Bible Geocoding on Google Earth
Holy land tour companies routinely promote themselves to Christians with the promise that “you will never read your Bible the same again.” Having been to Israel and Jordan I can tell you that for once, the hype is true. Traveling throughout the lands where the events recorded in Scripture happened, you get a perspective of how far (or close) things are to each other, the topography, the climate, so many things that help you form a more accurate picture in your mind as you study the Bible.
You might not have the bucks or time to make that trip right now, but thanks to the diligent efforts of the folks at OpenBible.info, you can do the next best thing. They have created a “mashup” database that indexes every identifiable place name in the ESV Bible in Google Earth. Google Earth is an amazing free program that puts satellite and aerial imagery (more and more of it hi-res) on a 3D globe that you can browse, zoom in on, and even fly across. If you have Google Earth, simply download and install the .kmz file from OpenBible and you can open the Bible place index. Double-clicking on a place name flies you right there. After the download links, I’ve provided some screen shots of some of my first journeys with this wonderful tool.
Download Google Earth | Download the Bible Geocode database | Geocode info
Jerusalem - Mount Moriah (click for full size 811kb)
Ephesus ruins (click for full size 645kb)
Philippi ruins (click for full size 638kb)
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May 20th, 2007 at 11:52 pm
Very cool tool, I especially liked the Philppi map man, I’ve always read about the region in commentaries and historical surveys but this map really fills out the topography of the area visually, thanks for the pointer.
May 21st, 2007 at 12:39 am
That is an awesome mashup, Mark. One of the more useful ones I’ve seen lately, and there will be more and more of them. I think the whole field of Google-Maps/Earth inspired mashups (Twittervision comes to mind) represent a higher order of the art form. Geolocation data will be available by and for practically all the services we use now that are location-specific.
May 21st, 2007 at 12:42 am
I agree, these truly are amazing tools. If you use BibleWorks, you should check out the blog on the OpenBible site linked above. He has a post with a link to a guy who figured out how to make this Google Earth Bible atlas work directly from inside BibleWorks! I’m definitely going to try that out.
May 21st, 2007 at 12:43 am
I was inspired by this post to fire it up and go see what Hezekiah’s Tunnel looks like.
I do a lot of geodata and geocoding at work, and our office has a Google Earth Pro license, so I’m always checking to see what features they are adding.
May 21st, 2007 at 11:19 am
Thanks for the link Mark, http://www.biblemap.org is a similar website where you can look up any verse in the Bible and it gives links to the various towns and places mentioned and you can zoom in on the Google map