两千多年来,巴勒斯坦一直是三大一神教信徒的朝圣之地。其中一些人献祭、收集圣物、祈祷;另一些人则求学、征战、传教、发掘或征服。作为新月沃地上一片富饶的粮仓,没有哪片土地像巴勒斯坦那样,成为宗教旅游与虔诚信仰、朝圣与殖民的焦点。(Matar 2013: 913)

For over two millennia, Palestine has been the destination of the three monotheisms. While some of these men and women offered sacrifices, collected relics, and prayed, others studied fought, preached, excavated or conquered. A rich granary in the Fertile Crescent, no land has been as much the focus of religious tourism and piety, pilgrimage and colonization as Palestine. (Matar 2013: 913)

现代欧洲的旅行者、朝圣者、作家、制图师、地理学家、圣经东方学家和浪漫的寻访者，并没有历史、地理或考古学上的证据，也没有充分理由把现代的巴勒斯坦称为"迦南"。他们顺理成章地沿用了古代的巴勒斯坦地图，这些地图源自一千五百多年的古典时代与拜占庭基督教传统。他们还依赖于这片土地在希腊化、罗马、早期基督教、拜占庭以及阿拉伯伊斯兰时期所积累的地名记忆与遗产。

Modern European travellers, pilgrims, writers, cartographers, geographers, biblical Orientalists and romance seekers had no historical, geographic or archaeological evidence or good reason to refer to modern Palestine as ‘Cana’an’. They logically reproduced ancient maps of Palaestina, maps derived from more than a millennium and a half of Classical Antiquity and Byzantine Christianity. They also relied on the Hellenistic, Roman, early Christian, Byzantine and Arab Islamic toponymic memory and heritage of the country.

在17至18世纪，欧洲的浪漫主义东方学与“圣经地理学”对巴勒斯坦的兴趣急剧增长，关于巴勒斯坦历史地理的大量著作开始出现，不仅有拉丁文本，也有欧洲各国的本土语言版本。其中包括荷兰东方学家、制图学家和语文学家哈德里安努斯·雷兰杜斯（Hadrianus Relandus，1676‒1718）的著作。他是一位杰出的学者，对巴勒斯坦的圣经地理研究做出了持久的贡献（Pailin 1984: 212）。他的工作主要具有语文学与神学的性质，包括用拉丁文写成的《希伯来古代遗迹》（Antiquitates Sacrae veterum Hebraeorum，1708）和《旧约文献所阐明的巴勒斯坦》（Palaestina ex monumentis Veteris illustrata，1714），书中他试图描述“圣经中的巴勒斯坦”的地理状况。

In the 17th and 18th centuries European romantic Orientalist and ‘biblical geography’ of Palestine increased phenomenally and voluminous publications on the historical geography of Palestine began to appear not only in Latin but in vernacular European languages. This included the works of Hadrianus Relandus (1676‒1718), a prominent Dutch Orientalist, cartographer and philologist who made a lasting contribution to research on the scriptural geography of Palestine (Pailin 1984: 212). His work was mainly philological-theological in character and included Antiquitates Sacrae veterum Hebraeorum (1708) and Palaestina ex monumentis Veteris illustrata (1714), written in Latin, in which he sought to describe the geography of ‘biblical Palestine’.