A Name That Belongs to Pilgrimage

Holy Land is not a border and never has been. It is the name three religions use for the same stretch of country, and the atlas holds it separately because the term belongs to devotion and travel rather than to any state.

For Judaism it is the land of the covenant, whose produce and boundaries carry legal consequences that apply nowhere else: agricultural tithes, the sabbatical year and other commandments are tied to it, so the definition of its extent is a matter of religious law rather than of sentiment. For Christianity it is the setting of the gospels, and it became a destination once Constantine's mother Helena travelled there in the fourth century and churches were built over the sites identified with the nativity, the crucifixion and the resurrection. For Islam it is the land of the prophets, and Jerusalem holds the Farthest Mosque named in the night journey; the region's earlier prophets are Islam's prophets too.

Pilgrimage is what the name mostly describes. Medieval European pilgrims travelled in organised parties with guidebooks and indulgences attached to specific sites; the crusades were preached as an armed extension of that traffic; and Muslim and Jewish pilgrimage ran alongside on their own circuits. Modern religious tourism, in the millions annually, follows routes that are recognisably the same ones, to sites whose identification often dates from the fourth century rather than the first.