“No tree in God's garden was as beautiful as him"
Religious tourism and extinction of the Lebanon's cedar forest in accounts by Protestant missionaries in the Middle East
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5433/1984-3356.2023v16n31p114-142Keywords:
Lebanon Cedar, Environmental history, Protestant Missionaries, PilgrimsAbstract
This article, from the perspective of environmental history, seeks to demonstrate how religious tourism, in the nineteenth century, became one of the factors that contributed to the devastation of the cedars of Mount Lebanon and to establish the connection between biblical literalism and the defense of the preservation of the forest of native cedars threatened with extinction, according to reports of naturalist travelers of that time. Finally, it is intended to answer the following question: why some biblical passages about the nature of the cedar forest on Mount Lebanon, a sacred place of pilgrimage for Christians, were put in check by science? To clarify this investigation, diaries of naturalist travelers, reports of Protestant missionaries in Syria and the press were consulted.
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