The Long Postbiblical History of “Judea and Samaria”

There are presently two separate congressional initiatives regarding the largely hilly countryside west of the Jordan River, and south and north of Jerusalem, that was part of the kingdom of Jordan from 1950 to 1967 and owes to it its name of “the West Bank.” The first of these, introduced last month by the Arkansas senator Tom Cotton and the New York congresswoman Claudia Tenney, both Republicans, would require all official United States documents to replace “the West Bank” with “Judea and Samaria.” (Tenney originally proposed a similar bill a year ago that was never brought to a vote.) A second more modest move comes from Florida congressman Brian Mast, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and would render “Judea” and “Samaria” compulsory only for the committee’s Republican staff members.

Disputes over place names are typical of international conflicts involving issues of sovereignty, national identity, and national pride. If President Trump wants to rename the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America,” he is doing nothing that Arab countries haven’t done for decades in referring to the Persian Gulf as “the Arabian Gulf,” while if the French had won their 18th-century colonial wars with the English, America would be known as Nouvelle France. The question of “Judea and Samaria” vs. “the West Bank” might seem just one more such bone of contention were it not for the extremely long history that bears on it and the ignorance, even on the part of those who should be most eager to invoke it, of what this history tells us.

Two narratives clash here. One is that of the world’s governments, diplomats, and media. Although, they maintain, Judea and Samaria—Hebrew Yehudah and Shomron—are what the Bible calls the hill country around Jerusalem, and what Israel has officially called it since conquering it in 1967, these names were previously used only rarely outside their biblical context and never had international acceptance. Since the 1948–49 Arab-Israeli war that ended with the area in the hands of Jordan’s Arab Legion, “the West Bank,” al-Daffa al-Gharbiyeh in Arabic (generally shortened to ad-Daffa, “the Bank,” in colloquial speech), has been its internationally recognized designation. The Israeli-led campaign to revive and impose the terms “Judea” and “Samaria” is an attempt to biblicize geographic nomenclature as part of Israel’s claim to land that does not belong to it.