By the 1800s and 1900s the Promised Land was neglected and run down.The prophetic description of what would happen to the God forsaken Promised Land by the Old Testament prophet, Isaiah, in Chapter 33 verse 9 had well and truly been realised.“The earth mourneth and languisheth: Lebanon is ashamed and hewn down: Sharon is like a wilderness; and Bashan and Carmel shake off their fruits.”The Jews remained, and some other people, but mostly what is modern day Israel was a wasteland. It remained a wasteland until the late 19th Century when something changed. I’ll talk about that in another programme.By 1893 the population of Israel, the home today to nearly 10 million people, had a population of about 153,031 people. This was made up of Jews (who were the majority), Arabs (who were the next most populous group) and non-Muslims (people from a very wide range of other races and countries, as you heard in my last programme). How long those Muslims had been living there is an important question. I’ll talk about that in a later programme.The exact breakdown of people living in the Holy Lands at the end of the Nineteenth Century, the 1890’s, was 59,431 Jews, 55,823 Muslims and 37,852 Christians and other. The number of Jews living there was remarkable because the Ottoman Empire had been under constant pressure, for centuries, to stop or at the least severely restrict Jews from elsewhere entering the Holy Lands from other parts of the Middle East, Africa and Europe.Let’s have a look at the Holy Lands through the eyes of tourists who visited there during this time from the time of the Romans, after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD, to the 1890’s, including the famous author, Mark Twain.Tag words: Promised Land; Old Testament; Isaiah