In Abrahamic religions, the "Promised Land" refers to an area in the Levant that God chose to bestow, via a series of covenants, upon the family and descendants of Abraham.
The Promised Land is translated as such in the following languages related to the topic:
In the context of the Hebrew Bible, these descendants are originally understood to have been the Israelites, whose forefather was Jacob, who was a son of Abraham's son Isaac. The concept of the Promised Land largely overlaps with the Land of Israel (Zion) or the Holy Land in a biblical/religious sense and with Canaan or Palestine in a secular/geographic sense. Although the Book of Numbers provides some definition for the Promised Land's boundaries, they are not delineated with precision, but it is universally accepted that the core areas lie in and around Jerusalem. According to the biblical account, the Promised Land was not inherited until the Israelite conquest of Canaan, which took place shortly after the Exodus.
These promises were given to Abram, later called Abraham, before the birth of his sons. Abraham's family tree includes both the Ishmaelite tribes, the claimed ancestry of Arabs and of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, through Abraham's first son, Ishmael; and the Israelite tribes, claimed ancestors of Jews and Samaritans, descended through Abraham's second son, Isaac.
The concept of the Promised Land is first mentioned in the Book of Genesis, which is the first book of the Torah, which collectively refers to the first five books of the Hebrew Bible.
God is claimed to have spoken the following promises to Abraham in several verses of Genesis, which the New International Version translates as:
God repeated the promise in Genesis 13:14-17:
Later in what is called the covenant of the pieces, a verse is said to describe what are known as "borders of the Land" (Gevulot Ha-aretz):
These promises, attributed to God, were given prior to the birth of Abraham's sons.
God later confirms the promise to Abraham's son Isaac (), and then to Isaac's son Jacob () in terms of "the land on which you are lying". Jacob is later renamed "Israel" () and his descendants are called the Children of Israel or the Twelve Tribes of Israel.
The Torah's subsequent Book of Exodus describes it as "land flowing with milk and honey" () and gives verses on how to treat the prior occupants and marks the borders in terms of the Red Sea, the "Sea of the Philistines", and the "River", which a modern English Bible translates to:
The Israelites lived in a smaller area of former Canaanite land and land east of the Jordan River after the legendary prophet Moses led the Israelite Exodus out of Egypt (). The Torah's Book of Deuteronomy presents this occupation as their God's fulfillment of the promise (). Moses anticipated that their God might subsequently give the Israelites land reflecting the boundaries of the original promise â if they were obedient to the covenant ().
The boundaries of the "Promised Land" given in the Book of Numbers, (chapter ) are:
The concept of the Promised Land is a central religious belief of the Jewish people and a key tenet of Zionism, the Jewish national movement which established the State of Israel.
Mainstream Jewish tradition regards the promise made to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as applying to anyone a member of the Jewish people, including proselytes and in turn their descendants and is signified through the brit milah (rite of circumcision).
Genesis 15 records God's covenant with Abraham, which includes the borders of the Promised Land:
In English:
Book of Joshua records the first prophecy given to Joshua about the conquest of the land:
In English:
In the New Testament, the descent and promise is reinterpreted along religious lines. In the Epistle to the Galatians, Paul the Apostle draws attention to the formulation of the promise, avoiding the term "seeds" in the plural (meaning many people), choosing instead "seed," meaning one person, who he understands to be Jesus (and those united with him). For example, in he notes:
In Paul goes further, noting that the expansion of the promise from singular to the plural is not based on genetic/physical association, but a spiritual/religious one:
In it is written:
German Lutheran Old Testament commentator Johann Friedrich Karl Keil states that the covenant is through Isaac, but notes that Ishmael's descendants have held much of that land through time.
The boundaries of the 'Promised Land' given by Jerome around 400 CE read:
Keil and Delitzsch, in the 19th century, note that Abraham had taken the western lands of Canaan after Lot, his nephew, had chosen to occupy the Jordan Valley in Genesis 13:11-12, but Lot in fact "had no share in the promise of God", and the words "northward and southward and eastward and westward ... all the land that you see" in Genesis 13:14-15 indicate that Abraham was promised the "whole extent" of the land.
Many European colonists saw America as the "Promised Land", representing a haven from religious conflicts and persecution. For instance, Puritan minister John Cotton's 1630 sermon gave colonizers departing England to Massachusetts repeated references to the Exodus story, and later German immigrants sang: "America [...] is a beautiful land that God promised to Abraham."
In a sermon celebrating independence in 1783, Yale president Ezra Stiles implied that Americans were chosen and delivered from bondage to a Promised Land: "the Lord shall have made his American Israel 'high above all nations which he hath made'," reflecting language from Deuteronomy of the promise.
Shawnee/Lenape scholar Steven Newcomb argued in his 2008 book Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery that Christendom's discovery doctrine was also the same claim of "the right to kill and plunder non-Christians" found in this covenant tradition, whereby "the Lord" in Deuteronomy told his chosen people how they were to "utterly destroy" the "many nations before thee" when "He" brought them into the land "He" had discovered and promised to "His" "Chosen People" to "possess", and that this "right" was woven into US law through the 1823 Johnson v. McIntosh Supreme Court ruling.
Jewish and Muslim tradition, with records that date to at least as far back as the works of 1st-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, postulates that Abraham's first son, Ishmael, was the founder of the Arab race. Islam's main prophet, Muhammad, also considered himself a Hanif, that is, a true monotheistic believer of the religion of Abraham. His tribe, the Quraysh, traces its ancestry to Ishmael. Although, this cannot be proven as there are 30 missing ancestors from the lineage . For these reasons, Muslims in general understand that Arabs are also entitled to the âÂÂPromised Landâ bestowed upon their common ancestor Abraham (âÂÂIbrahimâÂÂ).
Some Palestinians claim partial descent from the Israelites and Maccabees, as well as from other peoples who have lived in the region.
<blockquote>Under the name Palestine, we comprehend the small country formerly inhabited by the Israelites, and which is today part of Acre and Damascus pachalics. It stretched between 31 and 33ð N. latitude and between 32 and 35ð degrees E. longitude, an area of about 1300 . Some zealous writers, to give the land of the Hebrews some political importance, have exaggerated the extent of Palestine; but we have an authority for us that one can not reject. St. Jerome, who had long traveled in this country, said in his letter to Dardanus (ep. 129) that the northern boundary to that of the southern, was a distance of 160 Roman miles, which is about 55 . He paid homage to the truth despite his fears, as he said himself, of availing the Promised Land to pagan mockery, "" (Latin: "I am embarrassed to say the breadth of the promised land, lest we seem to have given the heathen an opportunity of blaspheming").</blockquote>
African-American spirituals invoke the imagery of the "Promised Land" as heaven or paradise and as an escape from slavery, which could often only be reached by death. The imagery and term also appear elsewhere in popular culture, in sermons, and in speeches such as Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1968 "I've Been to the Mountaintop", in which he said:
<blockquote>I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.</blockquote>