Explore where Old Testament events happened, how places connect, and how geography clarifies scripture.
Start here: pick an era in the left panel, or tap Study at the top for this week's reading — the map and right-hand panel fill in automatically.
Ur to the death of Herod · prepared by Taylor Halverson, Ph.D.
Two thousand years of Old Testament and intertestamental history laid on the land it happened on: 157 places, 53 journeys, 41 military campaigns, 124 events, 80 excavated objects, nineteen ancient peoples and thirteen eras, each drawn in real coordinates and tied to the verse that reports it, with the 52-week reading year mapped onto them.
Every scripture reference in the atlas — more than six hundred across places, events, journeys, campaigns, finds and the 52 weekly readings — was checked against book and chapter counts. Regnal dates follow Thiele’s synchronised chronology. Inscription dates, findspots and museum holdings were checked against published translations and museum records; disputed points — Samaria falling in 722 or 720, the figure on the Black Obelisk — are named as disputed.
Every route leg was checked against the coastline and stepped through real roads, rivers and caravan stations: none crosses water, and none runs more than about 200 km without a waystation — except the Arabian incense road, where the desert genuinely is that empty. Routes follow the historic network (Via Maris, the King’s Highway, the Euphrates road) but remain schematic, and kingdom outlines are approximate zones, not surveyed frontiers.
Walls, gates, valleys and the water system are drawn from the excavated and surveyed lines in four building phases — David, Solomon, Hezekiah, Nehemiah. Reconstructed stretches are named as such in the entry.
The map is the document; everything else is a way of asking a question about it. Thirteen eras run down the left and across the bottom, layers sit above the map, and the panel on the right holds whatever you last clicked.
The four eras after Malachi rest on different evidence from the rest of the atlas: 1–2 Maccabees, Josephus, Polybius, the papyri, coins and excavation rather than the Hebrew canon. Each era says which source carries it, and the entries name where a single ancient historian is the only witness.
Author · Teacher · Tour leader · Scripture scholar
Taylor Halverson is a scholar of scripture, educator, and learning-experience designer. He formerly taught entrepreneurship at the BYU Marriott School of Business and continues to help people find and act on useful ideas and tools.
He is the author and editor of more than fifty books and nearly a thousand articles and blog posts, and a builder of scripture study resources: the ScripturePlus app with Scripture Central, whose scripture YouTube channel he co-hosted to more than fifty million views, and BYU’s Virtual Scripture Group, whose team spent more than five years reconstructing New Testament Jerusalem in three dimensions. This atlas belongs to that same body of work — tools made so that ordinary readers can see what specialists see.
He leads tours to Israel and the Middle East, China, India, Central America, Europe, and the national parks of the American West, where he unfolds how geology, geography, civilization, and scriptural texts created our beautiful present day.
Two doctorates in two separate fields — the ancient world, and the design of learning. Both of them are in this tool.
Terms of use, refund policy & license.
This product is a Beta: an interactive atlas of places, finds, peoples, tours, campaigns and journeys across the Old Testament and intertestamental period, with accompanying essays and reference material, published by Taylor Halverson, Ph.D. ("Publisher"). It is a teaching aid and historical model, not a survey document — see the How to use it and Accuracy notes elsewhere in this panel for what that means.
Publisher grants the purchaser or recipient a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable license to view and use this product for personal study, teaching, and classroom use. Redistribution of the product file itself, or extraction of its map data, essays, or illustrations for republication, requires Publisher’s prior written permission. Third-party components (typefaces, code libraries, map and imagery sources) remain under their own licenses; see THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md and the Credits & licences tab.
Scripture quotations are from the American Standard Version (1901), which is in the public domain worldwide; no permission is required to reproduce it, and none is claimed here beyond what this license already grants for the product as a whole.
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Because this is a Beta reconstruction of disputed and debated ancient geography and chronology, Publisher makes no warranty that any specific dating, identification, or interpretation shown will not be revised in a later edition. The product is provided “as is” for its stated teaching purpose.
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