ABSTRACT
An understanding of the land of Palestine is essential to understanding the Bible and Palestinian identity is, historically, both fragile and mixed. Moreover, due to its geopolitical context as a crossroads, it is subject to the external demands of changing imperial control, from the ancient Egyptians to today’s Israelis. Rejecting a Christian-Zionist understanding of the biblical trope: “a land without a people intended for a people without a land”, the question of who the “native people of the land” are is opened. They are hardly the Jews of modern Zionism, as not only did most ancient occupants of Palestine’s many peoples remained in the land, including the Jews of the Greco-Roman period, but Jews of modern Israel include descendants of not only ancient Palestine, but many converts to Judaism, most notably North African Berbers and East-European Khasars. A proposal is made for a reexamination of our understanding of biblical texts from a theological rather than historical perspective. This article is a revision of M. Rahab: A Palestinian, Christian Perspective”, in idem, The Biblical Text in the Context of Occupation: Towards a New Hermeneutics of Liberation (Bethlehem: Diyar, 2012): 1–28.
