map – Soul Liberty

We have come a long way from the days when you had to choose between an unwieldy Bible atlas or else limit yourself to a handful of maps in the back of your everyday Bible. With the proliferation of free online mapping tools hosted by Google, Yahoo, MapQuest, and others, we have the ability to overlay practically any information we want onto satellite imagery or simple region outlines. Naturally, some industrious Christians have incorporated some of the information from that old atlas into interactive maps.

One of these is BibleMap.org which does a great job of helping you explore the places mentioned in a particular chapter of the Bible that you may be reading or studying at the time. Another approach is that of OpenBible.info which allows users to download place marks for Google Earth, either for the entire Bible or individual books. One limitation of each of these is that it is either difficult or impossible to see every place all at once without downloading additional software.

That’s going to change right here, right now. Thanks to a powerful tool called Tableau Public recently made free for limited use on open-source data, we can download a file from a site like OpenBible.info and make some interesting comparisons. We can vary the colors and sizes of each place mark, filter for a particular place or book, and much more that can help us discover new insights or rediscover old ones. For example, the New Testament more heavily references northern regions and … wait a second! Since when was Spain referenced in the Bible? And, just where are Gog and Magog, anyway?

Here are a few tips for exploring the information. Click the legend to show only New or Old Testament references. Hover over a place mark to see more info, or click on it to see all the references associated with that place. Click-and-drag to select more than one place. Use the arrow icon at the bottom to allow for zooming and panning around the map. Choose one or more books for other filter options. Click the name of a place in the data sheet to reveal its location on the map. Most of all, have fun seeing the Bible in a whole new way! Note: the map may take a while to load.

There are a few things to bear in mind, however. First, the country divisions on this map correlate to present boundaries, not the boundaries as they were in the past. Bodies of water or whole countries are shown as a single place mark, which can make things somewhat difficult to interpret. I did not compile the original data, but as near as I can tell it is limited to explicit references of a place by name; it does not include verses which describe an event which took place in a particular location but doesn’t mention the place by name. Lastly, places mentioned during a time period before Noah’s flood are not shown since the global flood would have reshaped the landscape enough to make its location impossible to accurately identify.

View Paul’s Life and Journeys in a larger map

While you explore the map above, below are some observations to take note of.

His friend Barnabus followed him everywhere until their dispute about John-Mark( Acts 14:26-28, 15:36-41). Barnabus (along with others) is later rebuked by Paul for withdrawing himself from Gentile converts ( Galatians 2:11-20).
He never seems to travel alone, meaning that his missionary journeys weren’t necessarily just Paul’s journeys as we normally refer to them.
Each of his three missionary journeys lasted no more than three years. We tend to remember him as the simply a missionary when in fact only 9 years of his roughly 65 year life span were spent on mission trips. The rest of his life was spent either as a Pharisee or as a Christian preaching in a small handful of cities.
He didn’t go on first trip untill he was around 40 years old.
The routes he took on mission trips brought him back to some of the same places multiple times. Paul was intentional about training the new converts by keeping in contact through letters and doing follow-up visits.
It’s easy to assume he spent a lot of time in the places that are the subject of his epistles. In fact, he only spent a relatively short period of time in Galatia, Ephesus, Phillipi, Collosae, and Thessalonica.
Paul visited both Tyre and Sidon on separate occasions. These once-great cities had a prominent place in Old Testament prophecy, which predicted they would fall. They were both destroyed, and little is mentioned of them in the New Testament other than as a warning to others.

If the Lord has shown you something interesting that’s not in this list, we’d love for you to tell us about it!

Source info: Biblestudy.org (not affiliated with this website)