George Adam Smith and the historical geography of the Holy Land: contents, contexts and connections

Abstract

George Adam smith was a prominent Old Testament scholar and theologian, whose work on the historical geography of the Holy land has been noted by historical geographers, though its intellectual contexts have never been fully explored. The contents and style of his major books and atlas reveal a special talent for narrative and description, and his connections with wider complexes of revolutionary theology and nascent scientific geography in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries are extensive and important indicators of the rapid and sometimes confusing and controversial changes in intellectual and societal milieux. He also affords significant links with older traditions of description of the historical or scriptural geography of the Holy Land. "Surely there is no region of earth where Nature and history have more cruelly conspired, where so tragic a drama has obtained so awful a theatre. The effect of some historical catastrophes has been heightened by their occurrence amid scenes of beauty and peace. It is otherwise here. Nature, when she has not herself been, by some convulsion, the executioner of judgement, has added every aggravation of horror to the cruelty of the human avenger or the exhaustion of the doomed. The history of the Dead Sea opens with Sodom and Gomorrah, and may be said to close with the Massacre of Masada.". © 1988 Academic Press Ltd.