Adrian Reland’s 1695 Survey of the Land of Israel: The Country as It Really Was

 The Empty Land: Adrian Reland’s Astonishing 1695 Journey Through the Land of Israel and the Findings That Change Everything We Thought We Knew

In 1714, the extraordinary Dutch scholar Adrian Reland, a polymath fluent in Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, and Latin, published his monumental work on the Land of Israel. Reland had arrived here in 1695 and spent many months crisscrossing almost every path and trail. He visited approximately 2,500 settlements mentioned in the Bible, Talmud, or classical writings, and for each one he tried to trace the original name, its meaning, and its linguistic roots. The result was one of the most thorough studies of the country ever conducted at a time when systematic documentation was virtually nonexistent.

Reland began with mapping. He produced a detailed map of “Palaestina” as it was then called, and then went settlement by settlement, recording each place’s historical name based on ancient sources. When he found a Jewish source, he cited the exact verse; when the source was Greek or Roman, he noted that as well. At the same time he collected archaeological evidence, inscriptions, travel accounts, and local traditions.

When he summed up his journey, he presented a picture almost completely unlike any narrative we are familiar with today. The land he described was astonishingly empty. Reland speaks of a “sparsely populated, almost deserted” country in which only a handful of cities, Jerusalem, Acre, Safed, Jaffa, Tiberias, and Gaza, had any significant population. Even there the numbers were tiny by modern standards: Jerusalem had about 5,000 inhabitants, most of them Jews and a few Christians; Nazareth had around 700 people, all Christians; Gaza had roughly 550 residents, half Jews, half Christians – who divided agricultural and commercial work between them.

The Muslims Reland mentioned were almost never permanent residents. They appeared mainly as nomadic Bedouins who entered and left the towns during agricultural or construction seasons. The only exception was Nablus (Shechem), where a single Muslim family, the Natsha family, of about 120 people lived alongside roughly 70 Samaritans. Apart from that, he found virtually no permanent Muslim settlement.

One of Reland’s most striking discoveries concerned the names of the settlements. The deeper he dug, the clearer the pattern became: almost no village or town name had an ancient Arabic origin. Reland could not find a single village whose name derived from an Arabic linguistic root – except Ramla, which was founded in the Muslim period. All the other names, Jaffa, Acre, Jenin, Nablus, Tiberias, Gaza, Haifa, etc., had no meaning in Arabic because they were later corruptions of Hebrew, Greek, or Roman names. Even names considered “authentically” Arabic today, such as Al-Khalil (Hebron) or Al-Quds (Jerusalem), are late Muslim-era nicknames unrelated to the original name of the site.

To grasp how meticulous his research was, consider a few examples he gives: in Umm al-Fahm he found only ten families, all Christian, and a small church. In Safed and Tiberias he found Jewish communities (he does not specify their occupations except traditional fishing in the Sea of Galilee). Everywhere he looked he found no widespread Arab settlement and no place names rooted in the local Arabic language. What he did find were long-established Jewish and Christian communities and Bedouins passing through the area without founding permanent villages.

Reland’s book is not propaganda and not a political document. It is a relatively early historical testimony, written in Latin, reasoned, cool, and precise, that portrays the Land of Israel at the end of the 17th century exactly as a scholar without modern national agendas saw it. And precisely because of that, it carries weight. It revealed a reality of a sparsely populated land filled with Hebrew and Greek place names, with a prominent Jewish and Christian presence, and with almost no Arab settlement. For Reland, the country’s historical connection was obvious and taken for granted, and most of the inhabitants he met knew it that way too.

Three hundred years later, “Palaestina ex Monumentis Veteribus Illustrata” remains an important document not only for what it says, but for what it reminds us: that there exists early, detailed, and profound documentation of the land from a period when many assume no orderly sources existed at all.