In 1525 the first Bible to include a printed map appeared in Zürich in Christopher Froschauer’s Old Testament, and it quietly changed how Bibles were made and imagined. The map’s appearance marked a turning point: maps began to be treated as essential parts of biblical books, and with them came new ways of picturing places and their limits.
The map itself was imperfect and revealing. It was based on an earlier drawing by the Wittenberg painter Lucas Cranach the Elder and was even reversed along the north–south axis so the Mediterranean shows up on the wrong side of Palestine. Small errors like that exposed how little many Europeans knew of the actual Middle East; printers and buyers were more concerned with the map’s religious meaning than its geographic precision.
Cranach’s image combines two mapping traditions. For centuries European mapmaking had been shaped by Ptolemy’s rediscovered Cosmographia, which, after the reintroduction of classical cartography and the rise of printing, encouraged the production of modern-style maps using latitude and longitude and orienting north at the top. These maps, reproduced and sold across the continent, made regional geography—rivers, coasts, towns—look familiar and relatively accurate.
By contrast, medieval world maps were often symbolic: they organized religious and cultural knowledge rather than precise spatial relationships. The Hereford mappa mundi is a well-known example—rich in meaning but not made for navigation. Palestine was a special case. Early modern mapmakers sometimes produced a “modern” Holy Land but followed medieval conventions: maps positioned east at the top, emphasized sacred sites, and divided the land into the territories of the twelve Israelite tribes.
Cranach’s map sits between these modes. It includes meridian lines and some classical trappings yet leans into a devotional geography: stylized towns and landscapes, scenes of the Israelites’ Exodus, and a layout that encourages the viewer to travel the biblical story. The territory divisions on such maps were not merely descriptive. They visualized the tribes of Israel and, for Christian readers, symbolized a theological continuity in which Christianity inherits the promises and places of ancient Israel.
That symbolic use of lines became consequential as mapping practices evolved. In the sixteenth century, maps increasingly marked out discrete political units and boundaries. When those dividing lines appeared inside Bibles, they carried apparent religious endorsement: borders that once suggested sacred allotment could now be read as political partition. Over time, atlas-makers and printers settled on a set of standard biblical maps—wilderness wanderings, the tribal territories, Palestine in the time of Jesus, and Paul’s mission routes—reinforcing a paired Old- and New-Testament logic and turning sacred geography into something like a cartographic canon.
The result was ambivalent. On one hand, maps in Bibles helped believers imagine sacred history more vividly; on the other, they embedded assumptions about Christian precedence over Judaism and about the separability of land into bounded units. These cartographic choices contributed to a broader shift toward thinking of the world as divided into nations with fixed borders—a shift whose political and cultural consequences have endured.
Originally published in The Conversation by Nathan MacDonald.
