My family has been reading through the Psalms together for the past few months, and the other day we read Psalm 83. Reading like a Who's Who of hostility, this psalm lists "Edom and the Ishmaelites", "Moab and the Hagrites," "Gebal, Ammon, and Amalek," "Philistia with the inhabitants of Tyre", and "Even Assyria" in the space of a few verses.

In an attempt to give my family a sense of who these various enemies of Israel were, I opened the Accordance Bible Atlas and overlaid the Divided Kingdoms region layer. I clicked the plus icon to magnify that zone so that it filled my entire workspace, and then had one of my children read the list of enemies again. As she read each name, I pointed out its location on the map, so that my family could clearly see that Israel was surrounded by all these nations. I summarized by saying, "You see, it's not that the psalmist is paranoid; they really were all out to get Israel!"

Showing all of these ancient nations naturally raised the question of where these places are today, so I merely switched the region layer pop-up from "Divided Kingdoms" to "Modern Nations" to show that Edom, Moab, and Ammon are now part of modern Jordan, ancient Philistia is now part of modern Israel, and ancient Tyre is in modern Lebanon.

This kind of geographical orientation was incredibly easy to do, and it helped make our discussion of the psalm much more engaging. If you're not using the Atlas as an impromptu teaching tool, you definitely should be!

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Our Graphics Bundle combines our interactive Bible Atlas, Bible Lands PhotoGuide, and interactive Timeline at a significant savings, which is probably why it's one of our best-selling products. To get the most out of this bundle, I recommend linking the Atlas and PhotoGuide in your preferences. Doing so will enable you to double-click a place name on the map to look it up in the PhotoGuide, giving you detailed information about that site along with spectacular and illustrative photographs.

To do this, simply open the Preferences panel and click the Map Tab Display settings. You'll then see a variety of settings you can tweak. In the section labeled Hypertext, select PhotoGuide 3 from the pop-up menu labeled Default tool.

That's all there is to it! From now on any new map you view will be linked to the PhotoGuide. Start double-clicking place names of interest and see what you discover.

Over the last two weeks I've been talking about how truly flexible the Accordance Bible Atlas is. Far from offering a series of static maps, the Atlas lets you create your own unique maps by combining various layers of information. I've also spent some time showing how you can customize these layers to eliminate label conflicts and get just the look you want. Today, I want to explain the concept of "extra sites" to you and show how you can use them to create even more customized maps.

If you've ever selected a place name in a Bible text and then clicked the Map button on the Resource palette to find that site, you've already seen an example of an "extra" site. The site name you searched for appears on the map even if it is not included in the currently displayed site layer. That's why we call it an extra site.

You can add extra sites to a map by amplifying like this, by searching for them using the Find button of the Map window, or by shift-clicking a site name that you already see on the map. If you want to remove an extra site name, simply click to select it and press the delete key on your keyboard. If that site name does not appear in your current site layer, it will disappear completely. If it does appear in your current site layer, then it will appear as part of that layer and will no longer be highlighted in red.

Now here's where the shift-click trick described in the previous paragraph becomes really cool. Let's say you have a site layer like Major Biblical Sites displayed, but you want to create a map which shows only a few specific site names. I did this for the current project I'm working on. In explaining the expression "from Dan to Beer-sheba," I wanted to create a map which showed only the sites Dan, Beer-sheba, and Jerusalem (as a point of reference).

Starting with Major Biblical Sites, I shift-clicked the names of these three sites so that they would appear as extra site names. I then chose Convert to Custom Layer… from the Site Layer pop-up menu.

Standard Site Layers like Major Biblical Sites display sites which meet certain biblical and archaeological criteria. You can customize these layers by tweaking the criteria, as I showed in a previous post, but you can't specify the exact sites you want to appear. A Custom Site Layer lets you create a list of the exact sites you want to appear on the map. We install a couple of pre-defined custom site layers such as Philistine Cities and Seven Churches so you can see how they work.

The Convert to Custom Layer… command simply gives you an easy way to build a Custom Site Layer from all the extra site names which are displayed on a map. When you choose it, the following dialog box will open listing all the extra sites you had:

All you need to do is give this Custom Site Layer a name and click OK. You can also customize the font, scale, color, and kind of marker used. You'll then have a layer with just the sites you want.

From there it's a simple matter to copy and paste your map into Pages and dress it up even further.

Understand how extra sites and Custom Site Layers work and you'll be able to create custom maps quickly and easily.

Last week, I showed how the Accordance Bible Atlas lets you create custom maps that show information you won't normally find in a print atlas or a software program that offers only static maps. The final map I showed combined several layers of information, and a user pointed out that there were some places where the labels overlapped. So I followed up that post by showing how tweaking one of the Site layers eliminated all but one of the label conflicts. In yesterday's post, I showed how to eliminate that last conflict by removing one of the subregions of a Region Layer. But even that wasn't quite good enough, because the labels for Philistia and Judah, while not quite overlapping, are still unacceptably close.

Unlike the label for Simeon, which I could simply hide, these two labels are a vital part of what I'm trying to show with this map. So how do I resolve the conflict? The easiest way is simply to change the font.

You can change the font of all Region names on a map by selecting Set Map Display from the Display menu (or using the keyboard shortcut command-T). In the dialog box that appears, select Region names from the pop-up menu at the top.

You can then select a font that avoids the conflict. The font I was using, Papyrus, takes up a lot of horizontal space, but a font like Impact is more horizontally compact. And of course, using a different font can also give your map a radically different feel:

Once again, a simple change can make a huge difference in the look of your maps. And I've just scratched the surface of the flexibility the Atlas offers. There's still more which I'll cover in yet another post.

Last week, I pointed out how the Accordance Bible Atlas lets you create custom maps that show information you won't normally find in a print atlas or a software program that offers only static maps. The final map I showed combined several layers of information, and a user pointed out that there were some places where the labels overlapped. So I followed up that post by showing how tweaking one of the layers eliminated all but one of the label conflicts. In today's post, I want to show how to eliminate that last conflict.

In the map above, you can see that the name Beer-sheba conflicts with the label for the tribal territory of Simeon. Since Beer-sheba is an important site, and since Simeon was a minor tribe located entirely within the borders of Judah, one way to resolve the conflict is to remove Simeon from the Tribes of Israel region layer. To do this, select Define Region Layers… from the Region layer pop-up menu of the Atlas.

In the dialog that appears, select Tribes of Israel in the list of layers at the top left corner. In the bottom left corner of the dialog box, you'll see a description of the layer and a pop-up menu which lets you choose the various subregions. In the Tribes of Israel region, each tribal territory is a subregion you can modify individually. Select Simeon in this pop-up menu, and you can choose to hide the label for that subregion while showing its borders, or you can hide both the name and the drawing of the borders to hide the subregion altogether. Here's how each option looks:

Once again, knowing how to tweak layers like this enables you to get a map which shows the information you need while eliminating potential label conflicts.

On Tuesday I showed how the Accordance Bible Atlas lets you create custom maps that give you the exact information you need, even when it would not be found on most standard maps. By combining layers and searching for specific locations, I was able to create this map which shows the portion of Dan's tribal allotment which was actually controlled by the Philistines.

All this flexibility does have a downside, one which was pointed out in the comments on that post:

What I wish for is a way to reposition names of places so that they do not overlap. In your maps above the country names overwrite the city names. I can't use these maps straight from Accordance for presentations without removing all of the map names and adding my own non-overlapping names.

Look at the map above and you'll see the problem. See how the labels for Dan, Judah, and Simeon all clash with the labels for sites in those regions? If we just gave you a series of pre-drawn maps, we would be sure to design the maps so that no labels overlap. In fact, within each individual layer, we did our best to avoid label clashes even as you zoom in and out. But since you can combine layers in an endless number of ways, there was simply no way we could completely prevent overlapping labels.

So let's say I'm writing a book on the Samson story and I want to be able to include this map in my book? I can't very well have these conflicting labels appear there, so I need a way to clean them up.

Fortunately, it's pretty easy to do. First, we can try tweaking the site layer to avoid the conflict. The site layer I'm using on this map is Major Biblical Sites, and I can see what its various settings are by choosing Define Site Layers… from the Site layer pop-up menu. In the dialog box that appears, be sure to select the specific layer you want to modify in the list at the top left. Here are the settings I had for the Major Biblical Sites layer:

As you can see, this layer shows sites from every Biblical period which have an importance rating of 3, 4, or 5. That's a lot of sites, including some sites which had different names during different periods. By simply unchecking the 3 on the Importance scale so that only the most important sites appear, my map now looks like this:

As you can see, this simple change immediately eliminated the sites which overlapped with the labels for Dan and Judah. The only conflict which remains is with the label for Simeon. I'll show you how to deal with that in my next post.

For a writing project I'm working on, I need to explain why the city of Dan was located at the far northern end of Israel when their tribal allotment was 100 miles to the south, on the Mediterranean coast to the west of Jerusalem. The problem for the Danites was, of course, that their tribal allotment was occupied by the Philistines, a fiercely war-like people who enjoyed two technological advantages over the Israelites: chariots and iron weapons. Add to that the fact that most of their tribal allotment was along the coastal plain where Philistine chariots were particularly effective, and you can immediately see the challenge the Danites were facing.

I also want to integrate the life of Samson into my explanation. Samson was a Danite whose exploits all took place in the Sorek valley. I therefore need to know where the Sorek valley is in relation to Dan's tribal allotment, the northern city of Dan, and the territory of the Philistines.

If I had to rely on a Bible program which uses pre-drawn maps, I would be out of luck here. I would certainly be able to find a map of the tribal allotments of Israel, and that map might even show the territory of the Philistines, but good luck finding the valley of Sorek on such a map. I might then be able to find another map which is focused on the life of Samson and the Sorek valley, but chances are that map would not show me the boundaries of Dan's allotted inheritance.

I would run into the same problem with even the best Bible Atlases in print. No print Atlas can create a map to answer every potential question about biblical geography. So they all give you certain standard maps, and the best ones will offer a few more detailed or specialized maps. Still, if the question you have is not one the makers of the atlas anticipated, you're left to try and piece together an answer from multiple maps that don't quite address your question.

The beauty of the Accordance Bible Atlas is that it's completely interactive and customizable, so you can actually make the map that will give you the information you need. Rather than giving you separate static maps, it gives you a wide variety of site, region, and route layers which can be combined however you like. In addition to choosing a combination of layers, you can also search for any site or region, and it will show up on the map even if it's not part of the current layer you have displayed. For example, here I've chosen the Tribes of Israel region layer and searched for the Sorek valley:

From this I can see that the Sorek valley begins in the foothills at the border of Dan's allotted territory and eventually opens out onto the coastal plain. If I were to search for a few sites mentioned in connection with Samson, such as his hometown of Zorah or the Philistine town of Timnah, I can see just how far the Danites had gotten in the conquest of their allotted territory.

As you can see, Israelite Zorah was deep in the foothills, while Philistine Timnah was near the edge of the coastal plain. That tells me that the Danites of Samson's day were largely bottled up in the foothills where Philistine chariots were less effective. It would seem they hadn't been very successful driving the Philistines out of the coastal plain.

My map already tells me a lot about the situation the Danites faced, but I have yet to place the Philistines on it. I could search for Philistia, but that would only put the label on the map. Since I really want the borders to appear, I need to choose a region layer that includes Philistia, such as Divided Kingdoms or Israel's Neighbors. There's just one problem: I already have the Tribes of Israel region layer displayed. How can I add two layers of the same type to my map?

It actually couldn't be simpler. If you hold down the shift key while selecting another layer, Accordance will add that layer to the one currently displayed. So if I shift-select Israel's Neighbors, I get this:

By combining multiple layers like this, I can see just how much of Dan's tribal allotment remained dominated by the Philistines. In view of this inability to dislodge the Philistines, the Danites began looking for some unclaimed territory which would be easier to conquer, and they eventually settled on the northern city of Laish, which they conquered and renamed Dan.

Not only has the flexibility of the Accordance Atlas given me the ability to research this messy territorial dispute, but if I need to explain it to someone else, I need only show them this map I've created. Pretty cool, huh?

Yesterday, I talked about how my wife and I will be touring Israel with a tour which includes several other members of the Accordance team. While we're away, I wanted my children to have a way to know where we would be each day and share in what we'll be learning. So I used the Accordance Atlas to create a series of custom maps showing where we would be each day. Here's one example:

First, I created some Custom Site Layers containing every site we'll be visiting. There were so many sites that I had to create two custom site layers and combine them into a Site Set. I then displayed that site set on the map.

Next, I created a user layer for each day of the trip. I then used the built-in drawing tools to add lines showing the approximate routes we'll be taking, to highlight locations, and to add text labels. Finally, I copied some representative images from the Bible Lands PhotoGuide and pasted them into each user layer.

When I was finished with these maps, I printed them out and taped them to a wall in sequence. That way, the kids can see where we'll be each day. I've asked their grandma to take each day's map off the wall and have the kids read through the Bible verses which mention the sites we'll be visiting that day. Hopefully when my wife and I get home and we can't stop talking about the places we've been, our children will be somewhat familiar with those places too.