Heterologias

As in the scriptural story itself, the precise location of the promised land remained vague, and for a time the desert lands of Arab Palestine seemed too far a stretch for the imagination. Alberto Gerchunoff was one of the pioneering Zionists who fled the steppes of Russia for the pampas of Argentina, to help found there, with earnest Argentine government encouragement, the Jewish settlement of "Moisesville." "Argentina is the Promised Land reached after a New Exodus," he declared in his book Los Gauchos Judios (The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas). "Here, in Argentina," he exulted, "we will work hard, we will eat the bread made with our own wheat, and will be farmers like the old time Jews, the ones in tne Bible."
If Palestine seemed too alien for these Europeans, it also brought with it another problem: it was already inhabited, by an Arab population of hundreds of thousands of people whose families had lived there for centuries. The small community of Jews who already resided in Jerusalem, like the more sizable Jewish enclave in Baghdad, had long ago made its accommodations with Arab culture and strongly opposed Zionist pretensions that might, in arousing Arab antipathies, threaten their relatively stable existence.
In the early years of the Zionist movement, two rabbis from Vienna were sent on a scouting mission to Palestine to estimate the possibilities of creating a Jewish state there. The rabbis wired back, "The bride is beautiful but she is married to another man." But for the more zealous, and focused, Zionists, this was no fatal obstacle. After all, in the very same chapter of Genesis in which the Lord first calls Abraham to the promised land, there is the explicit acknowledgement that "the Canaanite was then in the land."
Nevertheless, the Lord immediately thereafter appears to Abraham and declares to him, "Unto thy seed will I give this land." In the next chapter the sequence is repeated, and elaborated. "And the Canaanite and the Perizzite dwelled then in the land." And the Lord said to Abraham, "Lift up now thine eyes, and look from the place where thou art northward, and southward, and eastward, and westward: for all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed forever." The biblical message could not be any clearer: the imagined land took precedence over the inhabited land.

David F. Noble, Beyond the Promised Land: The Movement and the Myth, Toronto, Between The Lines, 2005, pp. 41-42

Que o Deus dos Céus, criador de todas as coisas, seja o detentor da verdade é, feitas as contas, lógico e ponto de fé; mas a afirmação de que um homem nunca se engana está eivada da doutrina burguesa do Iluminismo dos enciclopedistas e livre pensadores, incarnado pela deusa Razão que ilumina a humanidade.