The World Bible: Interactive Bible Map

How to read the map

On a phone or tablet: drag with one finger to move around, pinch to zoom, and drag with two fingers to turn and tilt the map. Tap a marker or a face for the story there.

Press Space or Play and the story runs by itself, and the camera follows it (switch Follow off to look around on your own). Or drag along the timeline yourself. Scroll or pinch on the timeline to zoom into an era, or double-click an era to fill the bar with it. To find a person, a place or a book of the Bible, use the search (/).

The arrows on the caption step through the story one moment at a time (so do [ and ]), and the link button copies a link that opens the map at that moment.

The colored line behind each person is the road they just traveled, and the arrows point the way they went. Click a name in the panel to follow that person around.

The colored washes are the kingdoms and empires of the day, and they move. The tribes receive their land, David’s kingdom tears in two, and one empire after another rolls across the map. The names change with them, so Canaan becomes Israel and Judah, and later Judea, Samaria and Galilee.

The land itself is drawn from satellite elevation data, so the Dead Sea sits at the bottom of its rift, Hermon towers over Galilee, and the Nile is the only green thing for hundreds of miles. Zoom in and the great cities are standing where they stood.

Gold markers open a 3D reconstruction of the place. Inside, drag to look around, pick a viewpoint, or press T for a guided tour.

Or press F and let the film do the work. It follows the story from Creation to Revelation, moves the camera for you, and stops in each 3D world along the way. There’s also a map-only version if you’d rather skip the 3D scenes.

A note on dates and places

Dates follow a traditional chronology, with the Exodus around 1446 BC and the crucifixion in AD 30. Genesis gives no dates before Abraham, so neither does the map. A lot of sites are still argued over, Eden, Mount Sinai and the place where the sea was crossed among them. The map uses the traditional locations and tells you when it’s doing that. Borders are drawn roughly. The 3D worlds are reconstructions, built from the Bible and from archaeology.

Elevation: SRTM (NASA), GMTED2010 (USGS) and ETOPO1 (NOAA), through the Terrain Tiles on AWS Open Data. Coastlines, rivers and lakes: Natural Earth (public domain). Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, sometimes shortened.