The land at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea has been called many things by many peoples across four thousand years of recorded history. Romans called it Palaestina. Crusaders called it the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Ottoman administrators divided it into sanjaks and called it nothing in particular. British civil servants stamped it “Palestine” on their passports and Mandate documents. But none of these names is the name. None of them is the name the land bears in the only book that has named it with divine authority. The Bible — the oldest and most theologically authoritative document concerning this land — has its own vocabulary for the place. It is a vocabulary worth recovering, because every name the Bible uses tells the truth about who the land belongs to, and every name modern politics has invented exists to obscure that truth.
Eretz Yisrael — The Name God Himself Uses
The Hebrew Scriptures call the land Eretz Yisrael — the Land of Israel. The phrase appears throughout the Old Testament with a specificity and consistency that admits no ambiguity. In 1 Samuel 13:19, the writer notes that “there was no smith found throughout all the land of Israel,” referring not to a political entity bounded by modern borders but to the territory inhabited by the descendants of Jacob, whose name God Himself had changed to Israel in Genesis 32:28. The phrase is not symbolic. It is not poetic. It is the technical and administrative name of the land, used by prophets, kings, chroniclers, and historians from the time of the conquest to the time of the exile and beyond.
The continuity of the name is not an accident. When the prophet Ezekiel speaks of God’s restoration of His people to their land, he uses the same phrase: admat Yisrael, “the soil of Israel” (Ezekiel 36:8), and Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel (Ezekiel 27:17, 40:2). When Matthew records the angel’s instruction to Joseph following the death of Herod, the same designation appears in Greek translation: “Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and go into the land of Israel” (Matthew 2:20–21). Across more than a thousand years of biblical history — across the Hebrew Bible and into the Greek New Testament — the name of the land does not change. It is the Land of Israel. It is what God Himself called it. And it is what He still calls it.
Canaan — The Land Before the Covenant
Before God’s covenant with Abraham, the land bore an older name: Canaan. The patriarchal narratives in Genesis use the name with care and frequency. Abram is told by God to leave Ur of the Chaldeans and travel “into the land of Canaan” (Genesis 12:5). The covenant is sworn over the land of Canaan: “And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession” (Genesis 17:8). The spies are sent into the land of Canaan (Numbers 13:2). The exodus generation is brought out of Egypt with the express purpose of inheriting the land of Canaan (Leviticus 14:34).
Canaan was the name of the land in the period before Israel inhabited it — when it was peopled by the various tribes descended from Canaan, the son of Ham (Genesis 10:15–19). Once Israel entered the land under Joshua and possessed it, the older name gave way to the new: the land was now the inheritance of the twelve tribes, and it bore their collective name. This is the natural pattern of biblical naming. Lands take the name of the people God places in them, under His covenant authority. The land was called Canaan when the Canaanites possessed it. It was called Israel when Israel possessed it. It has never been called “Palestine” by anyone except those who reject God’s right to name His own creation.
Judah, Samaria, and Galilee — The Geography of the Gospels
Open any of the four Gospels and read the geographical vocabulary. Jesus is born in Bethlehem of Judea (Matthew 2:1). John the Baptist preaches in the wilderness of Judea (Matthew 3:1). Jesus passes through Samaria and meets the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4:4–5). He grows up in Galilee, in the town of Nazareth, and conducts much of His ministry around the Sea of Galilee (Matthew 4:12–17). The Apostles travel through Judea, Galilee, and Samaria preaching the gospel (Acts 9:31). When the resurrected Christ commands His disciples in Acts 1:8, He names the regions in their proper biblical order: “Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.”
Not once — in any of the four Gospels, in any of the Pauline epistles, in any of the historical or prophetic books of the New Testament — does the word “Palestine” appear as the name of the land. The Greek-speaking world of the first century knew the geographical term Palaistine (used occasionally by Herodotus and others to describe the coastal strip of the Philistines), but the inspired writers of the New Testament never used it for the land of Israel. The Holy Spirit, superintending the writing of Scripture, did not choose the Roman label. He chose the Jewish ones. He named the regions of Christ’s earthly ministry by their Hebrew and Aramaic names — Yehudah, Shomron, Galil — Latinized in Greek transliteration as Judea, Samaria, and Galilee. These are the names the Gospel uses. These are the names the Christian inherits.
Zion — The Spiritual Name
Beyond the geographical and administrative names of the land, Scripture gives it a spiritual name: Zion. Originally referring to the specific hill in Jerusalem captured by David from the Jebusites (2 Samuel 5:7), the name expanded through the prophets and the psalms to become a designation for the entire land, the city of God, and the people of God’s covenant. The psalmist writes: “For the LORD hath chosen Zion; he hath desired it for his habitation” (Psalm 132:13). Isaiah envisions the day when “out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem” (Isaiah 2:3). Joel records the LORD declaring: “So shall ye know that I am the LORD your God dwelling in Zion, my holy mountain” (Joel 3:17).
Zion is not a political term. It is not a tribal designation. It is the name God gives to the land when He speaks of it as His own. Every Christian who has sung the hymns of the church — “We’re marching to Zion,” “Glorious things of thee are spoken, Zion city of our God” — has affirmed without thinking what the modern political vocabulary actively denies: that this land has a sacred identity, that its name is given by God, and that the name God has given it is not “Palestine.” When the prophets speak of God’s love for His land, they speak of Zion. When the psalms weep for exile, they weep for Zion. When the New Testament looks forward to the consummation of all things, it sees “mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem” (Hebrews 12:22), the eternal name of the land where God’s people dwell with Him forever.
“When the prophets speak of God’s love for His land, they speak of Zion. When the psalms weep for exile, they weep for Zion. The Bible does not weep for Palestine — because Palestine is not the land’s name.”
The Covenant Boundaries
The land does not merely have a name. It has borders — and those borders are given by God Himself. In Genesis 15:18, the covenant boundaries are declared with finality: “Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates.” In Numbers 34, God dictates the precise boundaries of the inheritance, naming specific landmarks: the Wilderness of Zin in the south, the Great Sea (the Mediterranean) in the west, Mount Hor and the entrance of Hamath in the north, the Jordan and the Sea of Chinnereth (Galilee) in the east. In Joshua 1:4, the LORD reaffirms the boundaries to Joshua before the conquest: “From the wilderness and this Lebanon even unto the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, and unto the great sea toward the going down of the sun, shall be your coast.”
These boundaries are not modern. They are not negotiable. They were not drawn by United Nations cartographers or British colonial administrators. They were drawn by God, and they describe a land that significantly exceeds the borders of the modern State of Israel. They include all of the territory politically contested as “Palestinian,” all of the territory recognized by international consensus as Israel, and substantial additional territory currently under Jordanian, Syrian, Lebanese, and Egyptian sovereignty. The covenant promise has not yet been fulfilled in its geographical fullness. The prophet Ezekiel describes the future restoration of these full boundaries in chapters 47 and 48 — and the God who promised the land has not revised the deed. The land of Israel, in its biblical fullness, awaits the day of its full restoration.
What the Bible Never Calls It
The word “Palestine” appears in the King James Bible four times — and in every instance, it refers not to the land of Israel but to Philistia, the small coastal strip inhabited by the Philistines. Exodus 15:14, Isaiah 14:29, Isaiah 14:31, and Joel 3:4 all use the KJV translation “Palestina” or “Palestine” to render the Hebrew word Peleshet — the territory of the Philistines, distinct from and adversarial to the land of Israel. Modern translations correctly render this as “Philistia,” restoring the biblical distinction between the Jewish land of Israel and the small enemy strip of Philistine territory along the southwestern coast. In no instance does Scripture use the term for the land of the Jewish people. The land of Israel is never called “Palestine” in the Bible. Not once.
The Jewish people are never called “Palestinians” in the Bible. The covenant is not made with the Palestinians. The land is not promised to the Palestinians. The prophets do not weep for Palestine. The psalms do not sing of Palestine. The Apostles do not preach in Palestine. Christ is not crucified in Palestine. He is born in Judea, raised in Galilee, crucified in Judea, and resurrected in Judea — and the Bible knows the difference between Judea, the land of the Jews, and Philistia, the coastal land of Israel’s ancient enemies. The modern political vocabulary collapses that distinction deliberately. The Bible refuses to.
Perspective
The land has a name. God gave it. The name is the Land of Israel — Eretz Yisrael — and every biblical writer, Hebrew and Greek alike, used it, honored it, and refused to substitute any other. When the Christian who stands with Israel speaks of the land, he ought to speak of it as the Bible speaks of it. Not “Palestine” — because Palestine is the Roman insult, the propaganda label, the political invention of Hadrian repurposed by Arafat. The land is Judea. It is Samaria. It is Galilee. It is Zion. It is the Land of Israel. These are the names Scripture uses, and the Christian who uses them is not engaging in political controversy — he is engaging in biblical faithfulness.
There is a discipline here, and it is a discipline worth practicing. When the news anchor says “the West Bank,” the Christian remembers the biblical names of those hills: Judea and Samaria, the land of David’s reign and Joseph’s tomb and Christ’s ministry. When the headline reads “the Palestinian territories,” the Christian remembers that no such territories exist in Scripture — that the land of Israel was promised to Abraham, deeded to Isaac, confirmed to Jacob, and conveyed by everlasting covenant to the people who still bear that patriarch’s name. The names matter. The names tell the truth. And the Christian who knows the names the Bible uses is equipped, in a way the world is not, to see the conflict as God sees it: not as a dispute between two peoples over disputed territory, but as the working out, in our generation, of a covenant promise older than Rome, older than Greece, older than the Roman emperor whose two-thousand-year-old insult still echoes in every newscast that calls the land of Israel by the name of her ancient enemies.