The Historical Geography of the Holy Land is a work of biblical geography and travelogue of Palestine first published in 1894, and the magnum opus of Scottish theologian George Adam Smith. The book sought to explain the history, literature and religion of the Bible through a description of the physical geography of Palestine, combining firsthand observation with biblical criticism and archeologically research. The work was widely read, revised repeatedly (with 26 editions), and became the definitive work on the topic, establishing Smith as one of the leading authorities on the geography of the Holy Land.[1][2]
In 1983, Biblical Archaeology Review described the work in a review of Bible atlases as: “[s]till one of the best Biblical geographies in print, this work is also one of the earliest… Though the maps are out of date and many of the site identifications are now known to be incorrect, the theological and literary contributions of this work are timeless.”[4]
Historical Geography had sold 35,000 copies by 1942, the year of George Adam Smith's death, and remained in print until 1976. It continues to have a significant second-hand readership.[2]
Background
Smith travelled in Palestine in 1880 and again in 1891, 1901 and 1904, undertaking systematic observations of landscape, climate, geology and settlement.[5]
Scope and structure
Historical Geography
The book is organised into three main sections. The first section, about 20% in size, treats Syria and Palestine as a whole, examining physical form, climate, fertility, scenery and their relationship to biblical history. The second, about 60% of the work, focuses on Palestine west of the Jordan River, while the third, about 20%, addresses Transjordan. Throughout, geography is presented as a shaping force in historical development, prophetic literature and religious expression.[6]
Atlas
The atlas synthesised nineteenth-century exploration, particularly the PEF Survey of Palestine, and presented historical maps illustrating territorial change from biblical to modern periods. It contained 60 maps and a detailed index.[3]
Reception and influence
Reception
The work was well received on publication and became Smith's most influential geographical study, reaching a twenty-sixth edition by 1935. It was used extensively by scholars, clergy and students, and was also consulted beyond academic circles, including during the British military campaign in Palestine in the First World War.[7]
It has been criticized as an Orientalist work, producing a "museumified" picture of Palestine.[8]
Impact on the British Mandate for Palestine
Map number 34: “Palestine under David and Solomon about 1015 - 930 B.C”
British prime minister David Lloyd George provided a detailed account over six pages in his 1938 work The Truth About The Peace Treaties.[10] A cable had been received from Louis Brandeis: [10]
My associates of the Zionist Organisation of America cable me from Paris that at the Conference on the Turkish Treaty, France now insists upon the terms of the Sykes–Picot Agreement. If this French contention should prevail, it would defeat the full realisation of the promise of a Jewish Home, for the Sykes–Picot Agreement divides the country in complete disregard of historic boundaries and of actual necessity. Rational northern and eastern boundaries are indispensable to a self-sustaining community and to the economic development of the country. On the north, Palestine must include the Litani River watersheds; on the east, it must include the watersheds of Hermon and the Plain of Jaulan and Hauran. If the Balfour Declaration subscribed to by France as well as by the other Allied and Associated Powers is to be made effective, these boundaries must be conceded to Palestine. Anything less would produce a mutilation of the promised Home. The Balfour Declaration was a public promise proclaimed by your Government and subscribed to by the Allied Powers. I venture to suggest that, in assuring a just settlement of Palestine’s boundaries, the statesmen of Christian nations should keep this solemn promise to Israel.
This demand was considered to be unreasonable – Smith’s map number 34: “Palestine under David and Solomon about 1015 - 930 B.C” was ultimately accepted as a fair basis for delimiting Palestine’s boundaries:[13][10]
M. Berthelot, after commenting that the contents of the telegram suggested Judge Brandeis had a much exaggerated sense of his own importance, said that he had carefully studied an authoritative work on Palestine which Mr. Lloyd George had been good enough to lend him. This work clearly showed that the historic boundaries of Palestine had never extended beyond Dan and Beersheba, and he was quite prepared to recommend to his Government that these should be recognised as the correct boundaries… Mr. Lloyd George said that the book he had asked M. Berthelot to read constituted the greatest authority in the English language on the question of Palestine. It showed that while the boundaries had at times stretched slightly beyond Dan and Beersheba, these places had always remained Palestine’s historic limits. After consultation with Lord Allenby and other authorities, the British Government had decided to accept these as the boundaries for the future. These boundaries had also been accepted by M. Clemenceau, whose acceptance had since been loyally upheld by the present French Government. Mr. Lloyd George therefore proposed to reply to Judge Brandeis to the effect that the Judge’s geography was at fault, and that it might be well for him to study more authoritative and accurate maps than those apparently at his disposal.
… Sir George Adam Smith, author of The Historical Geography of the Holy Land, [wrote] in 1891, "Nor is there any indigenous civilization in Palestine that could take the place of the Turkish except that of the Jews who... have given to Palestine anything it ever had of value to the world." Hence, when the world leaders at Versailles weighed the question of competing Jewish and Arab claims, they were justifiably not concerned with any "Palestinian" national claim. [14]
George Adam Smith's grandson, Adam Roberts, examined this claim in 2017 in an article in Haaretz, showing that the attribution was false, tracing it instead through the polemical work Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine to a dead end. Roberts showed that Smith’s own writings, particularly The Historical Geography of the Holy Land, had in fact rejected the notion that Palestine could ever properly belong to a single nation, including the Jews, emphasising its character as a land shaped by multiple peoples and tribes.[15]
12Aiken 2020, p.154, 164: "The book ran to twenty-six editions, with the first four arriving inside two years, and a progression of one each year for the next twenty years. The work quickly became the definitive treatise on the topic and remained in print until 1976, the rights having passed through different publishing houses. It still enjoys a healthy second-hand circulation and apparently a wide readership, and has also recently been published in Hebrew… A work of travel, characterized by a particular view of the spaces involved, informed by a synthesis of German geography and theology; and rich with poetry and the voices of competing perspectives. By the time of Smith’s death in 1942 the book had sold over 35,000 copies."
↑Aiken 2020, p.161ps=: "This is, in the terms of Timothy Mitchell, a ‘museumified’ Palestine, in which the present landscape only exists as a vestige of the past... the Holy Land itself is holy only because it has been, like a portable relic, in contact with the Divine’… While the book is not in its intention an Orientalist project, it is, in Saidian terms, an Orientalist product…".
↑Butlin 1988, p.383: “…who in addition to a deep and broad scholarly life possessed an interesting and wide range of contacts and friends, including Allenby who had used his Historical Geography of the Holy Land as a field guide in the Palestine campaign.”
↑Kirchhoff 2005, p.149 (footnote)-150: “In the above-mentioned discussion on the future shape of Palestine, British government representatives and leading military figures generally paid tribute to biblical geography. Thus Lord Allenby reported at the beginning of these deliberations that a locality called Banias had been identified as the ancient Dan and had been recognized as such by the War Office. In an apparent bid to argue against competing French claims resulting from the secret wartime Sykes-Picot understanding (1916) on carving up territory in the Middle East, Lloyd George gave instructions that along with a map of this agreement, the following should be sent from London to Paris: 'Adam Smith's Book on Palestine' as well as 'Adam Smith's Atlas (containing the boundaries of Palestine at different periods) ... He wanted a map showing what actually constituted Palestine. He was convinced that this would include Lake Tiberias.' [Footnote: Public Record Office (hereafter PRO)/CAB 21/153, quoted in the following according to Doreen Ingrams (ed.), Palestine Papers 1917-1922: Seeds of Conflict (New York, 1977), 75-8]”
↑Kirchhoff 2005, p.150-151: “Following this internal British discussion, Smith's The Historical Geography of the Holy Land was actually used in Paris in February 1920 as the basis for the tough negotiations between the British and the French on Palestine. This book, said Lloyd George to his French negotiating partners, 'had been written before the War, and, although the work of a theologian, was so accurate in matters of geography that it had been used by Lord Allenby during his campaign'. The publishers of Lloyd George's memoirs attributed such importance to this work that on the corresponding page, they inserted the marginal note: 'Boundaries settlement by Scottish theologian.' And the discussion did indeed return to this work. Lloyd George was in any case only prepared to accept the mandate for a 'real Palestine, the Palestine of ancient history'. In his eyes, the real Palestine had to be an undivided one, an argument grounded on historical geography, for which the Bible represented a veritable title deed. The French side did not seem able to ignore this line of reasoning. In order to reject Zionist demands that appeared to him exaggerated, the French representative, Berthelot, stated 'that the historic boundaries of Palestine had never extended beyond Dan and Beersheba and he was quite prepared to recommend to his Government that these should be recognised as the correct boundaries'. In the end, one of George Adam Smith's maps was recognized as a fair delimitation of the boundaries of Palestine.”
↑Kirchhoff 2005, p.150: “See PRO/FO 972/84 Foreign Policy Document No. 83. Palestine and Transjordan: 1914-1923, Oct. 1982, J. P. Bannerman, Research Department Note No. 23/1982, II: 'Both the Prime Minister and Mr. Balfour talked in terms of a Palestine within the ancient limits of Dan to Beersheba, and throughout discussions at the Peace Conference on this issue, Mr. Lloyd George used as a basis Map No 34 (Palestine under David and Solomon) of Adam Smith's Atlas of the Historical Geography of the Holy Land.”
↑Roberts, Adam (2017-11-01). "Balfour Set a Pattern for the West's Ignorant Interventions in the Middle East". Haaretz. Retrieved 2026-01-03. Some have believed the attribution to Smith of these words. They struck me as unlike Smith, but how can one prove a negative – that Smith never, in 1891 or at any other time in his long and active career, uttered these words? There was a clue in Netanyahu's careless footnoting: he did not quote directly from Smith, but rather from a polemical book, by Samuel Katz, Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine, published in New York in 1973. This in turn cited another book by Herbert Sidebotham, England and Palestine: Essays Towards the Restoration of the Jewish State, published in 1918, which did have the offending words about the lack of "any indigenous civilization in Palestine" but did not attribute them to Smith. In fact what George Adam Smith wrote on this topic in his 1894 The Historical Geography was this grandiose concluding sentence of a chapter on "The Form of the Land": "Palestine, formed as it is, and surrounded as it is, is emphatically a land of tribes. The idea that it can ever belong to one nation, even though this were the Jews, is contrary both to Nature and to Scripture." The conclusions from all this are that Netanyahu should have checked his sources, and also that fake news is not exactly a new problem.
Kirchhoff, Markus (2005). "Surveying the Land: Western Societies for the Exploration of Palestine, 1865–1920". In Stuchtey, Benedikt (ed.). Science across the European Empires, 1800–1950(PDF). pp.149–172.
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