The first Bible to feature a map of the Holy Land was published 500 years ago in 1525. Initially printed the wrong way round – showing the Mediterranean to the East – the map’s inclusion set a precedent which continues to shape our understanding of state borders today, a new Cambridge study argues.
“This is simultaneously one of publishing’s greatest failures and triumphs,” said Nathan MacDonald, Professor of the Interpretation of the Old Testament, and Director of Studies in Theology, Religion and Philosophy of Religion at St John’s College, where he is a Fellow.
“They printed the map backwards so the Mediterranean appears to the east of Palestine. People in Europe knew so little about this part of the world that no one in the workshop seems to have realised. But this map transformed the Bible forever and today most Bibles contain maps.”
In a study published in The Journal of Theological Studies, Professor MacDonald argues that Lucas Cranach the Elder’s map, printed in Zürich, not only transformed the Bible into a Renaissance book but contributed to the way people started to think about borders.
“It has been wrongly assumed that biblical maps followed an early modern instinct to create maps with clearly marked territorial divisions,” said Professor MacDonald. “Actually, it was these maps of the Holy Land that led the revolution.
“As more and more people gained access to Bibles from the 17th century, these maps spread a sense of how the world ought to be organised and what their place within it was. This continues to be extremely influential.”
Very few of Christopher Froschauer’s 1525 Old Testament survive in libraries around the world. Trinity College Cambridge’s Wren Library cares for one of the rare survivors.
Within it, Cranach’s Bible map depicts the stations of the wilderness wanderings as wellas the division of the Promised Land into 12 tribal territories. These boundaries were a distinctively Christian concern, communicating a claimed right to inherit the holy sites of the Old and New Testaments. Cranach’s mapf ollowed the example of older medieval maps which divided the territory of Israel into clear strips of land. This reflected their reliance on the 1st century AD Jewish historian Josephus who simplified complex and contradictory biblical descriptions.
According to Professor MacDonald, “Joshua 13-19 doesn’t offer an entirely coherent, consistent picture of what land and cities were occupied by the different tribes. There are several discrepancies. The map helped readers to make sense of things even if it wasn’t geographically accurate.”
A literal reading of the Bible was particularly central to the Swiss Reformation and so, Professor MacDonald said: “It’s no surprise that the first Bible map was published in Zürich.”
He argues that with a growing emphasis on the literal reading of the Bible, maps helped to demonstrate that events took place in recognisable time and space.
In a Reformation world in which certain images were banned, maps of the Holy Land were permitted and became an alternative source of pious reverence.
“When they cast their eyes over Cranach’s map, pausing at Mount Carmel, Nazareth, the River Jordan and Jericho, people were taken on a virtual pilgrimage,” said Professor MacDonald, who is a College Lecturer in Theology. “In their mind's eye, they travelled across the map, encountering the sacred story as they did so.”
The inclusion of Cranach’s map was, Professor MacDonald argues, a pivotal moment in the Bible’s transformation, and deserves greater recognition.
Better known changes include the move from scroll to codex, the creation of the first portable single-volume Bible (The Paris Bible) in the 13th century; thea ddition of chapters and verses; the addition of new prefaces in the Reformation; and the recognition of the prophetic utterances as Hebrew poetry in the 18th century. “The Bible has never been an unchanging book,” Professor MacDonald said. “It is constantly transforming”.
In medieval maps, Professor MacDonald argues, the division of the Holy Land into tribal territories had communicated spiritual meaning: the inheritance of all things by Christians. But from the late 15th century, lines spread from maps of the Holy Land to maps of the modern world and began to represent something veryd ifferent: political borders. At the same time, these new ideas about political sovereignty were read back into biblical texts.
“Bible maps delineating the territories of the 12 tribes were powerful agents in the development and spread of these ideas,” Professor MacDonald said. “A text that is not about political boundaries in a modern sense became an instance of God’s ordering of the world according to nation-states.
“Lines on maps started to symbolise the limits of political sovereignties rather than the boundless divine promises. This transformed the way that the Bible’s descriptions of geographical space were understood.
“Early modern notions of the nation were influenced by the Bible, but the interpretation of the sacred text was itself shaped by new political theories that emerged in the early modern period. The Bible was both the agent of change, and its object.”
“For many people, the Bible remains an important guide to their basic beliefs aboutnation states and borders,” said Professor MacDonald. “They regard these ideas as biblically authorised and therefore true and right in a fundamental way.”
He points to a recent US Customs and Border Protection recruitment film in which a border agent quotes Isaiah 6:8 – ‘Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”’ – while flying above the US-Mexico border in a helicopter.
Professor MacDonald is concerned that so many people view borders as being straightforwardly biblical. “When I asked ChatGPT and Google Gemini whether borders are biblical, they both simply answered ‘yes’. The reality is more complex,” he said.
“We should be concerned when any group claims that their way of organising society has a divine or religious underpinning because these often simplify and misrepresent ancient texts that are making different kinds of ideological claims in very different political contexts.”
N. MacDonald, ‘Ancient Israel and the Modern Bounded State’, The Journal of Theological Studies (2025). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/flaf090
