Emmaus Road, Jezreel, and Nain, are a bit off-road (off the typical modern tour route, that is, not the ancient network of highways). And so I have set signposts at the start of each reflection to point you to places that will help you organize your own Bible reading or travel through the Holy Land. Here and there, I provide tools to aid your reading and deepen your Bible study as well.

Let’s borrow the words of Moses, spoken in encouragement as he and all Israel stood on the plains of Moab east of the Jordan River, gazing into the land of promise: See, I have placed the land before you; go in … (Deut. 1:8). We’ll take the journey together.

Mount Zion, Jerusalem

September 2019

 Signposts: Anywhere in Judea, Samaria, or Galilee

1. Reading the Bible with Geographical Eyes

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s serious Bible readers, we want to know God better. It’s an awesome thought, really, that the all-powerful creator of the universe chose to reveal himself to the people who inhabit Planet Earth, a speck in the vast darkness of space. The Bible tells us how God entered the world of flesh and blood—our world, although in a time long ago and a place far away from where most of us live—in order to redeem people. Over the course of centuries, we read, God spoke to a small band of eager yet stubborn people who clung to a narrow land hugging the southeastern shore of the Mediterranean. Abraham, Rachel, Moses, Ruth, David, Isaiah, Mary, Anna—all sentinels of the past who marked God’s words well, but who also looked to what the apostle Paul called the fullness of the time (Gal. 4:4) when, in the fullness of place, God would dirty his hands and feet in a small, noisy, and very needy corner of the Roman Empire called Galilee.

The Sea of Galilee from the hills above Capernaum.

Unlike the sacred books of many of the world’s other great religions, the Bible is full of stories of real people living in real places at real times. God’s decision to communicate eternal truth through fallible human beings, to wrap his message around people’s experiences with rock and soil and water, is both mind-boggling and humbling. It also suggests that we can better understand God’s revelation to us if we take the time to learn about and appreciate the physical contexts in which it was given.

Harvest time in Galilee. As Jesus kept increasing in wisdom and stature (Luke 2:52), he walked through fields such as these, picking up imagery he would later use in parables.

The writers of the Bible knew the land in which God chose to reveal himself well. It was, after all, their home. They were intimately familiar with the rugged terrain of Judah, with cold winter rain and scorching desert heat. They had experienced the relief offered by a small spring of water or the shelter of a crevasse in a mighty rock. They knew what it meant for the hills surrounding their city or village to be filled with enemies, or to lie down securely at night after a full harvest. Time and again, the Bible’s historians, prophets, and poets infused the divine message they had to tell with geographical information. In fact, such information fills the biblical text—and its authors assumed their readers knew even more.

By carefully studying the geographical settings of the Bible, we are able to enter more deeply into its world. It becomes possible to follow Joshua’s army into the hill country of Canaan (Josh. 6–11), or to crest the hill on which David’s Jerusalem stood and experience a bit of the energy of the Songs of Ascents (Pss. 120–134). Jesus must have climbed the hills above Capernaum often in the early mornings to gaze out over the Sea of Galilee (see Mark 1:35). By doing the same today, we can better appreciate Jesus’ call to ministry, or our own place in the kingdom of God.

Let’s listen to what Jesus said, but also to what he did:

He began to teach again by the sea. And such a very large crowd gathered to Him that He got into a boat in the sea and sat down; and the whole crowd was by the sea on the land. And He was teaching them many things in parables, and was saying to them in His teaching, Listen to this! Behold, the sower went out to sow . . .

—Mark 4:1–3

Joshua entered Canaan from the east, through the wilderness above Jericho (seen here in late winter).

Jesus met people exactly where they were, at a specific place and a specific time. While the eternal truths of the Bible transcend time and place, they are also rooted in it. We are called to live with one eye focused on heaven, the other on the ground—and in this living in between we do well to consider how those who graced the pages of the Bible did the same. It’s a fresh adventure, with something new every day.

 Signposts: Anywhere in Judea, Samaria, or Galilee

2. Finding the Good Way

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ost visitors to Israel today zip along the countryside in air-conditioned motor coaches, largely oblivious to the challenges and adventures that those traveling the land faced in premodern times. Short stops according to prearranged itineraries do little to move a traveler beyond the tourist stage. Rather, it is only by taking time to walk the hills and valleys of Israel, as Jesus did, that we start to get in touch with the world of the Bible.

During biblical times, travelers in the land of Israel faced many obstacles: rough terrain, swampy ground, sand dunes, a lack of adequate drinking water, insufferable heat, sleet and snow, wind and blowing dust. Added to these was the ever-present danger of brigands and roadside thieves, eagerly awaiting unsuspecting travelers at every turn.

The descent to the oasis of Jericho on the natural route from Jerusalem. This road was paved in the second century

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, and then again only after the First World War.

The roads that connected towns and villages in ancient Israel followed natural routes. These routes avoided as many obstacles as possible by following paths of least resistance. For instance, routes into and out of the rugged hill country of Judah tended to follow the tops of ridges rather than dropping into the steep, rocky valleys below. These ridge tops offered a measure of security, and it was here that many towns and villages were located during the biblical period.

Tracking by camel through Wadi Rum in south Jordan, where the routes are long and water sources few.

For the most part, travel by foot or even donkey cart required that little improvement be made to what were basically donkey paths over hills and through fields. Strong kings would typically improve important roads by cutting brush and clearing stones (see Judg. 5:6–7; Isa. 40:3; 57:14; 62:10). However, most of the time long journeys were nothing short of arduous. An ancient Egyptian document dating to the late thirteenth century BC describes the journey of a traveler who crossed the land of Canaan. The scribe reports that when the traveler halted each night, his crushed and battered body collapsed into sleep.

Eventually, the Romans built a series of improved roads that connected the major cities of Judea, Samaria, and Galilee with the rest of the Roman Empire. In doing so, they graded steep hillsides, built bridges over watercourses, and installed paving, curbing, and milestones. For the most part, these improvements were made in the centuries following the events of New Testament. For this reason, it is not technically correct to say that Jesus walked a Roman road between Jericho and Jerusalem; rather, he walked a natural route that was incorporated into the Roman road system in the following century.

The prophet Jeremiah used the familiar image of journeying through a rugged land to speak about the human heart:

Thus says the

Lord

, Stand by the ways and see and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is, and walk in it; and you will find rest for your souls.

—Jeremiah 6:16

Perhaps because difficult travel conditions were such an everyday part of life in the ancient world, the biblical writers never tired of using travel imagery to speak about a larger journey, the journey each of us takes through life (Gen. 17:1; Deut. 8:6; Ps. 119:1, 105; John 14:6; Acts 9:2).