In Search of the Physical:

George Adam Smith's Journeys To Palestine and Their Importance

(This paper was read at the conference of the Association for the Study of Travel in Egypt and the Near East (ASTENE), Edinburgh, July 2001.)

By any standard, George Adam Smith's was a remarkable career. Having established a reputation for himself as the first minister of a new congregation of the Free Church of Scotland in the west of Aberdeen, where he consolidated his liberal evangelical pulpit between 1882 and 1892, Smith went on to become a foremost Old Testament scholar in the Free Church College in Glasgow (1892-1910) and Principal of Aberdeen University (1910-1935). More than one student of the period has linked his name with that of A.B. Davidson and W.R. Smith, succeeding them as one of Scotland's leading Old Testament scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Smith's contribution to historical geography, however, though still acknowledged in works on the Holy Land, has received little treatment. One exception has been an invaluable article by Robin Butlin on "George Adam Smith and the historical geography of the holy land: contents, contexts and connections", published in the Journal of Historical Geography in 1988. I intend in this paper to take another look at what we know of Smith's four visits to Palestine, and to contextualise them against the background of Smith's work on the Old Testament, and his concern to uncover the meaning of the Hebrew Bible.

Perhaps two quotations will exemplify the importance of this subject. Following Smith's death, a former student, James Black, who went on to have arguably the most distinguished ministry in Scotland during his pastorate at St George's West Church here in Edinburgh wrote to Smith's widow, Lilian. Black reminisced of his student days under Smith's tutelage: "I can picture [Smith] round that raised contour map, where he so often gathered us, enthusiastically explaining why such-and-such an expedition went this way and not that. It was all so infectious and so natural. And it made preachers". The second is from an article by Professor Wheeler Robinson, who became an outstanding Old Testament scholar in his own right, written for the newspaper The British Weekly following Smith's retirement from Aberdeen University. Robinson borrows a phrase from Smith's Historical Geography of the Holy Land, in which Smith speaks of his aim of making his reader hear "the sound of running history". Robinson says that this vivid phrase "may serve as text for an appreciation of the author's great achievement as an expositor of the Old Testament. Throughout all his work he has never been content to expound the letter; he has always striven to penetrate to the spirit; and that spirit for him is expressed and mediated by the history of nations and individuals".

Both Black and Robinson pinpoint one of Smith's perennial concerns as an expositor of the Old Testament -- the need to appropriate the insights from both history and geography in analysing the biblical text. To that end, Smith's visits to Palestine are of interest and importance in assessing his scholarship.

There are two main sources for the life and work of George Adam Smith: an intimate, noncritical but detailed biography written by his wife shortly after his death, and a large collection of letters and papers in the National Library of Scotland. I shall draw on both these sources to describe, first, Smith's visits to Palestine, second, to evaluate the results of these visits; and thirdly to consider Smith's resulting contribution to Scottish biblical scholarship.

Smith's Visits To Palestine

George Adam Smith visited Palestine on four occasions. The first was in 1880, at the close of his divinity training at New College. A friend of Smith's father, a Dr. Lansing, was working for the United Presbyterian Church of America in its Cairo mission. Smith left in December 1879, and arrived in Cairo after a difficult sea journey by the end of the month. Smith prepared for the trip by learning Arabic, of which he himself said that he and his tutor snarled at each other like two cats as Smith tried to master the Arabic gutturals; he also saved enough money to extend his trip to Palestine. He hired an Arabic guide to accompany him, and according to his wife "there is no doubt that the idea of writing a book upon the country was born in his mind from that first solitary journey." That is probably correct; but Smith's correspondence reveals that he was initially disposed not to visit Palestine and only did so to make the most of the opportunity. There is also a sense of disquiet in his letters as he witnessed the intrusion of foreign and non-Oriental nationals into Palestine. Their bazaars he described as "horrible places", and the busy-ness of the guides around the alleged site of Jesus' crucifixion also filled him with loathing. Swimming in the Dead Sea and watching the sun rise over Jerusalem, were, however, among the more memorable moments of the trip.

Smith's second visit was of probably greater significance as far as his subsequent scholarship was concerned. This visit was gifted to him by his congregation of Queen's Cross Free Church, Aberdeen in 1890, when he declined an invitation to succeed Alexander Whyte as minister of Free St. George's Edinburgh, a prestigious pulpit by any standard. By this time Smith had joined the Scottish Geographical Society, becoming its secretary in 1885. His grateful congregation made provision for both Smith and his wife to travel in the company of one of his former assistants, C.A. Scott, and P. Carnegie Simpson, future biographer of Principal Robert Rainy. The expedition commenced in Egypt in March 1890, and the following weeks saw the party zealously wandering through biblical sites.

Lilian Smith's biography is painstaking in its detail on this expedition, emphasising the relative importance of this particular visit. Smith is portrayed as studiously surveying every minute detail of landscape:

While the rest of us were interested in the general aspect and scenery, he was making notes of the details of each place, and at the same time his imagination, backed by his historical knowledge, called to life the events of the past, and envisaged the possible developments of the country in the future. He would see in his mind's eye terraces of vineyards upon a certain limestone ridge, or fighting taking place on a hill like Gezer. Never a day passed without his careful readings of the temperature and barometric pressure, and never an evening, however long and tiring the day, without his minute recording of everything done, seen, and heard -- places, people, views and contours, vegetation, soil, animals, rocks, water, trees and flowers.

In Jerusalem the Smiths witnessed the religious celebrations of the Greek Orthodox Easter and explored the major biblical sites. These days in the city which Smith would describe as "the bride of Kings and the mother of Prophets" were, in his wife's reckoning, "unforgettable". The party climbed Mount Hermon, snow-capped even in Spring, and then made their way to Damascus. There they stayed with friends who worked for the Edinburgh Medical Mission. It was part of Smith's intention during this trip to visit as many missionaries and mission stations as he could. The party returned to Scotland via Switzerland, and there is a telling comment in Lilian Smith's biography that Smith resumed his congregational work with vigour and enthusiasm and that "the minister's writings and sermons were enriched by all he had done and seen in those months of travel".

Over the winter of 1891/2, Smith delivered a series of lectures in Aberdeen on his visit, "descriptive of the Holy Land, the missions there, and the Christian churches in the East". He was much in demand as a speaker at various other venues. In December 1891 he delivered a lecture in Huntly Free Church to the Women's Bible Study Assocation on "The geography of Palestine in connection with the history of Revelation", in which he described Palestine as "a great bridge crossing between Egypt on the south and Assyria on the north, and enclosed on the one side by the Eastern desert and on the other by the Mediterranean Sea". Within the same week he addressed the Aberdeen Philosophical Society with a paper entitled "Notes of a recent journey through the Hauran and Gilead, with a number of inscriptions discovered during its progress".

In addition, Smith began to publish the results of some of his findings. Articles such as "On Aphek in Sharon" employed the fruits of his travels to seek to identify an obscure Old Testament place reference, and the paper read to the Aberdeen Philosophical Society was also published in the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement (1901 pp 340-361). He also published, in 1891, a review of a guide-book to Palestine which he says he took with him on the visit to Palestine. This was Baedeker's Palestine, first published in 1876. Smith's review points out some of the defects he found in the third edition of this volume, recently published. Smith argues that "No adequate account is given of the Jordan valley, none at all of the east side of it. Pella, for instance, is altogether omitted; of Pella, on which so much has been written lately, the tourist is not even told that it exists ... The archaeology is by no means up to date ... and facts that stare the tourist in the face are not mentioned". Of significance in this review article is the manner in which Smith describes what a "manual of sacred geography" should be: a book to help determine

the distances and difficulties of biblical journeys, the lines of the ancient campaigns, and generally all the perspective of the Holy Land, as well as the latest results of biblical archaeology and geography.

Ten years later -- in April 1901 -- Smith visited Palestine for a third time, this time as Professor of Old Testament language and literature at the Free Church College, Glasgow. He journeyed in the company of four ministerial colleagues, five students and a Glasgow businessman. Lilian notes that travel through Palestine was much improved since the last visit, with railways and improved roads opening up the country; one result of this was a concentration of travel east of the Jordan. Smith was disappointed, however, that the progress in building on ancient sites was hampering the archaeological work necessary for the study of ancient cultures. In the publication of his notes in the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement for 1901 Smith urges that "every year means irrecoverable loss", a point which he uses to urge increased subscription to the Fund.

Smith's notes indicate a strong interest in military campaigns in Palestine. One of the less well known aspects of this journey was a discovery at Tell Esh Shihab, in Hauran, some thirty kilometres east of the southern tip of the Sea of Galilee. Smith concluded from the low elevation of the area, and the water courses in and around Tell Esh-Shihab that it "must always have been a site of great importance"; and his discovery of a monument of Sety I of Egypt there corroborated his view. Smith concluded that the stone was "of no little importance in connection with the conquests of the Pharaohs on the east of Jordan". The prevailing view at the time was that Egyptian conquests of Palestine had not extended much into western Syria; but Smith challenged that on the basis of his find, concluding that Sety had in fact crossed the Jordan and extended his conquest into eastern Palestine.

The Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly also published Smith's extensive notes of his fourth and final visit to Palestine, in 1904. This visit was the result of Smith's having contracted a serious illness during a visit to America in 1903, as a result of which he was unable to fulfill his teaching duties during the 1903-4 session. He was advised to travel to recuperate, and a financial gift from some friends in Glasgow made it possible for him to visit India, his first visit to the country of his birth since 1858. Smith's wife accompanied him to India, but the exploration of Palestine was in the company of her brother, Dr G.S. Buchanan. The journey focussed on Moab, east of the Dead Sea, after which Smith and Buchanan returned to Jerusalem. There Smith spent much time examining the ancient city of David, particularly, according to his wife's memoir, "investigating water-courses and walls and subterranean passages and inscriptions, in all of which he received much interested assistance from authorities living in the city. He had in view his book upon Jerusalem, and this was a most valuable and helpful visit".

Results of the Visits -- Smith's Publications

Smith's visits to Palestine resulted in the publication of three important works: The Historical Geography of the Holy Land (1st edition 1894), Jerusalem: From the Earliest Times to AD70 (2 volumes 1908) and his Atlas of the Holy Land (1st edition 1916). The Historical Geography was by any standard a remarkable volume. The concept of "historical geography" is described by Robin Butlin as "the study of the geographies of past times, through the imaginative reconstruction of phenomena and processes central to our geographical understanding of the dynamism of human activities within a broadly conceived spatial context, such as change in the evaluation and uses of human and natural resources, in the form and functions of human settlements and built environments, in the advances in the amount and forms of geographical knowledge, and in the exercising of power and control over territories and people. Butlin cites Smith as an example of the particularisation of this genre in the area of biblical studies.

Smith's work is divided into three books; Book 1 deals generally with the land, in its relation to the history of the world, its form, climate and scenery, and also the questions of faith which relate to aspects of the geography of Palestine. Book 2 deals more particularly with Western Palestine, and Book 3 with Eastern Palestine. Five appendices deal with geographical passages and phrases in the Old Testament, the theory of Israel's invasion of Western Palestine, the wars against Sihon and Og, the bibliography of Eastern Palestine, and the subject of roads and vehicles in Syria.

Smith operates on the principle that as a theological concept, geography may have a symbolic, or even a spiritual significance, so that "geographical categories are being employed, but their literal geographical reference has completely disappeared. The geographical has become the servant of the spiritual". In this way Smith can describe the "Old Testament pictures of landscape" as "testimonies of the truth of the narratives in which they occur", and therefore aids to faith. Indeed, the concept of 'land' in the Old Testament has been described as "God's testing ground of faith". In such a context, Smith says, "the geography of Syria exhausts the influence of the material and the seen, and indicates the presence on the land of the unseen and the spiritual". Or, to put it at its most stark, for the Christian, in Smith's view, "his Bible is [Palestine's] geography from Beersheba to Antioch".

Butlin explores the influences on Smith's thinking -- the Bible as a primary source, the changing face of Palestine, and the development of the study of geographical context, as well as the intellectual connections which enabled Smith to produce his pioneer volume. He sets Smith's work in the context of "a watershed or divide in work on the historical geography of the Holy Land", standing midway between works which relied for the most part on secondary sources, and later works which would incorporate a wide corpus of new scientific discoveries. At least one critic recognised this when the HGHL appeared, stating that "It is, of course far from completing its task; it is really only the first opening up of what will hereafter prove a fruitful field of study".

The only lacuna in Smith's comprehensive study was a section devoted to the city of Jerusalem. Smith made good the ommission by publishing a series of articles on the subject in The Expositor between 1903 and 1906, which were expanded into the two-volume treatment of the city described by Smith as "the Bride of Kings and the mother of Prophets".

The site of the city and the surrounding areas is the concern of Book 1, in which Smith seeks to identify some biblical and historical sites around the environs of Jerusalem. Smith devoted a chapter to Jerusalem's geology on the grounds that "in all departments of his work ... the historian is dependent on the geologist". Here Smith is heavily dependent on secondary scientific sources; although one reviewer did take care to highlight that Smith, while availing himself of these insights, "is not blindly dependent upon them. He has studied the problems on the spot". Perhaps this was what Smith himself meant when he wrote to his wife from Palestine in April 1901: "this morning I took our party a tour of the walls of the city, both for my own sake and theirs". His concern was not merely to describe and highlight the sites for the sake of others; Smith was always anxious to take a close look himself with a view to amassing evidence which he presents in the Jerusalem volumes.

Book 2, on the economics and politics of Jerusalem, draws on an earlier article on 'Trade and Commerce' written by Smith in 1903. In this article Smith had emphasised the effects of eighth-century trade expansion on Jerusalem, raising Judah "to a pitch of wealth and luxury which the Hebrews had not before reached". The classical prophets made their appearance at this time, decrying greed and urging sobriety and self-control in the use of wealth. In Book 2 of Jerusalem, Smith examines the growth of the capital at the expense of the provinces; Jerusalem evolved into the only legitimate place of sacrifice-worship and the place of pilgrimage for many of the faithful. Given its physical elevation, Smith asks, "how were her finances regulated, and whence did she draw provision both for so numerous a non-productive population and for the temporary but immense additions to it caused by the Temple festivals?". There follows a detailed examination of Jerusalem's natural resources, and an examination of the commercial imports, temple revenues, royal trade, crafts and industries which, in a city most unfitted, in Smith's words, "to be the home of industries", nonetheless acknowledged that all its resources it owed to the benevolence of God. A discussion of the government and policing of the city and a note on the term 'the multitude', the common people, who laid the foundation for the Christian church of the New Testament concludes this section. Book 3, published in the Second Volume, provides a narrative history of Jerusalem from about 1400 BC to the Gospel period.

A master orator in the pulpit, Smith's writings show him to be a master craftsman with his pen. His geographical writings are rich in vivid imagery and word-pictures, and Butlin does not exaggerate when he describes the Jerusalem volumes as "a remarkable combination of scholarly erudition, intuition, historical imagination and depth of feeling".

Smith's close contact with the developing cartography business of John George Bartholomew allowed him to incorporate maps into both the Historical Geography and the Jerusalem volumes. These Smith claimed to be the first orographical maps of Palestine, that is, maps which showed the mountainous elevations by using different colours for different heights. If it was true that Bartholomew had "got his head screwed on the right way in the matter of maps", as Archibald Geikie suggested, then Smith had his head screwed on the right way by employing Bartholomew's services for the purposes of his geographical studies. Not only was John G. Bartholomew a man of foresight and wisdom, rightly dubbed the "Prince of Cartographers", the firm he represented was a hive of industry. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Bartholomew's was, in Elspeth Lochead's words, "a real focus of activity, having strong links with the scientific community centred in Edinburgh". This further facilitated the publication of Smith's Historical Atlas, planned as far back as 1894, but postponed for various reasons, and not realised until 1916.

Smith As Geographer and Biblical Critic

In his illuminating preface to the first edition of the Historical Geography, Smith outlines the philosophy behind his work. He acknowledges the amount of work done in the exploration of Palestine in the previous twenty years, paying tribute both to the international character of this work, and the distinctive contribution of the Palestine Exploration Fund. The nature of these archaeological and historical studies is such, he argues, that a new summary is warranted. But he argues that "an equally strong reason for the appearance at this time of a Historical Geography of Palestine is the recent progress of Biblical Criticism". He claims that his is the first historical geography to pay heed to the two-fold duty of serious students of Scripture: the duty, first, of "regulating the literary criticism of the Bible by the archaeology of Syria", and the converse duty of showing the "helpfulness of recent criticism" in writing the geography of the Holy Land. This point Smith explores in his chapter on 'The Land and Questions of Faith'. For example, he states as a guiding principle the following: "That a story accurately reflects geography does not necessarily mean that it is a real transcript of history ... let us at once admit that, while we may have other reasons for the historical truth of the patriarchal narratives, we cannot prove this on the ground that their itineraries and place-names are correct". On the other hand, he maintains that geographical descriptions authenticate biblical passages "as testimonies of the truth of the narratives in which they occur".

The intellectual context in which these works were written and published was based on the premise that literary texts alone were insufficient as an approach to history. In his study of the Annales school of historical geography, pioneered by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch in the early twentieth century, Alan Baker has suggested that historical geography rose partly as a reaction against "positivist history -- which believed that the 'hard facts' of historical reality were contained within documents". The result of this line of enquiry was a holistic and synthetic study of history which included not only the evidence of literary texts, but also an interdisciplinary analysis of history. Baker suggests that

the inseparability of geography and history, their combination in the form of regional histories, is a fundamental tenet of the Annales school and directly reflects its search for synthesis, its trust in total history.

Smith and others applied these principles of synthesis to the biblical history. The development of the historical geography of ancient cultures, not least the Palestine of the Scripture history, grew out of a desire to relate the biblical source to external evidential sources, and thus produce a comprehensive view of the biblical world.

There is a discourse among scholars that questions the authenticity of ancient Israel as a valid construct. Keith Whitelam, for example, while acknowledging the important work done by Smith, questions the imperialist and colonialist treatment of the Holy Land by his -- and similar -- studies. For Whitelam, Palestine, in Smith's treatment, "has no intrinsic meaning of its own, but provides the background and atmosphere for understanding the religious developments which are the foundation of Western civilization". The Historical Geography Whitelam describes as "a classic Orientalist expression of Europe's Other", in which there is no real or authentic "history", since the indigenous Palestinian history is silenced in the interests of "Israelite" history, and the history of Western monotheism.

That is a view to which Smith would have taken grave exception. His treatment of the ancient biblical history was informed less by his imperialism than by his attempt to feel the beat of the ancient civilisation. And to the extent that he wrote what he saw, and also marshalled the evidence of the contemporary biblical writings as he understood them through the tools of modern criticism, his was not an attempt to silence the Palestinian history in the interests of a merely academic construct of ancient Israel. It was an attempt, rather, to create a backdrop against which Old Testament scholarship could do its work. While for Smith it was axiomatic that the biblical history could not be constrained by the text alone, neither could the text be properly understood except on the basis of an understanding of landscape, topography, economics, geology and natural resources. It seems to me that Smith's visits to Palestine are an attempt to tell us that truth is indivisible, that our approach to biblical study must be holistic and synthetic, and that one of the greatest threats to our academic scholarship lies in our incessant need to departmentalise.

© Iain D. Campbell 2001