Ninro Ruiz Peña
Dr. Michael Brown, theologian, author, and host of the Christian program Line of Fire, is making a public appeal to Bible publishers. He questions the motivations for the word “Palestine” to appear more and more in recent editions.
Whether it’s on maps, footnotes, or commentaries in study bibles, to him that’s a big mistake. The most recent case is the new edition of the New American Standard Bible (NASB) translation, which chose to use the term “Palestine” in subtitles or headings. He refers to the phrases in bold used by different versions of the Scriptures to highlight the issue in a certain chapter or portion of the Bible.
The controversy isn’t new, but Brown says it’s not just an anachronism, it’s a pretty serious historical-theological issue. For example, the NASB uses the following heading before Joshua 10:29: “Joshua conquers southern Palestine.” In the same way, before the text of Joshua 11: 1 is the phrase: “Take Northern Palestine.”
“The problem,” recalls Brown, “is that Palestine doesn’t exist, if the place needs to be called by any name, let it be Canaan.”
For the theologian, many publishers have a healthy concern to make study materials that facilitate the understanding of the public, but that kind of thing leads to supersessionism, the interpretation called “substitution theology” where, mistakenly, the church is seen as the “spiritual Israel” and which ignores many of God’s promises to the nation of Israel.
Brown recalls that this would not make sense especially in the Old Testament. “I’m just asking why use the completely wrong term Palestinesince he only came to designate that part of the world during the Roman conquest», about a century after the death of Christ.
The theologian rescues some well-known arguments, remembering that Palestine is a translation from Latin for Philistia, the land of the Philistines. The word came to be used by order of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, who hated the Jewish people. In AD 135, he decreed that Judea would be renamed ‘Palestine’, referring to the enemy people of Israel that had become extinct over 600 years earlier.
Hadrian, who was dealing with the revolt of the Jews led by Bar Kokhba at the time, also changed the name of Jerusalem to ‘Aelia Capitolina’ (Capital of the Sun). His stated objective was to erase the name of Israel from history.
The ‘Christian’ use of the term
Historical records show that the terms Palestina and Aelia Capitolina fell out of use after Hadrian’s death. Jerusalem was never called that way again, but “Palestine” is found in the texts of Eusebius, a Church historian who lived in Caesarea. Around AD 300, he wrote about the end of the Roman persecution of Christians and how the Emperor Constantine began to accept Christianity.
Brown is not the only one to question its use. Dr. Thomas S. McCall, a theologian who has written extensively on the subject, explains that for centuries the idea of a land of Palestine, replacing Israel, was used in literature. However, no one spoke of a “Palestinian people”, as Jews and Christians lived together in the region for a long time. When Islam began to spread in the Middle East, Jerusalem was renamed “Al Quds,” but as a religious term, not an official redesign.
However, the idea of a Palestine was definitively signed when the British retook the region from the Ottoman Turks, after the First World War. At the time, they called both sides of the Jordan River Palestine.
It caught on as a geopolitical term, but everyone who lived in the Holy Land was eventually called a Palestinian, whether they were Jewish, Arab, or European.
Although this word never appears in the biblical text, at the end of many bibles the maps say «Palestine in the Time of Jesus». It’s a strange choice, considering that there was never a Palestine in the days of Jesus. It may be an established tradition, but it is still bad theology.
For McCall, the use of Palestine in the Bible “is more than bad, it is devastating when, in our days, that term is the cornerstone of the political propaganda war against Israel and against the Jewish people. Do we want to use terms invented by those who hate Christ, the Bible and Israel? Do we want to use terms used by the enemies of Israel who wish to accomplish nothing less than the destruction of the Jewish people? I think not!”
The scholar makes a vehement appeal: «Christians should use the terminology of the Bible whenever possible. Why don’t we go back to the terms used in the New Testament? The Gospel writers used the term “Israel” to refer to the Holy Land. Why should we use any other term to refer to the Holy Land, especially now that the Jews are returning to it to re-establish it as the nation of Israel from among the family of nations?”
Source: Charisma News and Beth Shalom
Post Visitors:53