As mentioned in my previous post, I spent next to no time in New Orleans. After my trip to the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary’s Museum of Biblical Archaeology, I got in my car, and raced for the state border with Mississippi. As I had planned it, I would be visiting the seminary and Palestine Gardens on the same day. This, of course, left little time for lounging, and with a several hour drive ahead, I had some concern that by the time I arrived, the garden would be closed. I’m quite fortunate both in that I arrived on time and that the garden’s caretaker, Don Bradley, was kind enough to give me the “full tour,” going well past the garden’s advertised closing time.
After transferring from the interstate to an increasingly sparsely driven on number of state roads, I finally saw a large and impossible to miss billboard advertising the gardens and noting where to turn off. Getting off the state road, I found myself on a poorly paved street, not quite two cars wide, with overbrush approaching its corners. If it were not for a series of signs, directing visitors down this overgrown residential road, I would not have been convinced that the attraction was there at all.
Finally, I turned into the attraction itself, announced by a biblical looking arch structure. Continuing past it, I found my way onto a gravel road that ended in a circular parking area with only one additional car in the lot as well as a few golf carts. With nobody in sight, I began walking around, convinced that everyone had gone home for the day. Thinking that I had missed my opportunity to get the “tour” I made my way into the surprisingly well-kept garden and began to walk around the path.
After some minutes of perusing, I heard people talking in the distance and made my way towards their increasingly enunciated voices and loud steps. Finally, I saw a nicely dressed older couple following a much more ruggedly dressed and long bearded man through the garden. Spotting me, the older gentlemen, who as it turned out was the garden’s caretaker, Don Bradley, let me know that he was just finishing up a tour would be with me soon.
Following the conclusion of their tour, I asked the well-kempt couple about their visit and learned that they had made a several hour-long detour on their journey just to see the gardens. While I came to the site half out of curiosity and half out of academic interest, for the visiting couple, their journey to the garden was religiously motivated and according to them, entirely spiritually fulfilling. As the couple told it, they themselves had never gone to nor planned to go to Israel because they worried it was unsafe. In their words, this would be the closest they would likely ever come to visiting the Holy Land. After the couple departed, and after I received permission to take notes, my tour with the garden’s caretaker began.
Seeing the Holy Land at Home: Palestine Gardens in its Deeper Historical Context.
Palestine Gardens is a replica, non-scale model of the Holy Land during the 1st century CE, the time of Jesus. While it might seem that such a concept is entirely novel and unique to the site, in actuality, the modeling of the Holy Land is a much older American tradition. Cartographic representations of Palestine and Transjordan conceptualized together as the Holy Land are known to have been created as early as the 6th century AD. While such maps (like all maps) offered their creators the opportunity to shape perceptions of the Holy Land, these representations could only be seen, but not experienced or embodied like models. Prior to the 19th century, maps of the Holy Land were largely impressionistic with the locations of biblical places provided by longstanding religious tradition. In the 19th century however, this situation changed dramatically.
In 1838 the American Biblical scholar, Edward Robinson, travelled to Palestine where he discovered that many of the contemporary Arabic place names often preserved ancient Hebrew Biblical antecedents. This discovery and Robinson’s other writings on Biblical geography heralded the beginnings of the scientific study of the Holy Land. In the 1860s and 1870s, a British academic society called the Palestine Exploration Fund began surveying Palestine, generating topographically and spatially accurate maps. Thus, by the 1870s, Biblical scholars had, for the first time, the tools to understand biblical geography and topography as well as the tools to reliably locate scores of sites mentioned in the Bible.
The work of Robinson and the Palestine Exploration Fund also served an important religious function, bringing something of the geographic and thus physical reality of the Holy Land to a broad audience. While present day tourism to the countries that make up the Holy Land (Israel, Jordan, the Palestinian Territories) has soared to the millions, in the early 20th century, only tens of thousands visited every year, while in the late 19th century, only several thousand visited. At that time, tourist access to Palestine was limited to a select few scholars, pastors, and the wealthy.
While travel to the actual Holy Land was limited to a select and privileged few, the work of European and American explorers meant that something of the experience and essence of the Holy Land could be carried back to the United States through paintings, photographs, artifacts, ethnographic objects, natural history specimens, and maps. Through these materials, while the actual Palestine remained out of reach for most, the Holy Land, or at least pieces of it believed to hold its holy essence, could be touched, experienced, and used for religious edification.
Palestine Garden’s spiritual ancestor, though apparently not its actual inspiration, was Palestine Park, a 350-foot-long topographical scale replica of the Holy Land built in Chautauqua New York in 1874. The park was just one feature of the larger Chautauqua Assembly, a lakeside vacation and study center originally founded for Protestant Sunday School teachers, but whose attendees came to encompass members of the broader American upper-middle class. Palestine Park included numerous places and natural features mentioned in the Bible with natural features literally carved into the landscape and places represented by small plaster and cast metal model cities. Visitors were led around the park by pastors who would use the model to discuss biblical history, geography, and the importance of the Holy Land as the actual setting for God’s miracles. Since the model’s biblical geography was based on the scientific explorations of the 19th century, it could be used to argue that the Bible was “true” because its geography had been scientifically proven.
In addition to being accessible to those who would never have the opportunity to visit Palestine itself, Palestine Park was also more amenable to American sensibilities. Whereas numerous European and American visitors to the Holy Land were disturbed by the seeming desolation of the land, the neglect of religious sites by the Ottoman authorities, and the general otherness of the land’s Palestinian-Arab occupants (Christian, Muslim, and Jewish), Palestine Park represented a sanitized version of the Holy Land where the biblical past could be highlighted through a Protestant Christian lens. Whereas the Holy Land’s narrative and reality were controlled by what American Protestants saw as the other, in crafting a model of Palestine, they could create a Holy Land that was entirely manicured to be biblical and free of perceived dangers.
Palestine Gardens was founded as ‘Palestinian Gardens’ in 1960 by Reverend Harvell Jackson, a Presbyterian Minister. As I learned on my tour, in the 1930s Harvell taught at a local seminary and became generally frustrated with how inaccessible the Holy Land was even to those training for the ministry. In Jackson’s view, understanding the Bible’s geography was an essential part of a believer’s ability to internalize and understand the Bible’s history and truth. In the early 1990s, Harvell passed management of the Garden to Don Bradley, the garden’s current caretaker.
Bradley, a lifetime local, first visited the gardens as a child in 1965 and related that his visit had made a huge impression. For Bradley, the management and sharing of the garden is literally a God given task appointed to him in a dream he had shortly after becoming a Christian in his early 30s. In one interview, available online, he characterized this leap of faith involved in taking over the garden’s management as similar to that incurred by the patriarch Abraham who, as depicted in the book of Genesis, left his home in Ur of the Chaldees to go to far away Canaan.
In his first years running the site, Bradley often ran low on funds, but related that when he needed money most, he experienced what he characterized as a miracle, opening his mailbox and finding a large check sent by someone who had visited the gardens some years before. Thus, as Bradley sees it, the management of the garden is literally a God appointed and approved ministry.
In addition to managing what already existed of the Garden, Bradley has added numerous structures and repaired older ones that were falling into disrepair. The Gardens are visited by local community members, but also by tourists from all over the world who are attracted by its uniqueness, connection to religion, or by their own curiosity. While the site serves as an active Sunday school for many local churches, most of its visitors are tourists.
In the last 20 years, Bradley made one additional major change to the site. Whereas the site was founded as “Palestinian Gardens,” Bradley changed its name to “Palestine Gardens” feeling that the term Palestinian carried a negative connotation. This change took place in the early 2000s, at about the time of the 2nd Intifada when international television news continuously covered the period of increased violence between Israelis and Palestinians. The change in the Park’s name away from the land’s inhabitants ‘Palestinians’ towards its geography alone ‘Palestine’ in many echoes the earlier Palestine Park, which similarly erased the land's inhabitants in order to present a comfortable and entirely biblical version of the Holy Land. Thus, in a way, the Garden is designed to exist “out of time,” perpetually presenting the Holy Land of the 1st century CE.
The Tour:
My tour with Don started with a brief introduction to the history of the site as we made our way from the parking lot to the starting point of our tour, the King’s highway, an ancient road dating back to the Bronze Age, in what is today’s Jordan. Bradley related to me that the whole point of his ministry at the garden and what he hoped to achieve with me was to make enliven the Bible for visitors by making the Holy Land understandable. He explained that if people could internalize the Holy Land as real, they might come to believe that the Bible was equally real and true, eventually allowing them to be ‘saved.’ Bradley’s point about rendering the land understandable piqued my interest, and I asked him if he had ever visited the Holy Land himself. He told that while he had never been, he spends his time studying the land’s geography so that his model can emulate the real thing.
Walking off the King’s highway, we made our way to a place overlooking a stream channel, representing the Jordan River. Bradley explained that, like Moses, we were overlooking the entirety of the Holy Land from our position. He clarified that while Moses never made it into the land, we would make it across as Joshua and the rest of the Israelites were able to. Bradley’s explanation was accompanied by several memorized Bible verses about the place and the biblical stories that took place there. This was the cornerstone of the tour experience with each location we visited being connected with a familiar verse or event, in turn connecting the geography visitors did not know, to the church taught sayings they likely did.
Looking beneath us, I noticed that we were on flat ground and asked, ‘where’s Mount Nebo?’ Bradley told me how the garden is a work in process and that building Mount Nebo is one of the next items on his agenda. Looking south, I oriented myself realizing that the big pond about 30 feet from us represented the Dead Sea. Bradley pointed out that if I looked closely, I would be able to see the destroyed Cities of the Plain, including Sodom and Gomorrah. These were depicted as an amalgamated plaque hidden in the bushes, demonstrating the sheer extent of the destruction and eradication of the cities as depicted in Genesis.
Continuing forward, we crossed the Jordan river at the site of Bethany, a locale just north of Jericho and the purported location of Jesus’ baptism as depicted in the New Testament. Within Palestine Gardens, the location for the baptism site follows Christian tradition and can be placed without caveat according to tradition. In the actual Holy Land however, the location of the baptismal site is more fluid for both political and historical reasons. Whereas the traditional site of Bethany is still frequented from the Jordanian side of the Jordan River, the site’s western bank is in the West Bank, with the area until recently being heavily mined. Since most tourists visiting the Holy Land go to Israel as opposed to Jordan, and with the complications associated with taking tourists to a tense, narrow, and militarized border, in 1981, the state of Israel established a new baptismal site next to the Sea of Galilee. Today, this site, despite its literal invention as a holy place, is the most frequented baptismal site. To put things in perspective, today, the actual Baptismal site receives only 40,000 a year. The recently created site however receives over 500,000 pilgrims annually.
Now across the Jordan river, we found ourselves next to 1st Century Jericho, depicted as a square walled city with Herod’s palace repurposed and renovated Hasmonean palace, Tulul Abu al-'Alayiq at its back. Before discussing Jericho’s role in the New Testament, he pointed to an overgrown group of concrete houses, explaining that they represented Joshua’s Jericho, depicted in the Bible as destroyed some 1200 years earlier by the invading Israelites. While the model is designed to demonstrate the geography of 1st century Palestine, by including the earlier site of Jericho, the model is actually able to come closer to representing the actual geography of the Holy Land and even suggests something of the experience of the ancient individual for whom, the presence of Jericho’s Tel would have served as an active reminder of how God had, through his recorded acts, shaped the landscape around them.
This also made me think about how modern pilgrims interact with and think about the biblical landscape, especially in locations they believe were created or affected by god’s direct intervention. For example, whereas my visit to ancient Jericho was spent admiring the site’s Neolithic and Early Bronze Age remains, a pilgrim visiting the site sees themselves standing on ground literally hand shaped by God as depicted in the Bible. This is despite the fact that the archaeological consensus for the past 70 years has been that Jericho was not even occupied during the period the Israelites are depicted as destroying it in the Bible. In some ways, regardless of factuality or reality, I can’t help but feel some small sense of jealously at not being able to look at a part of the world and imbue it with the elevated quality and essence that pilgrims imbue Palestine with in order to transform it into their Holy Land.
Continuing westward from Jericho, we came to what was one of my highlights of the tour, the recently finished reconstruction of Herod’s artificially built mountain palace, Herodium. Whereas most structures or cities in the garden are impressionistic and do not go off of what are in some cases known archaeological plans, Herodium conformed to recent reconstructions of the archaeological record perfectly. Curious about why certain structures more closely conformed to archaeological plans, I asked Bradley about the ways he strives for accuracy. He explained that in his view, the structures representing cities and places were a form of folk art. For him, it is more important to accurately convey the geographic locations and distances between sites than to provide accurate renderings of the places the garden depicts. Nonetheless, he told me that Herodium was a special project of his and that he had largely based his model on reconstructed images of the site found in an issue of National Geographic, connected to the Israel Museum’s wildly successful and controversial exhibition of artifacts from Herodium in 2013. He continued by telling me about how he had even been able to email an Israeli archaeologist to get some minor pointers. Thus, while Palestine Gardens does largely exist outside of the context of modern states, boundaries, and events, the 2013 exhibition in Israel and the worldwide news coverage that accompanied it had a direct effect on the site’s presentation.
Moving north through Bethlehem, I was given an extensive account of Christ’s birth aided by a small reconstruction of the Nativity scene below the houses of Bethlehem. In line with the version of Christ’s birth presented in the book of Matthew, Bradley next directed by attention southwards towards a large sign with a small statue of Ramses, some hieroglyphs, and some Egyptian style columns. He explained that this sign was his temporary stand in for Egypt and that in the future he wanted to expand his map southwards as far as Egypt in order to include the narrative of Christ’s family fleeing Herod and then walking back, telling the Exodus narrative.
During my long look southwards, I noticed that the Gardens omitted a vital place, Hebron. Asking Bradley about it, he explained that it was not in the garden since the place played no role in the New Testament. The map’s devotion to depicting places associated with the life of Christ and New Testament rather than the Hebrew Bible was further highlighted by the absence of a marker for Beersheba, the traditional southern boundary of ancient Israel as described in the Hebrew Bible.
Continuing northwards, we came to the garden’s crown jewel, Jerusalem. The garden’s large Jerusalem model featured 1st century Jerusalem’s most distinctive landmarks including the 2nd Jewish Temple after its aggrandizement by King Herod, the Roman Antonia Fortress, and the city’s tall walls. Also prominently displayed were the places in Jerusalem associated with the narrative of Christ’s passion including the Via Delarosa, Calvary, and the garden of Gethsemane. Though each of these places, mentioned in the gospel, have traditional locations still visited by tourists and pilgrims in the Holy Land, Palestine Garden’s version added additional locations for the sake of completeness such as the residence of King Herod Agrippa, a place in the passion narrative that is not identified with a particular location in Jerusalem. Asking about this, Bradley explained, that in his view, it was important to make sure that each location mentioned in the Passion narrative was represented so that he could use the model to help embody every moment of Christianity’s central story.
While one can use the model’s geography to go through the entire passion narrative linearly, it struck me that in the actual Jerusalem, constraints of time and the sheer convenience of certain sites being close to one another mean that biblical stories are more often than not presented in a sort of chopped up form, jumping from one book to another. Though the Via Dolorossa is obvious exception to this, other than the Stations of the Cross, tourists are often presented with sections of the biblical story out of order. Thus, while the experience of being in biblical locations is religiously empowering, the zoomed-out outlook of the model makes it a powerful educational tool for learning the biblical story, perhaps even surpassing the educational qualities of a real visit.
Passing Golgotha outside of Jerusalem’s walls, we continued our journey north passing through Shechem, Roman Neopolis (Nablus), Sebaste/Sameria, Mount Gilboa, Mount Tabor, Nazareth, and Sepphoris. Just as was the case with Jericho, each city not highlighted in the New Testament, or which mainly appears in the Hebrew Bible was left in a state of ruin. While the model of Nazareth was used to discuss Jesus’ family and the location of his childhood, Sepphoris, the primary Roman city of the central Galilee was left unmentioned. This is despite the fact that several modern scholars believe that Jesus and his craftsman father both commuted from Nazareth to Sepphoris, located only 4 miles away, in order to assist in the building of the city. While this theory is viewed by some as crucial to understanding a period in Jesus’ life not discussed in the New Testament, as the city does not feature in any of the Gospels, it was left absent from our tour.
Heading due east, we walked by Tiberius, which as Bradley proudly pointed out, was placed in the city’s ancient location rather than its modern one. This was just one example of the type of hard work that Bradley puts into maintaining and building the Garden. Whereas, if he wanted to, he could simply place locations approximately using them as props for discussing the life and times of Jesus, by striving for accuracy based on the locations of ancient sites discovered through archaeology, Bradley is able to demonstrate the text’s basis in geographic reality and by extension is able to suggest that geographic reality can serve as a proxy for the text’s veracity.
Bradley then led me around the Sea of Galilee covering the various towns and synagogues Jesus is depicted as visiting, preaching in, and performing miracles at throughout the New Testament. This part of the tour leaned on the text most heavily as Bradley went into great detail over the timeline of Jesus’ life in the Galilee. Moving north, we continued to Dan, the traditional northern boundary of ancient Israel, and Mt. Hermon where our tour ended.
Do Models Still Matter?
The original Holy Land model of the 19th century was created to present and teach accurate biblical geography to Christians who would never have the opportunity to visit the actual Holy Land. Today however, pilgrimage is increasingly accessible to families and church groups. While part of the model’s continued importance lies in the fact that for many, pilgrimage remains prohibitively expensive, I believe that in some ways, models play an educational role that can complement and even supersede certain aspects of the actual Holy Land visit.
When I was in High School, I spent several months in Israel with a study abroad program. Each week, we would learn about a period of Jewish history in Palestine and end the week with a field trip to a relevant tourist site or museum. Despite starting out the program by giving each of us a huge map of Israel, I’ll admit that whenever I stepped off the coach bus, unless we were in a big city like Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, I didn’t really know where we were. Sure, I could place it in a regional sense, but in terms of figuring out how each of the places we visited were related to one another, each visit may as well have been to an island.
Whereas my study abroad experience lasted months, the average pilgrim’s tour might last somewhere between one and two weeks at the most. Though the tours taken by pilgrims vary, many are made up of visits to a selection of places of biblical significance. In order to fit each of these places into the tour, little time is spent at most sites outside of Jerusalem as tourists are ferried onto and off of a tour bus. While these tours are spiritually fulfilling and give believers the sense that they have stood, seen, and absorbed the essence of the Holy Land’s sacredness, much like my trip, they do not truly allow visitors to become familiar with the land, its geography, and its people. This is despite the fact that for many pilgrims, the Holy Land is a place they read about every single week in church, in a Bible study, or in their free time. Thus, while the pilgrimage almost certainly fulfils its spiritual role, it is often not overtly educational, serving to reinforce visitor’s perceptions rather than necessarily expand their understanding of the Bible and its setting.
By contrast, whereas the original Holy Land model’s scientifically proven geography was meant to serve as a verification of faith, today, models like Palestine Gardens can play an entirely educational role. Rather than jumping between sites on a tour bus, visitors to Palestine Gardens walk between sites, gaining a sense of the distances involved in travel, an understanding of geographic relationships, and a sense of ancient Palestine’s crowded settled landscape. Equipped with this type of geographic knowledge, believers can make sense of the route of Joshua’s conquest, the geographically dispersed areas inhabited by the Patriarchs, and the extent of Jesus’ travels as he preached throughout the Galilee, spent time in the Judean Desert, and finally made his way to Jerusalem. Further, the model allows for a linear presentation of the biblical story since it can fill in locations that are not traditionally marked pilgrimage sites or discuss sites that would take visitors considerable time to walk between in cities like Jerusalem.
The other benefit of the model is that it is free of the religious contestation that characterizes the actual Holy Land. Today, the visitor to the Holy Land will be confronted at nearly every religious site by an alternative place held sacred by a different denomination. The most clear-cut example of this relates to Christianity's holiest site, Christ’s tomb, which many denomination place in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher with the exception of Protestants, Anglicans, and a small number of other groups, who believe Jesus was buried in the Garden Tomb. Within the world of Palestine Gardens however, these types of inter-denominational conflicts can be surpassed in favor of presenting the biblical narrative in an unencumbered and built world. The same goes for politically contested locations such as the site of Christ’s baptism, which I previously discussed.
Palestine Gardens is a wonderful and accessible educational tool for locals and travelers who want to experience and learn about the biblical story in an embodied way. In particular, it complements the emotive aspects of pilgrimage with a zoomed out educational outlook that can help bring clarity to believer’s understandings of the Bible’s geographic setting. Nonetheless, the model’s presentation is ultimately a very traditional one, taken directly out of the pages of the Bible. Little outside of aesthetics is added from over a century of archaeology and historical-critical biblical study. Though all models, like maps, necessarily select their narrative, I left wondering if something was lost by only focusing on sites associated with Jesus’ life in the 1st century.
One of the true joys of being in Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian territories is the feeling that history permeates every hill, building, or river. This is true regardless of whether that history is that of the 2nd millennium BCE or the more recent 20th century. It’s that history and the numerous lenses one encounters when they step away from a tour bus that allows one to understand why people of different backgrounds from all over the world feel so strongly about a place as small and far away as Palestine. Though one can still have an appreciation for the land through the singular lens, be it biblical or otherwise, I truly believe that zooming out and considering what Palestine has meant to so many others both in the past and present is essential to understanding the land’s unique quality. Models of the Holy Land have always tried to write out the land’s inhabitants and aspects that take away from their central narrative. In my view however, the ideal Palestine Gardens would benefit from a broader presentation of the land’s history and crucially, of its living, breathing inhabitants for whom Palestine has always been far more than an idea.