Better Bible maps

Our grandchildren and I enjoy Google Earth. We like to zero in on different places we are interested in. Sometimes two of my grandsons will ask where Grandma is on one of her mission trips. I tell them to buckle up for the plane ride there, and we fly via Google Earth. Great fun!

Today the ESV Bible blog has an interesting post on locating Bible places on Google Earth maps:

A Google Earth community has developed a file for Google Earth (and Google Maps) that shows the locations of about 200 places mentioned in the Bible. The community is going for accuracy: they try to pinpoint the locations of the ruins of ancient cities instead of using the locations of modern cities with ancient names.

We want to assist these efforts where we can. To that end, here is a comprehensive list of place names in the ESV aligned (mostly) to the names the community is using. This file also lists verse references for every occurrence of the place in the ESV text. This file is licensed under a Creative Commons-Attribution-ShareAlike license. The Bible contains 1181 place names (though some places have more than one name and some names refer to more than one place); the Google Earth community has already identified about 200 of them. They’re well on their way.

Head over there if you’d like to help them out, or just download the .kmz file if you have Google Earth on your computer.

Have fun!