ABSTRACT

The country is small: in Cisjordan, the area inhabited ‘from Dan to Beersheba’ is 200 km long (N-S) and 80 km wide (E-W); another 40 km area in Transjordan can be added. Altogether there are about 20,000 km2 – less than an Italian region like Piedmont or Sicily. To think that such a density of memories and events of millennial and universal relevance is concentrated in such a small land! Not all the territory can be used for agriculture. The only alluvial plains are in the central valley of the Jordan and in the plain of Jezreel; the costal strip is sandy and salty, but the low hills of the Shephelah are much more suitable. The rest is all hills and mountains, once covered with woods, then stripped by the action of men and goats, destined to a process of erosion contained only by the exhausting work of terracing. Such a setting is suitable for a transhumant sheep-rearing and to small-scale agriculture, restricted to valley ‘niches’ (or to the bottom of wadis in semi-arid zones), occupied only by family farms and minute villages. With the aid of constant human labour, this Mediterranean landscape becomes capable of sustaining a diverse, even if small, population and a region where agricultural and pastoral resources (especially when compared with the desert) are sufficient to fulfil the necessities of human life in the ancient world. The description of a land ‘flowing with milk and honey (Num. 13.27) is certainly exaggerated, but conveys the idea of a land that can sustain human habitation:

Actually, metals are very scarce (the copper of the ‘Araba is not found in Palestine), there are no gemstones (the turquoise of Sinai lies even further away), and there is no valuable timber (as in Lebanon). The coast is mostly covered by dunes, with a few modest lagoons, and it does not afford secure harbours except in the extreme north, between the Carmel promontory and Ras en-Naqura on the Lebanese border. Caravans travelling along the

‘Way of the Sea’ from the Egyptian Delta to Syria were anxious as they traversed a poor and menacing land. Those travelling on the ‘King’s Highway’ from Arabia to Damascus and the Middle Euphrates, passed along the edge of Palestine, almost preferring the clear spaces of the desert to the misery of the settled land. Compared with other areas of the Near East, such as Egypt and Mesopotamia, Syria and Anatolia, which already in ancient times provided the seat of renowned civilizations, of extensive states centred on monumental cities, Palestine seems singularly unattractive. If the number of inhabitants is a valid indicator of the opportunities afforded to civilized communities for subsistence and development, the data are self-evident. In the Late Bronze Age, when Egypt and Mesopotamia hosted some millions of inhabitants, Palestine did not reach 250,000. Even at the summit of its development, during Iron Age II, its inhabitants numbered no more than 400,000. If we focus on the internal configuration of Palestine, the narrowness of the landscape is striking: it is all fragmented into mountains and hills, and the view never meets an open horizon. Seen within a regional dimension, then, the marginality of the land appears with stark clarity: it lies to the extreme south of the ‘Fertile Crescent’, the semicircle of cultivated lands between the Syro-Arabian desert, the Iranian and Anatolian mountains and the Mediterranean sea. The role that geography dictates for this land, if any, is to serve as a connection (more for transit than for settlement) between Egypt and Western Asia: but this location seems to have brought the inhabitants of Palestine more misfortune than benefit. Yet this country, so modest in natural resources and in population, has played a key role in the history of a large part of the world. The contradiction is due to the extraordinary ability of its inhabitants to bind together landscape and memory, conferring on their land a set of symbolic values that, through alternating episodes of dispersion and focalization, departure and return, spread widely beyond its borders. It is not only the landscape that is thoroughly man-made, as is normal in all countries with a long cultural history. Not only its constitutive elements, even the smallest ones – a centuries-old oak, a well, a cave, some ancient ruins, an ancestral tomb – become sites of memory and tokens of legitimation. But the entire country, marked off from the surrounding diversity , is put at the centre of a complete mental history: as the object of a divine promise that makes it the selective heritage of certain groups, excluding others; and as the place of the physical presence of God in the world and therefore the setting of events whose value is universal and

eternal. The terms ‘Promised Land’ and ‘Holy Land’ indicate how a specific region could become a symbol and a value, without even naming it, since everyone knows immediately which land it is.