Use these maps

The 17 plates on this site were drawn for Biblion — the coastlines, the hills, the territories and every word lettered on them. They were drawn here rather than bought in, which is why we can say this plainly: use them in your own work. A video, a sermon, a class, an article, a study guide, a book. There is no fee, nothing to sign, and nobody to ask. We ask for one thing in return, and it is the next section but one.

What you may do

Put a plate in your own work — a video, a slide, a handout, a lesson, a blog post, a printed book, a church bulletin.
Including work you are paid for. A course that costs money, a book that sells, a channel that earns: all fine. Drawing a line at “commercial” would fall on the funded teacher and the small publisher, who are exactly the people this page is written for.
Change it to fit. Crop it to the shape of your frame, zoom into a corner, scale it, tint it for a dark slide, draw the route on it as an arrow, animate it, label it in your own language. A map is a thing to be used, not just displayed, and none of that needs asking.
Print it. At any size, on anything, as many copies as you need.

The one thing we ask

Say where it came from, and make it a link wherever a link is possible. This exact line, or something close enough to it that a reader could follow:

Map: Biblion — biblionapp.com/maps

In a video — on screen while the map is up, and as a real link in the description.
In an article or a post — in the caption, with biblionapp.com/maps as a working link rather than plain text.
In print — in the caption or the list of illustrations, where the address can at least be typed.
On a slide or a handout — small, in a corner, is fine. It only has to be legible.

The file already carries that line, in a band under the map. Please leave it there. If your layout genuinely cannot keep it — a full-bleed frame, a crop that takes the band off — then put the credit somewhere else in the work instead. What we are asking is that somebody who sees the map can find out where it came from; the margin is only the easiest place for that to be true.

What this permission does not cover

Four things, and they are all the same thing: the plates are offered to be used inside your own work, not to be handed on as a set.

Republishing the atlas. A plate or a few of them in a piece of your own writing is the whole idea. Putting them up as a collection — a gallery, a “Bible maps” page, a downloads page, or a selection large enough to stand in for this one — is not.
Building a product on them. Not as the maps of another Bible app, site, or piece of software, free or paid.
Selling the plates themselves, on their own or inside a bundle of graphics. Selling the work they appear in is fine. Selling them is not.
Putting a claim in our mouth. Change a plate as much as your work needs — but if you have changed what it asserts, by moving a place, redrawing a border or renaming something, then either say the map was altered or take the credit off. Several plates hedge a contested identification carefully, and a changed one still carrying our name would be making a claim we did not make.

Everything else about using Biblion is in our terms of use. If the terms on this page ever change, work you have already published under them stays as it is — we are not going to come after a video from last year.

The 17 plates

Each opens on this site, where you can read what it is drawn from and what its notes say about the places it is least certain of — worth a minute before you put one in front of an audience.

The land in relief

The coast, the hill country, the Jordan rift and the Dead Sea as a modelled landscape rather than a drawing — built from measured elevation data, not painted. It is offered on the same terms as the plates, with one addition, and it is the last section on this page for a reason: read what is under it before you use it.

A modelled relief of the biblical lands: the Mediterranean coast, the hill country, the Jordan rift with the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea.

Download the PNG 9.2 MB, 3,840 pixels wide.

What this picture is not

It is built from measured elevation data rather than painted, which makes it easy to trust further than it deserves. Four things are deliberately untrue to life:

The vertical scale is exaggerated six times. The hills are really much gentler than they look here; the shape is true, the steepness is not.
The rivers are drawn between 0.48 and 1.08 km wide so they can be seen at this scale. That is not the width of the Jordan.
The trees mark where vegetation is, not where trees are. They are symbols, and they are drawn far larger than any tree.
The water outlines are the modern ones, including two separate Dead Sea polygons. This is not a reconstruction of a first-century shoreline.

None of that makes it less useful — a six-times relief is how you show someone why the hill country and the coastal road are different worlds. It only means the picture is an argument about shape, not a measurement.

The credit this one needs

Longer than a plate’s, because the elevation and the water outlines are other people’s work and naming them is a condition of using it, not a courtesy:

Terrain: Mapzen / USGS / NOAA. Water outlines and river routes: Natural Earth. Relief exaggerated 6×; vegetation, river widths and materials illustrative.

Together with Biblion — biblionapp.com/maps, as above. Both lines are already in the band under the picture, so if you keep the file whole you have done it.

What you get, and what else we have

Each plate is a PNG 2,048 pixels wide, which is enough for a full-screen slide, a video frame at 1080p, and most printing at the size a plate is meant to be seen. Under the map is a narrow band carrying the credit line, and nothing else — no watermark over the drawing, and nothing written across the places. The relief render is bigger, at 3,840.

If you need something bigger — a page in a printed book, a banner, a wall — or if you want the plate as vector artwork so it stays sharp at any size, write and say what you are making. We will usually just send it.

Where the geography comes from

Worth knowing if you are being careful, or if someone is checking on your behalf. The coastlines, rivers, lakes and land classes come from Natural Earth; the relief is drawn by hand rather than taken from anywhere. Place coordinates come from Pleiades and OpenBible.info. Nothing is traced from a printed atlas — the plates were drawn from data and from Scripture. The full account of how they are made is on the About page.

The relief render is the exception and has its own sources, named in its own section above: its elevation comes from Mapzen, USGS and NOAA rather than from anything drawn here.

Anything else

If what you want to do is not on this page, ask. The contact form reaches a person, and the answer to a reasonable request is usually yes. We would far rather say yes to something unusual than have a good piece of work go out with clip art on it.

Use these maps

What you may do

The one thing we ask

What this permission does not cover

The 17 plates

The World of the Patriarchs

The Exodus

The Tabernacle in the Wilderness

The Conquest of Canaan

The Twelve Tribes of Israel

The Kingdom of David and Solomon

The Divided Kingdom

Elijah and Elisha

The Assyrian Empire

Babylon and Medo-Persia

Yehud under Persia

The Hellenistic World

Galilee, Samaria and Judea

Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus

The Journeys of Paul

The Seven Churches of Asia

The Roman Empire