Five hundred years ago the first Bible to include a map was published. The anniversary passed largely unmarked, but the addition transformed Bible production. The map appeared in Christopher Froschauer’s 1525 Old Testament, printed in Zürich and widely distributed across 16th‑century central Europe.
The map was not a triumph of accuracy. It was flipped along the north–south axis, so the Mediterranean appears to the east of Palestine rather than the west — a sign of how little many Europeans knew about the Middle East. The design had been drawn about a decade earlier by the Renaissance painter and printmaker Lukas Cranach the Elder of Wittenberg. Drawn in Latin, it shows Palestine with holy sites such as Jerusalem and Bethlehem and, at the bottom, the mountains of Sinai and the path of the Israelites as they left Egypt. The landscape, however, appears more European than Middle Eastern: walled towns amid trees, an exaggeratedly meandering Jordan River and a more indented coastline.
In the previous century Europeans had rediscovered Ptolemy and his methods of mapping using latitude and longitude. With printing, his Cosmographia and maps of the ancient world spread widely. Printers soon met demand for contemporary, accurate maps of places like France, Spain and Scandinavia, with north at the top and reliable coastlines and city locations. These replaced the medieval, symbolic mappa mundi, which prioritized cultural and religious meaning over geographic precision — the notable exception being maps of Palestine.
Early modern Ptolemaic printers still supplied a “modern map of the Holy Land” that was not modern in the scientific sense. It was a medieval-style map using grids to measure distances but oriented with east at the top, highlighting Christian holy sites and dividing Palestine into tribal territories. Cranach’s map blends both traditions: it includes meridian lines at the top and bottom but is slanted so that northeast sits at the top. It is both realistic and full of symbolic geography, inviting viewers to follow the Israelites from bondage in Egypt to the promised land and marking resonant locations like Mount Carmel, Nazareth, the River Jordan and Jericho.
This hybrid reflects European indifference to contemporary Palestine, then under Ottoman rule. What mattered to European readers was the “Holy Land” as an imaginative, quasi-historical space — towns as they had existed two millennia earlier were, for Christians, in some sense more real than the present landscape. That juxtaposition of ancient and modern became consequential in the way the land was divided on maps.
Maps dividing Palestine into the 12 tribes of Israel brought symbolic lines into the cartographic record. Those tribal boundaries, expressing divine promises and inheritance, introduced a visual vocabulary of partition. As the 16th century progressed, more atlas maps divided the world into distinct nations with clear borders. The presence of territorial lines in a Bible lent religious sanction to a world of borders: lines that once signified divine promise came to mark the limits of political sovereignty.
Maps then became a permanent feature in Bibles. Printers experimented with layouts but eventually settled into a set of four: the Israelites’ wilderness wanderings, the territories of the 12 tribes, Palestine at the time of Jesus, and Paul’s missionary journeys — two Old Testament maps, two New Testament maps; two journey maps and two maps of the Holy Land. These arrangements reinforced theological connections between Old and New Testaments and between Judaism and Christianity.
The inclusion of maps in Bibles was therefore a pivotal moment. It turned Bibles into something like Renaissance atlases while embedding assumptions about Christian superiority: the Christian imaginative Holy Land displacing contemporary Palestine and Christianity positioned as superseding Judaism. At the same time, these maps played a role in shaping modern notions of distinct nation-states. In many ways, the consequences of that cartographic shift continue to shape how we imagine borders today.
Nathan MacDonald is professor of the interpretation of the Old Testament, University of Cambridge
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
