Part III

Conlicts of Identity at the Water’s Edge

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TRICIA CUSACK.indb 106 4/11/2012 3:39:21 PM
 7

The Jordan River in Ancient and Modern Maps

Rachel Havrelock

Introduction

In 1922, the British Foreign Oice marked the edges of Transjordan (later
to be Jordan) and Palestine (later to be Israel) by drawing a line through
the Jordan River. The line on the map was illusory – the British efectively
controlled both sides and travel was easy – yet the image of the nation
rising from the river’s edge made it seem longstanding and even natural.
The British map determined geography from the moment that Jewish and
Palestinian nationalists adopted it as evidence of their yet unestablished
homelands. In the 1948 war following British withdrawal, the Jordanians
led by King Hussein claimed the “West Bank” as an inalienable part of the
Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Only after the 1967 war when the Israeli
Defence Forces defeated the Jordanian army on the West Bank and expelled
signiicant numbers of Palestinian inhabitants did the State of Israel, albeit
through incorporating occupied territory, resemble the 1922 map. No
mater the outcome of the wars in question, Palestinians and Israelis became
increasingly certain that the Jordan marked the eastern limit of the homeland,
beyond which lay exile. Such certainty is evident, for example, in the March
2011 statement on the Jordan River by the Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin
Netanyahu, “Our line of defense starts here, and it has no alternative,” and
the retort by the Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, “The
Jordan Valley is an integral part of the Palestinian land occupied in 1967, just
like east Jerusalem.”1
To this day, Palestinians and Israelis do not admit that they derive their
most important boundary from the British. Instead, each group appeals to
indigenous geographic traditions and draws from its store of collective
sufering. In the Palestinian case, the geographic traditions tell of pioneers
crossing from east to west in order to found the villages and cities of Palestine

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 108 art and identity at the water’s edge

or uphold the notion of a land sanctiied by the activities of Muslim prophets.

Since 1948, as noted by Edward Saïd, the Jordan River has operated as the
very symbol of Palestinian exile. Maps and icons of Palestine always relect
the 1922 British borders and never include any portion of Jordan, where the
greatest number of Palestinian exiles lives. Israelis turn to the Hebrew Bible,
which records the Jordan River as a border and narrates Israel’s miraculous
homecoming after slavery as the crossing of the Jordan led by Joshua. Most
records of ancient Jewish political autonomy reinforce the claim. Modern
stories of Jews reaching Israel from any direction are often framed as Jordan
crossings to the Promised Land. This rhetoric intensiied following the 1967
conquest of the West Bank, widely viewed as a messianic event. The messianic
sentiment, in part, arose from the sense that by restoring the capitals of
ancient Israel to Jewish rule, God had at last redeemed His long-sufering
and fragmented people. Reaching the edge of the Jordan contributed to the
euphoria.
Since 1967, Israelis and Palestinians have experienced the river as a border.
The 1994 peace accord between Israel and Jordan that opened the border
did litle to mute the sense of divide. This means that colonial delimitations,
cultural traditions and historical experience all contribute to the investment
in the Jordan as a necessary and perpetual border.2 The British Protestant
map irst published by the Palestine Exploration Fund in 1880 and adopted
by the British Foreign Oice in 1922 ultimately exerted the strongest inluence
on the Arab and Jewish contenders for the land between the Jordan and the
Mediterranean. In more general terms, one can say that empire determined
the contested nation.
I have accounted for why most contemporaries would simply assume that
the Jordan River has always marked a dramatic division. For the remainder
of the essay, I will focus on the much longer period of time during which
the Jordan was not seen in this way. My evidence for the claim that, while
signiicant in their own right, the western and eastern edges of the Jordan
were not construed as dichotomous comes from the representation of the
riverbanks in maps. As political division becomes apparent in British maps
from 1922–47 and then in Israeli and world maps after 1967, so maps can
also show us when such division was not in efect. This is to say that the
modern political conigurations that rely on the Jordan as a border are
discontinuous with prior geographic conceptions in which the Jordan River
plays a connective rather than a divisive role. However, these representations
still depend on the river when constructing a site of advanced culture – the
redemptive Holy Land – deined through opposition with the natural wilds
and deserts of the eastern bank. Not only do these maps produce the Holy
Land, but they also create a Holy Land in the image of Europe.
Christian European mapmakers and, ultimately, the viewers of the
maps understood the represented landscapes in terms of the Holy Land, a

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 Rachel Havrelock 109

concept itself dependent on the Christian reading of the Hebrew Bible (the
Old Testament). In order to understand the ideas that the Christian maps
transform, let us irst consider the Hebrew texts that inform the maps.

The Jordan in Antiquity

The Jordan River has a divisive function in some texts of the Hebrew Bible. In
the qualiication that this function pertains only to some texts I refer to biblical
source criticism that perceives the Hebrew Bible as comprised of the work of
multiple authors or sources. I am interested here in three sources in particular:
the Elohist (E) source associated with the northern kingdom of Israel; the
Deuteronomistic (D or DTR) source that generates the monarchical history
contained in the books of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings;
and the Priestly (P) source associated with the many generations of priests that
presided over or maintained the memory of the Temple in Jerusalem.3 Each of
these sources promulgates a distinct map of the land promised to Israel and,
as a result, portrays the Jordan River diferently. The term “map” in these
cases is something of an overstatement since the Priestly and Deuteronomistic
sources ofer only boundary lists and the Elohist source deines the relevant
territory though narratives that depict open frontiers much more than
delimited terrain. In any case, only the Priestly source cites the Jordan as the
eastern border of Israel’s homeland. In the book of Numbers 34 and the book
of Ezekiel 47, the Jordan River distinguishes the land of God’s promise from
locations of wandering and exile to the east. This mapping renders the western
edge of the Jordan as the threshold of the homeland – a place of reintegration
and redemption. By extension, the eastern edge igures as a place of danger
and trials that threaten one’s status. The particular dangers associated with
the eastern edge arise from an indelible foreignness that begins immediately
at the shoreline.
Such meanings hold in Deuteronomistic literature despite the fact that this
source contains a map that stretches eastward, far beyond the Jordan, to the
Euphrates River. Only the Elohist source portrays the eastern side of the Jordan
as a productive space, a representation that bespeaks a historical scenario in
which the more syncretistic northern kingdom spanned both banks of the
Jordan. These biblical texts together with the archaeological record betray
that Israelite communities resided on both banks of the river. The Priestly
source, it seems, looked to the Jordan as a symbol of Israel’s distinction and
separation from other nations.
In the Second Temple period of ancient Israel as well as during the period
when Herod and his heirs ruled, Jewish communities persisted along the
eastern edge of the Jordan. Although no maps per se exist from this period,
descriptions of territory included in the books of Maccabees and the writings

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 110 art and identity at the water’s edge

of Josephus represent the Jewish character of the eastern shore. This social
reality combined with biblical notions that the eastern edge of the Jordan is
a threshold of transformation contributes to the seting of John the Baptist’s
immersions (according to the Gospel of John 1:28) at Bethany beyond the
Jordan.4 However, late antique as well as contemporary debates regarding
the bank on which the Baptist set up camp suggest that the river, in the case
of baptism, was more important than the shore.

The Madaba Map

The earliest known map depicting the Jordan River is the sixth century CE
Madaba Map (Figure 7.1). Comprised of small mosaics, the map depicts
both banks of the river. The space and detail aforded to Jerusalem shows
that this was the most signiicant site in the mapmaker’s world.5 Although
located in a church east of the Jordan, the map “presents the Promised Land
to a visitor coming from west of the Jordan not east of it, where Madaba
was”, which may relect “the orientation of all churches to the east” during
this period (Shahid 1999: 147). The Jordan River seems to be a central feature
of the map that connects two areas with biblical signiicance. In the surviving
section, three ish swim in the Jordan. One of them swims upstream to avoid
the Salt (Dead) Sea with a noticeable look of disgust. Two boat bridges or
pontoons connect the two sides of the river. Although the fragmentary
nature of the map makes it diicult to draw too decisive a conclusion, the
map may suggest the wild, more natural character of the eastern bank in
contrast to the well-developed and highly signiicant western bank. To
the east, only the site of “Aenon now Sapsaphas” is marked. Nearby a lion
chases a gazelle, a scene that suggests a wilderness, perhaps “the jungle
of the Jordan” mentioned in the book of Jeremiah 12:5, 49:19, 50:44. In
contrast, the western edge hosts the marked locations of “Aenon near to
Salim”, “Coreus”, “Archelais of Saint Elisha”, “Jericho”, “Galgala, Also the
Twelve Stones”, “Beth Abara the Baptism of St. John” and “Floor of Atad,
now Bethagla”. These marked locations depict inhabited towns, shrines and
commemorative sites of biblical miracles (Avi-Yonah 1954). Still, one cannot
rush to the conclusion that the Jordan divides nature from culture in the
Madaba Map since time has so eroded its dimensions. It is quite possible
that the Madaba map once depicted all the Levantine sites of biblical events
(Hepper and Taylor 2004).
In the Tabula Peutingeriana, a map of Roman imperial road systems
drawn during the 1200s but ostensibly a copy of a late antique original, the
Jordan River does not have a divisive function (Kadmon 2001a: 54). This
cartographic ode to empire recognizes few barriers to the connective powers
of transportation systems. Bodies of water that cannot be traversed by roads

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 7.1 The Madaba Mosaic Map, late sixth century, coloured manuscript, oriented to the east,
126 × 178 cm: detail showing the Jordan River and the northern part of the Dead Sea

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 112 art and identity at the water’s edge

are simply compressed (Weber 1999: 43). The Jordan presents no exception
– a road connects Tiberias west of the Jordan to Gadara to the east and a
red line spanning the Jordan likely indicates the Roman bridge south of the
Sea of Galilee. As relatively early examples in the history of cartography, the
Tabula Peutingeriana and the Madaba Map atest to the primary purposes
of mapping. The Tabula is product and tribute to empire, displaying the
geographic knowledge acquired by conquest as well as the roads along which
troops and commodities can travel. The condensed span of the map allows
all of the lands encompassed by the Roman Empire to appear uniied and
manageable.
The function of the Madaba Map remains an open question. Scholars have
suggested that it may have served as a guide to early Christian pilgrimage,
but its ixed position in a church forecloses this possibility – pilgrims often
needed immediate, practical guidance (Tsafrir 2001). Reviving an older thesis,
Irfan Shahid (1999) suggests that the map represents Moses’ inal vision of
the Promised Land from atop the Transjordanian mountain of Nebo. Shahid
further notes that the sixth century marks an important moment in the
Christianization of Moses as well as in the crystallization of the Christian Holy
Land. Building on his thesis, I suggest that the map served as an instrument
of constructing the Christian Holy Land. As much as and, perhaps, more
than they represent extant topographies, maps bring places into being
as distinct entities marked by the character of empire, nation or religion.
Without boundaries that confer distinction, adherents do not know where to
place their loyalties or what territory needs to be defended in the name of
the collective. Although the fragmentary state of the Madaba Map makes it
diicult to name these boundaries with precision, the centrality of Jerusalem
and the punctilious identiication of biblical sites show a landscape saturated
with religious meaning. The Madaba Map makes the Christianization process
a stable reality laid out with certainty through thousands of mosaics. From
Hagith Sivan’s perspective, the map also functions to celebrate the empire
that makes Christianisation and its appropriation of biblical sites possible
(Sivan 2008: 257).

Christian Exploration and Holy Land Maps

The age of exploration and European colonisation revived and intensiied

the cartographic arts. Driven by the prospect of imperial conquest, the
European maps simultaneously granted themselves sanctity and legitimacy
by appealing to a Christian sense of purpose. This purpose became manifest
in the world maps that placed Jerusalem at the centre. The use of cartographic
technologies to represent the Holy Land – whether or not it was connected
to a larger geography – implied that exploration was primarily Christian,

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 Rachel Havrelock 113

rather than economic, in its aims. In maps from the ifteenth to the eighteenth
centuries, the Holy Land includes both banks of the Jordan. Again, the river
connects rather than divides. How far east the maps reach depends upon
whether the map is based entirely on biblical sources or combines biblical
sources with current or historical setlements.
The English pilgrim William Wey’s 1458 map includes so many sinuous
tributaries that the very notion of a bifurcating Jordan River becomes
completely lost.6 Wey clusters eastern cities and shrines right along the banks
of the Jordan with the efect that the eastern edge appears no less setled than
its western counterpart. Since all of these cities and shrines are drawn like
“medieval castles” (Tishby 2001a: 77), the entire landscape appears European.
The profusion of rivers creates a series of enclosed or semi-enclosed
interconnected zones with seemingly quaint gardens and colourful churches.
Wey’s irst-hand experience, it seems, was iltered through a pre-existing
cultural lens. All the same, Wey atends to the current names of places and
reconciles them with their biblical titles. For example, he provides four names
for the northern freshwater sea: Tiberia, Sea of Galilee, Kinneret, Gennasereth.
In a fascinating atestation, Wey also identiies the “Sepulchre of Blessed Job”
east of the river.
In a 1532 German version of Ptolemy’s map, Jacob Ziegler atempts to create
a scientiic map of Palestine (Tishby 2001b: 86). The intersection between myth
and science becomes beautifully apparent in the top left corner where the sea
monster Leviathan draws dangerously close to the orb depicting the cardinal
directions as well as to the longitude lines on the margin. However, the map’s
north-west orientation renders it ininitely more legible to a modern viewer
than Wey’s map. The Jordan River is central, but not particularly divisive. A
chain of mountains follows its span, and all relevant sites are located along
these mountains. In Ziegler’s map, as in many others from this period, this
eastern mountain chain serves as the boundary between biblical lands and the
desert. The map identiies the distance between the eastern mountain chain
and other eastern capitals such as Susa, Babylon and Nineveh.
A 1542 map drawn by Henricus Petri is likewise based on a Ptolemaic
model (Kadmon 2001b: 70). However, its south-eastern orientation renders
it almost the reverse of Ziegler’s map. It strongly diferentiates between the
east and west sides of the Jordan. The east is sparsely populated, hosting
more trees than cities. Animals, riders on camelback, Bedouin tents and a well
whose pumping seems to require prodigious efort characterizes the eastern
desert. If not quite the Jordan itself, then the strip of towns just east of the
desert draws the line between culture and nature. The transigured Christ
shining above the mountain of Tabor just west of the Sea of Galilee points to
the salvation inherent in the culture of the west.
More precise and suggestive is the Venetian Bolognino Zaltieri’s 1569
map (Figure 7.2) oriented in the manner of the Madaba Map rather than in

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 114 art and identity at the water’s edge

7.2 Bolognino Zaltieri, map of the Holy Land, showing the River Jordan,
1569, copperplate, 29 × 53 cm

the Ptolemaic style. Densely spaced rows of trees line the Jordan and deine
its edges as if to declare the river, rather than either of its shores, a feature
of nature. Between the Samachonites Lake and the Sea of Galilee, the trees
cluster mostly on the eastern shore, but between the Sea of Galilee and the
Dead Sea the trees form a corridor that emphasizes the edges of the river and

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 Rachel Havrelock 115

outline the river as a lifeline of the region. As long maintained in exegesis,

the river stems from twin sources named “Jor” and “Dan” that low into
the Samachonites Lake. A bridge named for the biblical Jacob appears just
south of the Samachonites Lake and the Roman bridge crosses the river just
south of the Sea of Galilee. Like its predecessors, the Zaltieri map saturates
the landscape with biblical signs. Although the markers are sparse to the
east, the spaciousness suggests a frontier, albeit not a wild one. The unsetled
mountaintops and empty spaces of the east suggest unlimited potential. The

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 116 art and identity at the water’s edge

fact that Zaltieri depicts no site postdating the New Testament intensiies this
potential. The most unsetling feature in Zaltieri’s east bank is the igure of
Absalom hanging by his hair from a tree.
European maps from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have a
standardized north-west orientation. Although distinct in terms of how much
detail they provide, whether they incorporate place names from one or both
Testaments and in terms of their decorative features, maps from this period are
fairly uniform. All include the east bank of the Jordan, and most incorporate
the eastern desert. Uninterested in contemporary setlements, these maps
preserve and recreate biblical kingdoms. That is, the geographical projections
of the maps restore ancient Israel while imagining a purely Christian space.
This technique maintained a European hold on the Holy Land during the long
period in which it was a Muslim, Otoman possession.

The Beginning of the Line

By 1873 Otoman authorities had taken all of the steps they would toward
subdividing the area. The Jordan served as perhaps the most deinitive
border, separating the districts (sanjaks) of Acre, Nablus and Jerusalem to
the west from the districts of Damascus and Ajlun to the east. The deinitive
nature of the Jordan may say more about the luidity between other Otoman
districts and subdistricts than about any barriers posed by the river. In fact,
travel, trade and migration across the Jordan characterize this period.
As the Otomans inalized their administrative districting, a London
organization named the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) was formed in the
name of excavating and mapping the Holy Land. A private, subscription-
based organization with missionary roots, the PEF’s cartographic projects
from the outset were subsidised by the British War Oice and stafed by
members of the Royal Engineers. In this marriage of convenience, members
of the PEF remained largely unaware of the increasing dependence on the
War Oice while the War Oice ignored the PEF’s archaeological endeavours
and pressed for a scientiic map. That the PEF produced the map used, with
some modiications, by the British general Edmund Allenby in ousting the
Turks from Palestine and that this same map deined the initial colonial claims
to Palestine shows how the measurement and representation involved in
cartography also function as means of exerting control and absorbing space.
This sort of quantiied imperial knowledge that can be reproduced, cited and
disseminated then has the force to override historical or indigenous claims. In
the case of Palestine, scientiic technologies substantiated biblical truth, which
in turn inlected British military and imperial endeavours.
At an early stage of the PEF’s survey, the Jordan River became recognized
as a border. The sparsely populated, less urbanized terrain east of the Jordan;

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 Rachel Havrelock 117

the competition between British and French explorers over the Holy Land; and
the limited funds available to the PEF all contributed to the limitation of the
survey to “Western Palestine”. The PEF’s Survey of Western Palestine invented
the place that would become British Mandate Palestine and established the
Jordan River as something of an indelible border in the colonial imagination.
After the PEF commitee on mapping drew the hypothetical line, it divided
surveying duties between the PEF and the American Palestine Exploration
Society (APES) (Hallote 2006: 52). Suspecting that the Americans were likely
to fall short of English standards, the PEF gave them the less signiicant – from
a biblical as well as military perspective – Eastern Survey in order to thwart
French or Prussian inroads. Indeed the APES maps were disregarded by the
PEF and their War Oice sponsors and never included as part of the map of
Palestine. This efectively led to a Palestine restricted to territory west of the
Jordan.
The War Oice published its version of the maps in 1879, with publication
of the PEF maps delayed a year by agreement. The twenty-six maps published
in 1880 presented a Palestine conforming to the biblical formulae “from Dan
to Beersheba” for the north–south axis and “from the Jordan to the Sea” for
the east–west axis; thus the Holy Land as a potential holding of a Protestant
empire was born. The logic of mapping suggested that just as the territory
could be contained and abstracted, so could it be ruled and administered
as a colony. From a strategic perspective, a map of the entire Jordan River
Valley remained essential: the French and Russians contemplated atacks on
the Otomans along this route, the Germans were building a railroad from
Damascus to Haifa, and the British knew that the Jordan River Valley ofered
a route to the Suez Canal and their holdings in Egypt and India. In 1884 the
PEF published an Eastern Map of “only 500 square miles of the land east of
the Jordan”, with additional knowledge acquired from the maps of Gotlieb
Schumacher, a German railway engineer friendly to the PEF who surveyed
the area from the eastern shore of the Galilee to just south of the Yarmuk
River (Moscrop 2000: 146). The contrast between the totalizing knowledge
produced by the Survey of Western Palestine and the piecemeal familiarity
with “Eastern Palestine” impacted upon the sweeping success of General
Allenby’s ofensive west of the Jordan as well as his failed atempt to conquer
the city of Salt to the east.
While ighting the Otomans, the European powers began drawing new
lines across the Middle East that ultimately resulted in the enduring shape
of Middle Eastern nations. The hypothetical divisions in circulation included
T.E. Lawrence’s liberated Arab world marked by a “Greater Syria” ruled
by the Hashemite heir Feisal with whom Lawrence had led the Arab revolt
and zones of British inluence and control administered by Feisal’s brothers,
Zeid and Abdullah, and the Sykes–Picot Agreement in which the British and
French diplomats Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot shaded the map

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 118 art and identity at the water’s edge

with gradated zones of British and French control and inluence. As a jewel in
the crown of Muslim lands, the Sykes–Picot Agreement designed a Holy Land
with multiple Christian inluences in which the northern Galilee region fell
under direct French authority and French, Italian, Russian and Greek control
traversed a southern zone encompassing Jerusalem. A relex of this model
later appeared in the idea of an internationalized Jerusalem outlined in the
1947 partition plan, but neither scheme ever materialized. After the British
army under General Allenby efectively took control of the region by 1918,
the British rejected the Sykes–Picot coniguration and established temporary
demarcations of British administrative control. While British actions made it
clear that the Sykes–Picot map was no longer operative, the precise borders
of the new Middle East remained undetermined during the post-war era of
international conferences and local negotiations.7
As a result of these negotiations, the French received mandates in Lebanon
and Syria and the British mandates in Mesopotamia and Palestine. The exact
location of these places remained unspeciied, and so measuring, mapping and
negotiating continued following the conference. After the war, Transjordan
started to take shape at the Anglo-French Convention in December 1920
where the Yarmuk River was designated as the border between French
Syria and British Transjordan. Transjordan fell under the Palestine mandate
approved at San Remo, but the British modiied the mandate in 1921 through
Article 25, which stated that the provision for a Jewish National Home did
not apply east of the Jordan. Spliting the mandate, reasoned British oicials,
would allow them to fulil promises made to Arab and Jewish nationalists
alike. Approving the modiication in 1922, the League of Nations granted
international recognition to the Jordan boundary and, one could add, to the
PEF map. A single mandate governed Palestine and Transjordan, yet the
Jordan River border distinguished the two “countries” in British as well as
international eyes.8 With his brother Faisal crowned King of Iraq, Abdullah
ibn Hussein became the Emir of Transjordan. Abdullah kept desirous watch
over afairs in Palestine and Zionists from time to time petitioned the British
for the right to develop lands east of the Jordan, but by 1923 the Jordan River
had force as a boundary.9
Because no other comprehensive maps of their prospective nations existed,
the Palestinian and the Jewish national movements absorbed the British
imperial map.10 The strange efect of two aspirants adopting the same map
was that, despite their co-presence, each movement perceived the map as
theirs alone. Mandate Palestine – a colony where British sympathies vacillated
between the local Arabs and the immigrant Jews – set the template for two
separate homelands. So long as the British remained uncertain of where
precisely Palestine began and ended, the invested nationalists perpetuated
multiple ideas about the scope of the nation and its relation to other political
entities. Once the British promulgated a deinitive map of Mandate Palestine,

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 Rachel Havrelock 119

Jewish and Palestinian nationalists looked to a deining territory with certainty.

The western edge of the Jordan became the marker of a legitimate homeland
and, in turn, set limits on the scope of Jewish and Palestinian national identity.

Conclusion

The Jordan River has been represented as a limit in three historically distant
cases: in the Priestly source in the Hebrew Bible, in pre-modern European
maps that depict the Holy Land as a topos of salvation, and by British colonial
powers following the First World War. In all of these cases, the shared culture
and extensive contact between the two banks of the Jordan becomes obscured
in the assertion of an ideology. In the case of the Priestly source, the ideology
promotes a sense of Israel’s purity and distinction from other peoples. In the
case of the long tradition of Christian Holy Land maps, the eastern edge of the
Jordan is not so much rejected as subordinated. The subordination of adjacent
areas forms part of a Christian imperial ideology in which the sacred centre
determined by Europe deines the world. In other words, the geographical
scheme in which the Christian Holy Land stands at the centre of the world
generates maps and globes in which Europe is proximate and above the Holy
Land while the other continents are marginal. I suggest that this geographical
scheme already imagines the other continents of the world as colonies. In
this way, the Holy Land maps work to deine a Christian imperial identity.
I maintain that the map drawn by the Palestine Exploration Fund and
eventually adopted by the British Foreign Oice operated in a similar way.
The exceptional aspect of the British colonial map of Palestine arises from its
inheritance by two competing national groups. In the Palestinian and Israeli
cases, the Jordan and its edges deine national subjects. Jews outside of the
borders of Israel are potential ailiates or diasporic counterparts, but not
Israelis. Palestinians beyond the borders – even just to the east of the Jordan
– are by deinition refugees whose status may or may not be addressed in the
future. The river’s edge not only determines the location of homeland, but
also one’s relationship to the twice-claimed land.

Notes

1. The Jerusalem Post.com: htp://www.jpost.com/Defense/Article.aspx?id=211268.

2. See Havrelock, 2011.
3. I include the Holiness Code or H source in my deinition of the Priestly source.
4. “Beyond”, “over” or “the other side” in biblical narrative more often than not indicates the eastern
side of the river. “By the sixth century, however, a place on the western bank was identiied as the
place of baptism and a church and monastery dedicated to St. John were built there by Anastasius,
as we are told by Theodosius” (Di Segni 1999: 118).

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 120 art and identity at the water’s edge

5. Hagith Sivan notes the degree to which the Jerusalem of the Madaba Map diverges from
“geographical reality” and the Onomasticon, the map’s alleged source (Sivan 2008: 256).
6. The maps discussed in this chapter can be viewed online through the Eran Laor Cartographic
Collection of Holy Land Maps at the Jewish National and University Library: htp://www.jnul.
huji.ac.il/dl/maps/pal/html/.
7. With the exception of an internationalized Holy Land, the San Remo conference produced a
Middle East that resembled the Sykes–Picot Agreement.
8. “The eastern borderline was deined in writing, although it wasn’t marked in reality, and it
appeared on maps only two years later” (Biger 2004: 183).
9. “The obscurity regarding the borderline’s location, and especially the fact that it remained
unmarked, allowed Emir Abdullah, the ruler of Trans-Jordan, to contest the legality of the line
and its location. He raised a demand for passing the Semah triangle and the Negev area to Trans-
Jordan, shortly after the borderline was oicially announced, by claiming that these areas belong
to the vilayet of Syria (A-Sham), during Otoman rule … Abdullah’s demand was rejected” (Biger
2004: 184).
10. “It is clear that British map-making had a greater direct impact on the Zionist population of
Palestine than on the Arab one. It certainly inluenced the Arab population as well, but in more
subtle and indirect ways” (Ben-Ze’ev 2007: 104).

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Ben-Ari, 98–121. New Delhi/Thousand Oaks/London: Sage Publications.
Biger, Gideon. 2004. The Boundaries of Modern Palestine, 1840–1947. RoutledgeCurzon
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