How to Add New Dimensions to Your Study with Bible Maps

Today, we’re going to look at a familiar, but not often well-used tool: Bible Maps!

We’ll dig into this coming resource, and look at:

• Why Bible maps can be a powerful tool for understanding more than just geography.
• How to utilize a map alongside other approaches to Bible study.
• Where and how to find good FREE Bible map resources.

Making the Colorful Pages in Your Bible Useful

By learning how to use Bible maps as a part of your approach to Bible study, you will definitely broaden and deepen the paths and approaches to exploring what you read. You’ll be able to connect more and more holistically to the passages AND begin to intuitively understand contextual ideas without even needing to dig for them.

At the end, I’ll give you a bunch of FREE resources so that you can be equipped for studying with maps beyond whatever you may have in your printed Bible.

So, let’s get started.

The Big Ideas and Helpful Highlights

Why Bible Maps?

This parallel, from Wayne Stiles, is our starting point for understanding the usefulness of maps:

• When traveling, road maps give you insight into the distance between locations, which roads to take, and what points of interest to look for.
• Topographical maps use contour lines in which each line represents the same elevation. This representation gives you an understanding of the “lay of the land”—the topography of a given terrain. It’s much more informative to see a topographical map than a flat map with no contours and curves.
• A physical map reveals locations of rivers, mountains, lakes, seas—basically the physical features of an area.

These same things have an impact on our understanding of what we read in the Bible. (These examples continue the parallel and are also from Wayne Stiles.)

• Highways—There was a major highway that ran the full length of Israel; this is the primary reason Israel had interactions with surrounding nations. HUGE importance.
• Topography—Jerusalem, Megiddo, and many other sites had a significant military advantage because of their topography.
• Physical Barriers—Rivers, seas, and lakes—and climate—all played a major role in shaping biblical events. Understanding their significance gives a greater understanding into the biblical narrative than you would have otherwise. [sic]

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The rest of this post (it was too long for show notes!), all the visuals, and oodles of links to free map resources are here on my website. Enjoy!

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