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"Judea and Samaria" Were in Common Use until 1948

(Mosaic) Philologos - The largely hilly countryside west of the Jordan River, and south and north of Jerusalem, that was part of the kingdom of Jordan from 1950 to 1967, owes to Jordan its name of "the West Bank." Disputes over place names are typical of international conflicts involving issues of sovereignty, national identity, and national pride. The Bible calls the hill country around Jerusalem "Judea and Samaria." The "West Bank" is the linguistic interloper - and a senseless one too, since most of the territory it refers to is far from the banks of the Jordan River. The term was invented by a Hashemite monarchy ruling east of the Jordan River for the purpose of justifying its annexation of Judea and Samaria. There simply were no indigenous Arabic place names for the area since its Arab inhabitants never thought of these territories as discrete geographic entities that required names of their own. The Arabs who lived in them identified with the cities, towns, and villages they came from, not with a larger region. Far from being uniquely Jewish, "Judea and Samaria" were, until the mid-20th-century, the standard Christian and European way of referring to the area. The 1st-century CE Jewish historian Joseph Flavius, writing in Greek, wrote, "Now, as to the country of Samaria, it lies between Judea and Galilee." The 12th-century German pilgrim Theodericus wrote, "On the west Judea extends to the Great [Mediterranean] Sea...and to the north it is bordered by Samaria. The 14th-century The Travels of Sir John Mandeville states, "Jerusalem is in the land of Judea." French author Francois-Rene Chateaubriand wrote in 1811, "The plain of Sharon is bordered on the east by the mountains of Judea and Samaria." Mark Twain wrote in 1869, "We were out of Galilee and into Samaria at last. So, rested and refreshed, we fell into line and filed away over the barren mountains of Judea. Old maps of Palestine commonly divided its central mountain range into "Judea" and "Samaria," and a district of Samaria was one of the six administrative districts of British Mandate Palestine. UN General Assembly Resolution 181 of 1947 calling for the partition of Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state refers to "the boundary of the hill country of Samaria and Judea."
2025-03-06 00:00:00
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