Amitai (Tai) Elon, Natur Farm, Golan Heights
I have spent my working life walking people into the pages of the Bible. Not reading it to them. Walking them into it. There is a moment I have seen hundreds of times, and it never gets old: a person who has read a story since childhood stands in the place where it happened, looks at the hill, feels the wind coming off the valley, and goes quiet. Then they open their Bible and read the passage again, and their voice changes. The words have weight now. They have an address.
This book is that moment, eighty-five times, from Ur to the New Jerusalem, in the order the events happened.
How the book is built
Every stop is a real place. I do not walk you through the books of the Bible one by one; I walk you through the land, and the books come with us. Genesis is read at Shechem and Hebron and Bethel. Kings is read at Carmel and Jezreel and Lachish. The Gospels are read on the lake. Acts runs down the hills to the coast. When we reach Revelation we are standing on the hill of Megiddo, and then, at the end, inside the city.
At every stop you will find the same five things, always in the same order.
Where we are. What you would see if you stood here. Which way the road runs, where the water is, which hill is which. In this land the geography is not background. It is half the story.
Open your Bibles, we read aloud together. The anchor passage, printed in full, from the World English Bible, which is free for anyone to copy. I never quote scripture from memory in this book, and I never cut a passage to make it fit. If the reading is long, we read it long.
What happened, in order. The events as the text gives them, in sequence, with the supporting passages named as supporting. Every chapter has one anchor event. Where a place appears again later in the Bible, that later story is told briefly inside the same chapter and the anchor stays where it belongs.
What they were after, and the turn. The people in these pages were not illustrations. They wanted things. They were afraid of things. Somewhere in almost every story there is a moment where a person turns, toward God or away from him, and if you find that moment you have found the reason the story was written down.
Where the writer stood, and what is contested. The prophet who wrote a chapter was standing somewhere when he wrote it, and it matters. And where the identification of a site is uncertain, I say so plainly. Two places claim the tomb of Jesus. Nobody knows which cave was Adullam. The location of Sodom is argued. A book that pretends to know more than it knows is not a book you can trust in the places where it does know. So I tell you every time.
The four teachers behind this book
I am a Jewish guide from the Golan. I did not learn the Bible in a Christian seminary, and this book is not one. But four teachers shaped how it is built, and I want to name them, because a reader deserves to know where the tools came from.
From Kristi McLelland I take the insistence that the Bible is a Middle Eastern book, written by Middle Eastern people, about honour and shame and hospitality and the table, and that a Western reader who forgets this will misread almost every story. Pilgrims have long called the land the fifth Gospel. I have been walking it my whole life, and they are right.
From Skip Heitzig I take the view from thirty thousand feet. Before you walk a single stop you should see the whole shape of the story, so that every place you stand connects to the one before and the one after. That is why this book opens with the whole Bible in one ribbon, and why every chapter begins with a short line that says where this stop sits in the one story.
From Joseph Prince I take the habit of looking for the Messiah on every page, including the pages of Moses and the prophets. I am a Jew, and I read those pages as a Jew, but I will not hide from a Christian reader the places where the New Testament writers themselves said this is what that meant. I mark them as what they are: the later reading of an earlier text.
From David Jeremiah I take the seriousness about the land today. The prophets did not write about an abstract Israel. They wrote about hills that still exist, a city that still stands, and a people who are, against every prediction of history, still here. What that means for the end of the story, people argue about. That it means something, I do not think a reader of these pages can deny.
A word about the map
The map in this book is drawn from the real coastline, the real Sea of Galilee, the real Dead Sea and the real Jordan, and every stop is placed at its real coordinates. Where a site is uncertain the pin is placed at the traditional or the most likely location and the chapter says so. Jerusalem has twelve stops in a space you could walk across in an hour, so it has its own map. So does the lake.
On the website version, the map walks. Press play and a single point of light travels from Ur to the New Jerusalem in ninety seconds, naming each stop as it passes. Watch it once before you read anything. It is the whole Bible in a minute and a half, and I have seen people cry at it.
How to read
In order, if you can. The book is built as one walk, and each stop assumes the one before. But it is also a book to open at random, at the place you are standing or the place you are praying about, and every chapter stands on its own feet.
Read the scripture aloud. I mean it. Every stop says we read aloud together, and that is not a figure of speech. The Bible was written to be heard.
And when you finish a stop, look up. Whether you are on the hill itself or in a chair in Ohio, look up from the page and let the place be a place. That is what this book is for.
B'ahava, from the Golan.