Thursday, December 13, 2007

Biblical Places: Locating on a map and in the Bible

As I have been soliciting suggestions for my upcoming BibleTech08 presentation on Digital Resources for Biblical Mapping, one request was made that a person would like to be able to click on a place on a map and see all the instances where it is mentioned in the Bible. Here are some ways to do just that.

  • Using the map module in BibleWorks7, right click on a place name, and then click on that place name in the popup. This causes a search to run in the BW7 main module.
  • Using the OpenBible.info Bible Atlas, one can find the information displayed in the graphic above. If you use GoogleEarth and the OpenBible.info downloadable kmz file which contains all the biblical information, then you can fly around in GoogleEarth, click on a place and get the information displayed like this:
  • There is a similar downloadable file from the GoogleEarth community that provides information from the ISBE or Eastons when you click on a place name instead of the references.
  • A similar online option is to use BibleMap.org. This one works through the biblical text. Clicking on a hyperlinked location name, the place is located on a GoogleMap, and then clicking on that place name will bring open the entry from the ISBE. It looks like this:
There are lots of other ways to get from a place mentioned in a biblical text to an accompanying map, but the best way to find biblical references starting by looking at a map location is the GoogleEarth with the OpenBible file. [The maps in Logos do not really lend themselves to this kind of work. I have created a resource collection of "Maps," and so I conduct searches on that collection to generate the list of appropriate maps.]

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