Late in her life, about the year 320, she journeyed to the Holy Land to find the sacred sites. The best known of early Christian pilgrims was Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, the first Christian Roman emperor. Whatever the description-holy places in ruin, a new folk and a new faith resident in sacred cities-it was the ancient land and city which continued to live in the imagination of the faithful. Pilgrims made the hazardous journey there and returned to tell their tales, retold by word of mouth and often set in print. Memory and holiness are joined in this land, where as Disraeli said in Tancred, "not a spot is visible that is not heroic or sacred" where, as the Hebrew poet Micah Joseph Berdichevsky observed, "every stone is a book and every rock a graven tablet." Jews and Christians in every age were avid recipients of news of the Holy Land. To the Moslem, Jerusalem is holy, the city the Prophet Mohammed chose for his ascent to heaven from the sacred spot now enshrined in the Dome of the Rock. For the present, it is a land for pilgrimage and prayer. Jerusalem is the scene of His passion and resurrection, and when in the "end of days" He will rise again, it will be in that city, in that Land. The Passover seder ritual and the Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) liturgy conclude with the pledge and prayer, "Next year in Jerusalem."įor the Christian, the Land is the birthplace of his Lord and the site of His ministry. Thrice daily the Jew turns in his devotions towards the Holy City. For a millennium and more, the people Israel lived in Zion for two millennia Zion lived in this people.
The Jew is bound to the Land by God's promise to Abraham: "Unto thy seed will I give this land" (Genesis 12:7)-this once and eternal homeland where Patriarchs trod, where Prophets preached, where ancestors began the eternal quest to know God's word and do God's will. The three are drawn together by a ring encircling a single city that city is Jerusalem.Ĭity and land are holy to the three great faiths of western civilization-Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Heinrich Bunting's world map in his Itinerarium Sacrae Scripturae, Helmstadt, 1581, of which the Library has a copy, depicts the earth as a three-leaf clover, each leaf being a continent: Europe, Asia, and Africa. Jerusalem is the center of the Land of Israel.Ī thirteenth -century crusader map places Jerusalem at the center of the earth. The Sages of Israel proclaimed: The Land of Israel is the center of the world.
The Land of Israel is the holiest of Lands. Charting the Holy Land: "Charting the Holy Land": Table of Contents
0 kommentar(er)
