Maps

Oh, how I love maps.

Seriously. Ask my wife - I'm a very cheap date. For fun, we sometimes go to Barnes & Noble just to browse and invariably, if Joy loses me, she knows exactly where to find me: in front of the map section, gazing longingly at the two-dimensional representation of some part of the world.

I suppose I could attribute it to my love of travelling. But by the same token, I think my love of travelling stems as much from an obsession with geography as it does from anything else. I could have a blast on a vacation where all I did was drive and drive and drive, enjoying the scenery while paying attention to the changes in topography and vegetation, committing them to memory to create in my head something of a virtual map of some part of the world. I know that's wierd. But it's true. And it's me. Now that you know my deepest, darkest secret, I suppose it's time for me to show you where I'm going with this post.

This past year's Old and New Testament courses surveyed events which covered a large span of time and geography. So, one of my favorite parts of the studies were the opportunity to - you guessed it - study MAPS! And lots of them. Big ones, little ones, regional maps and localized maps. And maps showing key cities during different time periods. A significant component of each test was even an exercise of our ablity to identify the locations of many of those sites. What better excuse to spend hours looking at maps, under the guise of "studying"? I was - quite literally - in map heaven.

Along the way, I stumbled upon the following very useful resource for biblical maps: The Bible Atlas Online, by the Access Foundation. It's a collection of very easy-to-read maps which can help enhance one's reading of scripture.
For example, this map showing Paul's third missionary journey puts his travels in perspective, and helps show the locations of the churches to whom he wrote his letters (which we now include as part of the canon of Scripture).

It's definitely a site worth bookmarking.