How do you know which way to go when your smartphone has no service? Just this week, Cathy and I faced this problem as we drove through Glacier National Park with some friends. So, we used something I hadn’t used in years. An actual roadmap.
Amazingly, the roadmap worked! We made our way just fine. (Back to the service of our smartphone satellites.)
It struck me how we don’t have a GPS for our understanding of Bible lands. Instead, we have great maps in a wonderful variety.
Do you use maps when you read your Bible? Here’s why you should.
A good, modern atlas can help you understand the biblical lands. The value of maps to Bible study dates back centuries. (For good reason.)
Eusebius, the Bishop of Caesarea, wrote the first historical geography of Bible lands around A.D. 325. Having lived in what was then called “Palestine” all his life, Eusebius was well-suited to the task of writing his Onomasticon (“a collection of names”). You can still get a copy today, finally in English.
A couple of centuries later, the mosaic Medeba Map on the floor of a 6th-century church offered a perspective of the Holy Land to travelers. I’m still amazed at the details of the map, which you can see in modern Madaba, Jordan, in spite of the fact that cartographers in centuries past had no satellite images to work from. (Or smartphones!)
Think about the value of maps in your own life.
When studying the Bible, all of these play a critical role in our accurate understanding of biblical events. For example:
I have a study Bible from years ago that gave great attention to the text but little thought to the maps in the back.
Even a Study Bible that has a good set of maps really isn’t enough. Why? Because they give only a 35,000-foot view of Bible lands. It’s like trying to understand a city’s details from an airplane.
In other words, if you want to glean the tremendous value Bible maps can add to your Bible study, you need to take the next step.
Get an atlas.
The Bible is replete with geographical information, not as a guidebook for travelers or a textbook on geography, but often almost incidental to the message. Yet without the geography, that message is often obscured or vitiated for the uninformed reader.—The Sacred Bridge, p. 9
Good atlases provide more than maps. They show you the importance of geography as it relates to history, archaeology, topography, and climate.
There are a number of excellent atlases available today. Although I could suggest more than these, I’ll recommend only three—covering various levels of study. I own and enjoy all three.
This is a condensed version of Dr. Rasmussen’s larger atlas—the first atlas I seriously read and used—and its text is excellent. Dr. Rasmussen served as Dean of the Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem for years. This “essential” atlas is ideal for beginners, as it introduces readers to the biblical terrain, roads, and climate—as well as to the benefits of geography in Bible study and in particular biblical events. You can pick it up here.
Produced by a Christian professor who has lived in Israel for many years, this new Bible atlas has 85 full-page color maps with biblical events marked on enhanced satellite imagery, accompanied by geographical and historical commentary (see the image above). I’m amazed at the detail of these maps, as well as how they inform every significant biblical event. You can pick it up here.
The atlas also comes with digital versions of the map, perfect if you want to search your atlas in Evernote. (That’s what I do.)
This atlas is pretty dense and scholarly, but it makes excellent use of maps, original sources, and biblical languages. It’s also expensive, but I always appreciate the detail and insights it gives me every time I open it.
There is enough in this atlas to give you a lifetime of beneficial study. You can pick it up here.
The lands of the Bible will give you much more than you think. The more you understanding the lands of the Bible, the better you’ll understand the Bible itself.
I promise you, it’s well worth your time.
Tell me what you think: Have you read a Bible atlas? To leave a comment, just click here.