Ancient Israel and the Modern Bounded State

The rediscovery of Ptolemy in the early modern period altered the representation and understanding of boundaries between territorial states. From the late fifteenth century onward, atlases increasingly began to depict countries with their political borders marked. In the first part of this essay, I argue that an important influence on this development was maps of the Holy Land which delineated the territories of the twelve tribes. These maps of the Holy Land were adopted from medieval maps and the tribal boundaries depicted not political authority, but communicated the spiritual inheritance that Christians were to possess. Thus, the Bible and its reception through maps was a significant agent in the changing perception of space’s relationship to political authority, but in an unexpected way. In the second part, I argue that the changing political sensibilities also influenced the reading of the Bible. Through an examination of the interpretation of the table of nations in Genesis 10 in early modern England, I demonstrate that the separation of the peoples that descended from Noah’s sons came to be seen as the establishment of homogenous, bounded states.