The fun part of going to academic conferences like that of the Evangelical Theology Society (ETS) and Society for Biblical Literature (SBL) is the enormous exhibit of book publishers and other religion-related businesses that we can visit when we are not in sessions.
A couple weeks ago when I attended this year’s meetings in San Diego, one of my favorite exhibits was that of BiblePlaces.com photography, which was created by Dr. Todd Bolen, a Bible professor at The Master’s University in California.
I first met Dr. Bolen in Israel almost 25 years ago, when he just had begun BiblePlaces.com, and he told me that he had become frustrated that most photography of biblical places had restrictive copyrights or charged high usage fees. So he decided to make his own collection and give owners generous copyright permissions, to allow teachers and pastors to use them for church, college classes and other non-commercial uses. (There are quite a few free images on his site too.)
The BiblePlaces collection is the best photography from biblical sites that is available anywhere. If you look in any illustrated study Bible, many of the images come from here. Dr. Bolen lived in Israel for 10+ years, so he was able to photograph sites in optimal lighting and perfect weather.
The collection includes not just archaeology, but also cultural images of Jews, Arabs, Bedouins, and also historical image collections, with remarkably antiquated scenes.
The main collection organizes images by physical location, but there’s also a Photo Companion to the Bible that organizes images by books and passages of the Bible, which is a very nice resource for preaching.
More Remarkable Resources
Along with photography, Bolen offers two more extremely useful resources on the BiblePlaces.com website. First, for each image category or geographical site in the collection, there is a webpage filled with historical information and related links for in-depth information. Like here’s the page on En-Gedi, the oasis near the Dead Sea. And here’s one on grain harvesting, and on scribal writing practices. It took years to amass this virtual encyclopedia, which has come out of Bolen’s two-plus decades of teaching experience.
The second resource from BiblePlaces is the extensive weekly email blog, with links to all the latest archeology and biblical studies news online. I never studied archaeology formally, but I’ve learned a lot over time by reading news articles on topics of interest each week. Super useful!
What Dr. Bolen has done is really impressive. He has not only devoted his life to teaching the Bible, but to equipping and resourcing others to do so too.
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