New research from the University of Cambridge shows how the first map of the Holy Land in a printed Bible from 1525 – which was accidentally printed upside down – contributed to shaping the idea of territorial boundaries, strengthening the concept of the nation-state and the mutual influence between biblical interpretation and modern political theories.
New research from Cambridge reveals how the first Bible ever printed with a map – published in 1525 with the Holy Land mistakenly printed upside down – had a profound impact far beyond the world of biblical illustration.
The first Bible to include a map of the Holy Land was published in 1525, and 2025 marks its 500th anniversary. Although the map was printed “upside down” – with the Mediterranean Sea placed to the east – its very presence set a new standard, which, according to a recent Cambridge study, continues to influence the way modern borders are imagined to this day.
“This is simultaneously one of the great failures and one of the great achievements of the publishing world,” says Professor Nathan MacDonald, professor of Old Testament exegesis at the University of Cambridge.
"They printed the map upside down, so that the Mediterranean Sea appears to the east of the Land of Israel. People in Europe knew so little about that part of the world at the time that no one in the printing shop seemed to notice. But this map changed the Bible forever, and today most Bibles have maps."
In an article published in The Journal of Theological Studies, MacDonald explains that Lucas Cranach the Elder's map of the Holy Land, painted in Zurich, not only connected the printed Bible with the spirit of the Renaissance, but also influenced emerging ideas about territorial organization.
“It has been wrongly assumed that biblical maps grew out of an early modern drive to create maps with well-marked territorial divisions,” says MacDonald. “But in fact, it was these maps of the Holy Land that led the revolution.
"As more and more people gained access to Bibles from the 17th century onward, these maps spread a perception of how worthy "That the world is organized, and what the readers' place is in it. It still continues to have a huge impact."
The first map in the Bible
Only a handful of copies of Christopher Proschauer's 1525 edition of the Old Testament still exist in libraries around the world. One of these rare copies is held in the Wren Library of Trinity College, Cambridge.
In this volume, Cranach's map depicts both the key sites associated with the "Wanderings in the Desert" and the division of the "Promised Land" into twelve tribal regions. These boundaries reflected a distinctly Christian interest in establishing a historical claim to holy sites associated with both the Old and New Testaments.
Cranach drew on earlier medieval cartographic traditions, in which Israel was depicted as discrete, neatly arranged strips of land—a style influenced by the first-century Jewish historian Josephus Flavius, who attempted to reconcile the inconsistent geographical descriptions in the Bible.
Nathan McDonald with the Bible map
Lucas Cranach the Elder's map of the Holy Land in Christopher Proschauer's edition of the Old Testament (Zurich, 1525) in the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge.
Credit: The Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge
According to McDonald, "Joshua 13–19 does not provide a completely coherent and consistent picture of what territories and cities were inhabited by the various tribes. There are some inconsistencies. The map helped readers to put things in order, even if it was not geographically accurate."
Literal reading of the Bible was particularly central to the Swiss Reformation, and so, adds MacDonald: “It is not surprising that the first biblical map was published in Zurich.”
MacDonald, a Fellow at St. John's College, Cambridge, argues that with the increasing emphasis on a literal reading of the Bible, maps helped to illustrate that events occurred in an identifiable time and space.
In the world of the Reformation, where certain images were banned, maps of the Holy Land were permitted and became an alternative source of religious awe.
“When people looked at Cranach’s map, stopping at Mount Carmel, Nazareth, Jordan and Jericho, they were on a virtual pilgrimage,” says MacDonald. “In their imagination they wandered across the map, and in the process they encountered the sacred story.”
According to MacDonald, the inclusion of Cranach’s map was a pivotal moment in the history of the Bible’s transformation—a moment that deserves greater recognition. Better-known changes include the shift from scroll to codex (book); the creation of the first portable Bible in one volume—The Paris Bible—in the 13th century; the division into chapters and verses; the addition of new introductions during the Reformation; and the recognition in the 18th century that the prophetic utterances were Hebrew poetry. “The Bible was never an unchanging book,” MacDonald says. “It’s constantly changing.”
A revolution in the meaning of borders
MacDonald argues that on medieval maps, the division of the Holy Land into tribes conveyed a spiritual message: the inheritance of all things by Christians. But from the late 15th century, the lines spread from maps of the Holy Land to maps of the modern world, and began to represent something entirely different: political boundaries. At the same time, new ideas about political sovereignty were read back into the biblical texts.
“Biblical maps depicting the boundaries of the twelve tribes were powerful agents in the development and dissemination of these ideas,” says McDonald. “A text that has no concern with political boundaries in the modern sense became a supposed example of God ordering the world into nation-states.”
"Lines on maps began to symbolize the boundaries of political sovereignty rather than the unlimited divine promises. This fundamentally changed the way the biblical description of geographical space was understood."
"Early modern ideas about the nation were influenced by the Bible, but the interpretation of the sacred text itself was, in turn, shaped by new political theories that emerged in the early modern period. The Bible was both the agent of change – and the object of change."
Relevance today
“For many people, the Bible still serves as an important guide to their fundamental beliefs about nation-states and borders,” says McDonald. “They see these ideas as biblically approved, and therefore fundamentally true and just.”
McDonald points, for example, to a recent US Customs and Border Protection recruitment video in which a border agent quotes Isaiah 6:8 – “And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” – while flying in a helicopter over the US-Mexico border.
Prof. McDonald is troubled by the fact that so many people see boundaries as something simple and obvious, “biblical.” “When I asked ChatGPT and Google Gemini if boundaries are a biblical idea, they both simply said ‘yes.’ The reality is much more complex,” he says.
"We should be troubled when any group claims that its way of organizing society is based on a divine or religious foundation, because these claims tend to simplify and distort ancient texts that deal with ideological claims of a completely different kind and in very different political contexts."
Place appearance: Nathan MacDonald, "Ancient Israel and the Modern Bounded State", published on November 29, 2025 in The Journal of Theological Studies.
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