The first Bible with a map was published 500 years ago. The map shows the division of the Holy Land into twelve tribal areas. Admittedly, this medieval depiction was historically inaccurate and sometimes even geographically incorrect. Nevertheless, this map still shapes our understanding of national borders today, as a new study in this edition of the Bible explains.
In 1525, a very special edition of the Bible was printed in Zurich: the Old Testament by the German printer and publisher Christoph Froschauer. This version of the Bible was the first to contain a detailed map, drawn by the famous German Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach the Elder. Today only a few copies of this work remain. They are held and preserved in libraries worldwide, including a copy in the Wren Library at Trinity College Cambridge. The historian Nathan MacDonald from the University of Cambridge has now examined Cranach’s portrayal in more detail and compared it with various Bible texts.
The map shows the stages of the Israelites’ 40-year journey through the desert after they were freed from slavery and left Egypt. In doing so, she illustrates the course of one of the most famous biblical stories. In addition, the map also shows the division of the Promised Land into twelve tribal areas following the arrival of the Israelites in the biblical land of Canaan. Cranach – similar to earlier Christian maps from the Middle Ages – divided the area on both sides of the Jordan into twelve strips of land with clear boundaries.
First map of the Promised Land – with errors
Where these borders supposedly ran historically is described in the Bible, written in the first century AD by the Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus. However, he simplified the true borders in his descriptions. “Joshua 13-19 therefore does not provide a completely coherent, consistent picture of what land and cities were inhabited by the various tribes. There are several inconsistencies,” MacDonald said. Additionally, the map was not geographically accurate and contained errors. For example, the map was printed so that the Mediterranean appeared east of Palestine.
“Still, the map helped readers understand things,” MacDonald said. Many Christians at that time took the Bible very literally, including the believers during the Reformation, to whom Froschauer also belonged. Illustrating the stories and people of the Bible and making them accessible to a wider audience is expressly forbidden in the Old Testament and was taken very seriously at the time, but creating maps of the Holy Land was permitted. Maps like those of Lucas Cranach the Elder therefore offered Christians a rare opportunity to better understand the spatial and temporal events of the Bible. For example, they could use the map to track where Mount Carmel, the cities of Nazareth and Jericho, and the River Jordan were located, allowing them to go on a virtual pilgrimage. “In their mind’s eye they traveled across the map and encountered sacred history,” MacDonald said.
Bible map as a driver for political forces
Froschauer’s Bible and Cranach’s map followed an existing trend to create maps with territorial divisions, but at the same time they fueled this trend enormously, emphasizes the historian. This and later vivid depictions of the Holy Land in various Protestant Bible editions caused people to increasingly think about worldly boundaries. “As more people gained access to 17th-century Bibles, these maps spread a sense of how the world should be organized and their place in it,” MacDonald explains. People therefore understood the lines as God’s order of the world. In the late fifteenth century, the representation of state borders was also transferred to secular atlases instead of religious maps. From then on, the lines marked political boundaries and areas of influence. “Bible maps delineating the territories of the twelve tribes were powerful players in the development and dissemination of these ideas,” says MacDonald.
However, the depicted division of the Holy Land into tribal areas also led some Christians to view these territories as their ancestral rights and inherited from the Jews. This view of supposedly legitimate sovereignty was also transferred to the political world and led to a kind of national idea for the first time. This in turn flowed into later editions of the Bible and the texts described therein and changed the tradition of the once apolitical Holy Scripture.
According to the historian, this is problematic when fundamental Christians today ignore the complex and lengthy history of the Bible’s development and want to defend boundaries described in it that never once existed. “For many people today, the Bible remains an important guide to their fundamental beliefs about nation states and borders,” says MacDonald. “They view these ideas as biblically authorized and therefore fundamentally true and correct.” However, MacDonald emphasizes that political boundaries and associated social orders have no divine or religious basis. He warns against building ideologies based on the frequently rewritten and distorted or simplified texts of the Bible.
Source: University of Cambridge; Specialist article: The Journal of Theological Studies, doi: 10.1093/jts/flaf090