Abstract:

The paper explores the ways in which the Bible has been used by European travellers and biblical scholars to construct imaginative geographies of Palestine. It is important to understand how these spatial stories work, and their continuing influence, by examining their representations and images of space that have such a profound and continuing hold on popular and scholarly understandings of Palestine. Failure to explore the critical relationship between the Land and the Book (geography and reading) runs the risk that received scholarship becomes an object of veneration or an instrument of oppression.

Author: Keith W Whitelam