A Good Atlas

What can a map teach us about the Bible? Today, Stephen Nichols explains how understanding Scripture’s geography can deepen our grasp of redemptive history.

Welcome back to another episode of 5 Minutes in Church History. On this episode, we are talking about, not history, but a crucial part of history, geography. And we're going to start not with church history, but biblical geography, which again, is essential to understanding biblical history. And I've had this book since college, and I loved it in college, and I continue to pull it off the shelf and look at it. It is The MacMillan Bible Atlas, and this is the completely revised third edition. I was always drawn to the maps from the very first Bible I had and the maps in the back then to atlases. And when I got this as a textbook, I pretty much devoured it. In the preface, the author's state, “Historical geography, putting the Bible on the map, is an attempt to understand the biblical events in their ecological and sociocultural context. It is an essential component of biblical studies if we truly desire to empathize with the ancient people whose religious experience we claim to share. To truly enter into the biblical story, the narrative, we need to enter into the history and the geography.”

The editors go on to say this wonderful description of the land of Palestine, “To the north, the winter bound snow covered mountains of the Lebanon, to the south, the semi-arid Negev, to the east, the wide desert, and to the west, the Great Sea. These are the natural borders of Palestine. Within their confines was enacted the history of Israel from the days of the patriarchs on. A look at the landscape, its roads, its ancient settlements, and the country's surrounding it are a prerequisite for a proper understanding of biblical history.” The editors also point out, “The Bible does not, as a rule, give many descriptions of settlements their location and character. These matters were taken for granted then. Only a few verses diverge from this rule,” and they go on to mention the site of Shiloh as very specifically located in Judges 21:19. Then they ask, “Why did the biblical writer give such detail to the location of a site as famous in ancient times as Shiloh? Probably because Shiloh had been destroyed by the Philistines. And early in the period of the monarchy when this story was written down, it lay in ruins.”

So, they go on to say that they need to reconstruct the ancient map of the holy land. And they do this by an analysis of the history, character and general topography of the individual site in light of available sources. They look at identifications of places in later sources past biblical times. They also look at the preservation of the ancient name with possible modifications as the name transferred from Hebrew to Aramaic and in some cases Arabic. And then finally, it's the archeological examination of the site under consideration. So, that is the task of these archeologists and cartographers as they give us the lands of the Bible in a book.
Well, I didn't have it available in my days as a college student, but if I did, I would've also devoured another atlas. And it is the ESV Bible Atlas. I heartily recommend it. There's a smaller concise edition, but you should get the big one and put it on your shelf and have fun exploring these lands of the Bible. The first paragraph of this atlas, the editors tell us, “The land in which the Israelites settled is important in its location because it sits at the crossroads of the ancient near East. It serves as the land bridge between Asia and Africa, and in ancient times, it lay between the two great civilizations of the near East, Egypt and Mesopotamia. Anytime these great empires interacted with communication or militarily, they went through Palestine. It truly was a land bridge.”

Well, there you have it, a good atlas. These days we don't use atlases, of course, we just punch things in our phone or our car screen takes over. But in the old days, in summertime when we would travel, we had our atlases to get us there. As you travel through the pages of the Bible, now you have your Bible atlas. I'm Steve Nichols and thanks for listening to 5 Minutes in Church History.