Jaffa from Thomson’s “The Land and the Book”

Almost 150 years ago one of the most popular travel accounts of the Holy Land was penned by an American missionary named William M. Thomson. Born in Ohio, my own home state, the 28-year old Thomson and his young bride arrived in Lebanon in 1834 as Protestant missionaries. This was a mere 15 or so years after the first American missionaries had made the Holy Land a mission field. At once an entertaining travel account and Sunday School commentary on the places and people of the Bible, this may have been one the most widely read books ever written by a Protestant missionary.

Reading Thomson is like reading one of the early English novels. The language is less familiar, although still thoroughly Yankee and the devotional tone has long since disappeared for a readership buying out The Da Vinci Code as soon as it hit the bookstores. The biblical exegesis, literalist yet frankly pragmatic at times, is intertwined with astute and at times humorous accounts of the people Thomson met along the way. But the style is not at all dry or discouragingly didactic. From the start Thomson engages in a dialogue with the reader, making the text (which stretches over 700 pages in the 1901 version) a rhetorical trip in itself.

Here is one of the forgotten books of a couple generations back. Easily dismissed as an Orientalist book, in the sense propounded and confounded by Edward Said, it is nevertheless a very good read. With this post I begin a series to sample the anecdotes and local color presented by Rev. Thomson. The times have indeed changed, but such textual forays into the night reading of a previous generation of Americans are well worth the effort. Let’s begin with the author’s own invitation.

Our first walk in the Land of Promise! To me a land of promises more numerous and not less interesting than those given to the Father of the Faithful, when the Lord said, “Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it; for I will give it unto thee.” [Genesis 13:17] It is given to me also, and I mean to make it mine from Dan to Beersheba before I leave it.¦

And now we are abroad, shall we ramble on ala bab Allah (towards God’s gate), as our Arabs say when they neither know nor care where they are going?

Just my case at present. Where all is new, and every prospect pleases, it matters little what path we take, and, for the moment, I am thinking of what is not seen rather than what is.

Looking for an omnibus, perhaps, or expecting the cars to overtake us?

Not just that. I know that such things are not yet found in Syria; but I am greatly surprised by the absence of all wheeled vehicles, and look round at every fresh noise, expecting to see a cart, or dray, or waggon of some kind or other, but am always disappointed.

And will be. There is nothing of the sort in Syria; neither is there street or road for them in any part of the land.

How do you account for this? It was not always so. We read of carriages and chariots at a very early age. Joseph sent waggons for the wives and little ones of his father’s family [Genesis 14:19,21]. Jacob’s funeral was attended by chariots from Egypt to Hebron [Genesis 50:9]. The Canaanites had chariots in the time of Joshua [Joshua 17:16]. Judah could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley because they had chariots of iron [Judges 1:19]. Jaban had nine hundred [Judges 4:13], and the Philistines thirty thousand (?) in the reign of Saul [I Samuel 13:5]. Isaiah rebuked the children of Israel because there was no end to their chariots [Isaiah 2:7]; and thus it continued to the time when Philip joined himself to the chariot of the eunuch on the road to Gaza. Throughout all this long period there were countless carriages in the country, and, of necesity, roads for them. How is it that now there is neither the one nor the other?

Natural enough, and very appropriate. The first inquiry of a sensible traveller in a strange land will have references to the means of locomotion. As to your question, however, the natives will tell you that carriage-roads cannot be made in Syria. But this is a mistake. They might be constructed, at a moderate expense, in nearly all parts of the country. Their total disappearance can easily be explained. When the wild Arabs of the Mohammedan desolation became masters, wheeled vehicles immediately sunk into neglect, and even contempt. Accustomed only to the horse, the camel, and the ass, they despised all other means of travel and transportation. Good roads were not necessary for them, and, being neglected, they quickly disappeared from the land, and carriages with them. Nor will they ever re-appear till some other race than the Arab predominates, and a better than the Turk governs. Even the Christian inhabitants of Lebanon, where good roads are most needed, have no adequate appreciation of them, and take no pains to make them. They drive their loaded camels, mules, and donkeys along frightful paths, and endanger their own necks by riding over the same, from generation to generation, without dreaming of any improvement. You must educate your nerves into indifference in this matter, and get ready as fast as possible to flounder over all sorts of break-neck places in the course of our pilgrimage.

In the modern politically correct, multicultural world we seem to inhabit these days, Thomson does not come across as a trustworthy reporter out to only reports the facts. He invites us on a ramble over sacred territory in which the heroes of biblical times have been superseded by a contemporary melange of Arab Muslims, Christians, Jews, Turks and fellow Franks. The trip will be, as Mark Twain said about his touristic invasion of the Holy Land, some “rough pilgrimizing” with saddle sores rather than the comforts of a carriage, and ethnocentric views rather than balanced sympathy.

[Excerpt from William M. Thomson, The Land and the Book; or, Biblical Illustrations Drawn from the Manners and Customs, the Scenes and Scenery of the Holy Land. London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1901, pp. 19-21, Original, 1859]