Israel Road Maps Now Viewable in Google Earth

Google Earth is a great mapping tool. One longtime deficiency that indirectly affected its value for biblical studies was that there were no road maps for Israel. This has just recently been remedied. To see the roads, enable "Roads" in the Layers menu. A couple ways that it helps:

• It makes it easier to figure out where you are/were when you are/were traveling in Israel.
• You can apply map overlays to compare ancient and modern roadways. In the graphic above I have done just that. Of course the modern maps of the ancient roadways are somewhat imprecise, but this should allow greater clarity. Since the transparency of map overlays can be adjusted in GoogleEarth, you should at least be able to see in the graphic that the ancient north/south trunk road is a major north/south road still today.

(HT: GoogleEarth blog)