When we read our Bibles, it is so important to remember that these are real stories about real people in real places. They are not myths or legends. So when I learned this week on the ESV blog that a website called OpenBible.Info has “geocoded” the Bible, I was thrilled.

Actually, I have no idea what “geocoding” is, but it sounds cool. Apparently, it has to do with integrating the names of Biblical places with sophisticated map software, such as Google Earth. The result is that you can look at a map of the region and see all the places in a given book. For instance, here is the map from the book of Jonah:

For my geography-challenged friends, the blue stuff in the middle is the Mediterranean Sea. Africa is all brown at the bottom, Italy and Greece are green towards the top, Spain on the top left, and Israel is be just a tad to the right of Joppa.

Isn’t it helpful to see how God told Jonah to go preach to Nineveh, but instead he went down to Joppa and jumped on a ship for Tarshish (the edge of the known world at the time)? Have fun exploring this new toy!

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