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.

Not so, the proponents of “Judea” and “Samaria” argue back. It simply isn’t true that Yehudah and Shomron were rarely used in post-biblical times. They continued to be the standard Hebrew words for the hill country of central Palestine, the biblical heartland that Jews yearned to return to, throughout Jewish history. Rather, it is “West Bank” that is the linguistic interloper—and a senseless one too, since most of the territory it refers to is far from the banks of the Jordan, from which it is separated by the Jordan Valley. The term was invented by a Hashemite monarchy ruling east of the Jordan River for the purpose of justifying its annexation of Judea and Samaria and denying the historical Jewish connection to them, and it is it, not “Judea” and “Samaria,” that politicizes geography.

Neither side is totally right. In point of fact, there is little basis for saying that “West Bank,” as Senator Cotton has stated, is a “politically charged,” anti-Jewish term. When it first came into use, it did so because the kingdom of Jordan had no better alternative. There simply were no indigenous Arabic place names equivalent to Hebrew’s Yehudah and Shomron, since the Arab inhabitants of Palestine, let alone the wider Arab world, never thought of these territories as discrete geographic entities that required names of their own. The Arabs who lived in them identified with the cities, towns, and villages they came from, not with a larger region, and the administrative districts they belonged to were named in Jordanian times for their capitals, such as the district of Jenin, the district of Nablus, and so on, with “West Bank” seeming the best way of referring to them collectively.

There is nothing particularly surprising about this when one considers that the notion of two distinct regions, one to Jerusalem’s north and one to its south and including it, goes back to the Bible and its account of a unified Davidic and Solomonic kingdom that later split into warring northern and southern halves. The longstanding rivalry between Judah and Israel, or between Judea and Samaria, as they later came to be known, helped shape Jewish and Christian conceptions of the geography of Palestine. It played no role, however, in the Quran or in Islam, which never taught its followers to think of Palestinian geography in this way.

Indeed, the fact that the opposition Judah/Israel, or Judea/Samaria, is part of Judeo-Christian and not just Jewish tradition had a result that, in our own increasingly post-Christian age, few people on either side of the dispute seem to be aware of. This is that, far from being uniquely Jewish, “Judea” and “Samaria” were, until the mid-20th-century, the standard Christian and European way of referring to what today would be called the southern and northern West Bank.

I will cite only a few examples of this, but I assure you that they are entirely representative of the usage of their age and of all other ages from the start of the Christian era.

• From the 1st-century CE, the Jewish historian Joseph Flavius, writing in Greek for a non-Jewish audience:

Now, as to the country of Samaria, it lies between Judea and Galilee . . . and is entirely of the same nature with Judea; for both countries are made up of hills and valleys, and are moist enough for agriculture, and are very fruitful.

• From the 12th-century German pilgrim Theodericus’ Libellus de Locus Sanctus (“Little Book of Holy Places”):

On the west Judea extends to the Great [Mediterranean] Sea, on the south it is delimited by the mountains of Arabia and Egypt, to the east its boundary is the River Jordan, and to the north it is bordered by Samaria.

• From the 14th-century The Travels of Sir John Mandeville:

Jerusalem is in the land of Judea, and it is clept Judea, for that Judas Maccabeus was king of that country [sic!]; and it marcheth eastward to the kingdom of Arabia; on the south side to the land of Egypt; on the west side to the Great Sea.

• From the French author FranÇois-Réné Chateaubriand’s Itinéraire de Paris á Jérusalem (1811):

The plain of Sharon is bordered on the east by the mountains of Judea and Samaria.

• From Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad (1869):

We camped at Jenin before night, and got up and started again at one o’clock in the morning, [and] came to the singularly terraced and unlovely hills that betrayed that we were out of Galilee and into Samaria at last.

So, rested and refreshed, we fell into line and filed away over the barren mountains of Judea.

One might also observe that old maps of Palestine commonly divided its central mountain range into “Judea” and “Samaria,” and that a “district of Samaria” was one of the six administrative districts of British Mandate Palestine. (There was not a district of Judea, whose territory was divided between a district of Jerusalem and a district of Hebron.)

• Finally, there is this from U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181:

The boundary of the hill country of Samaria and Judea starts on the Jordan River at the Wadi Malih southeast of Beisan and then runs due west to meet the Beisan-Jericho road and then follows the western side of that road in a northwesterly direction to the junction of the boundaries of the sub-districts of Beisan, Nablus, and Jenin.

In case you’re rubbing your eyes, yes, you’re reading part of the momentous United Nations resolution of November 29, 1947 that called for the partition of Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state.

Whether it would be politically wise for Congress to adopt the Cotton-Tenney “Recognizing Judea and Samaria Act” is another matter. If it does, though, it will not have been party to a campaign to revive archaic biblical language. It will rather be restoring part of the accepted geographic terminology for Palestine that English and many other languages used as a matter of course up to the 1948–49 Arab-Israeli war. The proponents of “Judea” and “Samaria” have more on their side than they realize.