POLITICS AND HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY:
Pro-Israel Legal Group Lobbies British Museum to Remove Word 'Palestine' From Displays. U.K. Lawyers for Israel told the museum that some maps and descriptions of exhibits 'retroactively apply the term "Palestine" to periods in which no such entity existed and risk obscuring the history of Israel and the Jewish people' (Ben Kroll, Haaretz).
The British Museum, the United Kingdom's most-visited attraction, has removed the word "Palestine" from some displays, after a pro-Israel group said it was used in a historically inaccurate way to describe areas in ancient Levant and Egypt.
U.K. Lawyers for Israel, an organization which says it "uses the law to counter attempts to undermine, attack and delegitimize Israel," said in a statement on Saturday that the museum is "reviewing and updating some gallery panels and labels" after determining that they were "in some circumstances no longer meaningful."
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To read the full Haaretz article you need to subscribe or (for monthly access to a limited number of articles) register for free. Since I started writing this post, the Times of Israel (
here), the Guardian (
here), and many other media have also covered the story.
UKLFL has posted its own account:
British Museum Reviewing Palestine Terminology in Galleries after Audience Testing. The British Museum has confirmed that it is reviewing and updating some gallery panels and labels after “Audience testing has shown that the historic use of the term Palestine … is in some circumstances no longer meaningful.”
Not surprisingly, the move is not popular in some circles. This article is critical, but reviews the facts of the situation with the British Museum accurately as far as I can tell:
British Museum erases 'Palestine' label after pro-Israel complaint (Türkiye Today Newsroom).
I don't see anything particularly controversial about the reported changes in the British Museum displays, which mostly have to do with the Iron Age II and earlier.
The line taken by UKLFI, if I understand them correctly, is that where there is an emic term (i.e., one used by the ancient writers) for an ancient geographical region, that should be the preferred usage over any modern etic terms. That is a reasonable position as long as an ancient emic term is avialable.
In the case of the Land of Israel, for a long time the term "Palestine" has been used by scholars, often including Jewish scholars, as a neutral geographical term for the region in pre-Roman antiquity. See the PaleoJudaica posts, for example, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
It is a fair point, however, that political developments in the twentieth century to the present have given the term a political sense that makes it less than neutral. So traditional usage is coming up against the more recent political usage. It will be interesting to see how this debate develops. For an earlier post, see here.
And the debate raises a question for Second Temple Jewish studies which is worth exploring. Did Second Temple-era Jews have an emic term for the Land of Israel? I have poked around a little, not comprehensively, and found a few relevant passages.
The Dead Sea Scrolls and related:
- The Damascus Document (XII 19) and the Temple Scroll (11Q19 LVIII 4-5) refer to "the cities of Israel" in a geographical sense. The Temple Scroll is notionally set in the time of Moses, but is addressed to a contemporary (or eschatological-era) audience.
- 4Q382 refers to "the [La]nd of Israel," paraphrasing 1 Kings 18:13, but the biblical text lacks a geographical term. The context is badly broken.
The Gospel of Matthew:
- in 2:20-21 an angel has Joseph take Mary and baby Jesus from Egypt to "the Land of Israel." Matthew is technically post-Second Temple, but before the Roman designation of the province "Syria-Palaestina."
Josephus:
- uses "the country of the Israelites" in a passage paraphrasing 1 Kings 11:23-24 (Antiquities 8.204), replacing the (national rather than geographic?) term "Israel" in the bibilical passage;
- and he refers to "the country of the Jews," reportedly quoting a letter of King Demetrius to Jonathan in the mid-second century BCE (Antiquities 13:58).
- Josephus does use the term "Palestine," but he seems to follow, and at least once quotes, Herodotus' usage restricting the area to the coastal plain, historical Philistia (e.g., Antiquities 1.136, 145; Against Apion 1.169).
Philo of Alexandria:
- in On Abraham 133, he says that the land of Canaan was "afterward (after Abraham's time) called Syria Palestine";
- in Life of Moses I 163, he says that Moses proposed to lead the Israelites from Egypt to "Phoenicia and Coelesyria and Palestine" which then belonged to the Canaanites, with boundaries a three-day journey from Egypt;
- in Every Good Man is Free 75, he refers to "Palestine Syria" as the place where "the very populous nation of the Jews," including the Essenes, lives.
The Wisdom of Solomon:
- addressing God, mentions "your holy land" in reference to the pagan peoples who inhabited the land before the Israelite conquest.
These are some raw data to ponder. I found them with the help of AI, but with a lot of effort to weed out hallucinations.
It's far from a complete listing, but it does show some range, which seems to have included "Israel," "the Land of Israel," "the country of the Jews," and perhaps "the country of the Israelites" and God's "holy land."
Josephus seems to follow Herodotus' more restricted usage of "Palestine."
Philo refers to "Syria-Palestine/Palestine-Syria" etc., but it's not clear to me what exactly he means. He may well be using "Palestine" in the same sense as Herodotus. I don't know if his terminology means anything different from the term for the Roman province "Syria Palaestina" in the second century CE.
Again, this is NOT a comprehensive listing. It's just illustrative. For example, I haven't looked at pre-Roman-era numismatic evidence or the evidence of the Bar Kokhba letters. Their usages, especially of "Israel, are likely relevant.
It would be nice to sort through all that and more sometime, but I do have other things to do. Meanwhile ... I'm pretty sure that the passages I did cite are correct, but I may well have missed other important references, so don't draw any comprehensive conclusions from my list.
If you find more Second Temple (or pre-Roman) references to the Land of Israel as a whole, do drop me a note.
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