hello and welcome to the first in a large series of projected small lectures that i'd like to call
the jewish history lab now i'm calling it a lab because this is somewhat experimental
in nature i'm very proud to let you know that i've signed a contract with corin publishers
jerusalem really important publishing house that does really beautiful work i have so many
of their books in my own collection and i'm very honored to be producing a multi-volume
massive survey history of the jews for them over the course of the next few years
so these lectures are kind of like my rough draft of the materials that will ultimately find their
way into the printed word and i hope you will snap up copies of them when they're available because
i think they're going to be great i'm really excited about this particular work so it's
experimental in the sense that i'm going to put my first draft together in this video format and put
it up on the internet and i'd love to hear from you please insert your comments in the box below
this video and let me know what you think if you have any questions or suggestions and then we'll
see how we go forward as i transform these lectures into the written word but let's get
straight to the material let's look at this little piece of global real estate and try to understand
how it fits within the larger perspective of the history of the jewish people many people tend to
look at the land of israel something like this amazing 6th century map that was discovered in
madaba jordan now what do i mean they look of it this way it looks intriguing and fascinating but
at the same time illogical and confusing so what exactly is this map first of all it was discovered
in madaba jordan you can see here's a screenshot of where it appears on google maps just a little
bit northeast of the dead sea a little south of amman and it was in a the floor of a sixth century
church that was designed for pilgrims christian pilgrims who were making their way
into the land of israel from the west and it was intended as kind of like a permanent physical
reminder of how to find the various holy sites it was discovered in the late 19th
century in the course of church renovations and unfortunately this gorgeous mosaic was
badly damaged over the centuries nevertheless a significant amount of it was preserved and we can
learn some fascinating things about how they viewed the region obviously it's not to scale
but i think one of the most fascinating things is that it is disoriented with east at the north
that is you can see the dead sea is right in the middle of that region there it's got some boats
massive boats by scale floating on the dead sea and there's a river the jordan
river that's at the left that would connect up to the missing uh sea of galilee or yom kinaret
and so this is how pilgrims would have seen the land they would have seen it with jerusalem
really at its center here is a close-up detail of jerusalem and comparisons with archaeological
data indicate there's a lot of features here that indicate that the mosaic artists actually did have
close experience with the land of israel itself and the the city of jerusalem with the cardo
roman road running through the center of it and there's all kinds of fascinating features in the
map such as for example if we zoom in on the boat in the dead sea there are a couple of fishermen
there but they look sort of like potatoes because you can see the figure on the right
has a hand extending from it the reason for this is because muslim iconoclasts approached this map
and wanted to wipe out any kind of reference to human beings so they disfigured specifically the
recognizably human faces on these forms but we still have some sense of what they look
like and they replace them obviously with other mosaic tiles a fascinating kind of look at the
land of israel but as i said very confusing obviously deeply affected by political and
religious concerns here's a more conventional look at the land of israel with north at the top as is
the custom in western cartography and i think the most important thing that i can point out here is
just how small the land of israel is i mean check it out if you go from the southernmost tip
of the land of israel in a lot at the gulf of aqaba and you go all the way to the north
roughly equivalent with mount carmon in the golan heights and you see that basically
it's only 420 kilometers or 262 miles if you could drive that in a straight road it's basically four
hours driving from one end of this of the country to the other and the widest waste of the land is
only 115 kilometers or 71 miles you can easily drive across that in about an hour i mean this is
essentially what people commute to work crossing the entire country of israel uh when the
lightly shaded areas um with the shechem or nablus in the top and cabron in the south that refers
to the west bank which we'll talk about much further on in this course this is the region
of course which is not annexed to israel itself as the palestinian authority and of course you
see the gaza strip there which is sort of hatched that is on the lower left side also
really a very small strip of land that looms large in the public imagination if you were to
take the amount of real estate that the state of israel takes up in today's newspapers for example
and you were to make that geographically to scale i mean it would be the size of i don't know africa
or something like that but it is really a tiny little territory looking at it geographically i
think this map is especially helpful this uh of course turns it on its side facing to the east
somewhat like the madaba map we saw earlier and the most prominent feature of course is the judean
mountain range uh they're not really mountains by like you know rocky's standards or the alps
they're they're really more like dry desiccated hills and once again uh this map which is in
hebrew shows that it's 53 kilometers from the jordan river over the the judean mountains and
then an additional 16 kilometers uh to the sea the mediterranean itself uh and it gives you
some sense of the vertical topography and the climactic effect of those fairly low mountains
here's one more view of the same idea uh this is once again oriented north south you have
the coastal plain which is quite dense and gets a lot more rainfall then you have the jordan valley
and the dead sea which are much lower in fact the dead sea is the lowest point on the surface of
the earth now let's look at the land of israel in its regional context because this is where it gets
really important how does this tiny little country uh subsume so much history and so much politics in
contemporary time if you look at this satellite view you can see that israel is very centrally
located between the three continents of africa europe and asia and if you remove air travel which
of course was impossible in the ancient world and if you uh consider the limitations of water travel
of sea travel because of land barriers you can see that israel is the main thoroughfare between those
three continents any kind of trade typically has to go through israel unless you're talking about
europe to asia directly or vice versa really africa asia europe are all connected to israel
over land route if we look in a little closer you see that one of the most important aspects
of those connections is the fertile crescent and it is so called because there's kind of like
a c-shape or more precisely kind of like an upside down flattened u-shape of arable land
that extends from the nile delta which is in the lower left of this map you can see it says
in hebrew mitzrayim or egypt and the hatched area represents the greater arability that is the the
product of the nile river that flows from the bottom of this map into the mediterranean sea
and then there's a little bit of a dead spot at the to the right of the nile delta where
you have the sinai peninsula but then the land of israel itself becomes fertile again
it goes up north through lebanon and syria and then it curves over and follows the euphrates
and the tigris rivers down into the persian gulf which would be today's iraq and kuwait the uh
the two rivers that flow from the northwest and down into the southeast are the mesopotamian
region the word mesopotamia is from a greek word meaning between the rivers mesopotamos
and so that's the tigris and euphrates represent another great fertile area now these two regions
on the extreme west egypt and on the extreme east mesopotamia are really the super powers
of the world but any kind of land or commerce communication between them has to go through
israel and note that it is not very practical to try and go straight like let's say following
the uh the latitude from egypt straight over uh to the mesopotamian region because that's essentially
crossing a lot of desert which is basically impassable and not practical except through
camel caravans it's much easier to follow the fertile settle regions and actually make travel
from the southeast all the way up over the top and then down into israel this is in fact the route
that the patriarch abraham followed from ancient sumer the city of ur and then made his way up over
the north through syria and down into israel but we'll talk about that in a later lecture here is
a road map of the ancient world where you get to see the actual roots that they would take
first of all there was the so-called via mares or in hebrew derek hayam the way of the sea
i like to think of this as the scenic route where you would go from the left from the nile delta
and you would basically follow the coastline and it's a little rough as you're going along these
top of the sinai peninsula because that's quite dry but then once you hit the region of gaza and
move up north then you've got quite a bit of settled territory and a lot of arable land and
you can follow the road all the way up and then down over to the right into mesopotamia the other
route which was also quite widely traveled is the so-called king's highway there's actually a street
like that in brooklyn of course maybe named after this i don't know sometimes called the royal road
or in hebrew the derek hamelech and this was a little bit shorter in the sense that you crossed
the relatively small sinai peninsula compared to the great arabian desert it's much more passable
and then you make a straight shot north up to damascus so it's not nearly as beautiful because
you don't have the mediterranean sea to your left uh at best you have to travel through the
very hot zone of the the dead sea but after that initial burst through the sinai then you've got
fairly clear rest stops along the way lots of gas stations as you make your way to mesopotamia
and so israel was extremely important as these commercial ventures expanded and of course that
becomes a political question as well perhaps what makes israel so important to the rest of the world
is the religious context that we are going to be exploring in a lot of lectures as we go on
uh it is the center really of three major world faiths uh judaism first and then christianity and
then islam to a slightly lesser extent and it's regarded as the naval of the world in fact that's
a hebrew term used in rabbinic literature for israel and for jerusalem specifically
this is a sentiment that is echoed by many other cultures have a look at this amazing 16th century
map by heinrich binting which is meant to be kind of a thematic map he he published a lot of really
beautiful maps that captured ideas in cartographic form and you can see that he has indicated that
jerusalem specifically is at the center of european asian and african history uh
like a cloverleaf and if we zoom in here on jerusalem uh we get a beautiful sense of this very
christian sort of perspective of the reaching to see the three crosses there just outside the city
so that gives us a sense of the geographic features of the land of israel uh the uh political
and economic features of the land in its regional context and just a hint at what we're going to be
discussing as we go further in this jewish history lab thank you very much for watching