As some of the readers of the blog know, my wife and I lived for a year in Jerusalem. While we were there I studied a variety of topics at Hebrew University and we took several trips throughout Israel and two of the surrounding countries. When I came back to the States, I taught a class (at Northwest Baptist Seminary as well as a Sunday School class at the church I attend) on Bible Geography. Some time ago I started a series on Bible Geography and got a whole two posts into it before I quote. Well, I am now going back to it. I plan to post pictures of various sites as well as a small amount of data. Hope it will be fun! We are going to start with Caesarea.

I will begin this book review by saying that I normally hate devotional books. Either they are so cheesy I can not stand it or they say such intellectually ignorant things that I get too distracted from the point of the text. But Wayne Stiles has written a devotional book that I have found helpful. The theme of his book is the geography of the Bible, so each entry is based upon some geographical theme. While there are a few that I think are a stretch, overall they are well done and either challenging or encouraging. For example, he discusses the move of Jesus from Nazareth to Capernaum. He believes the reason for this move was to put Jesus on the International Highway so that he would have greater influence. The application then is that we need to think strategically in our lives and think about the big picture of what God is doing. Each entry also contains a prayer and a quote from someone in church history. Interspersed throughout the book are wonderful pictures from Israel and several maps to help the reader orient themselves. I highly recommend this book for an intellectually responsible but still encouraging devotional.  

My dad left me a legacy of game playing. He played detailed war games throughout most of his life and left them all to me. Since my family refuses to play them with me, they don't get unpacked very often (I do play a lot of Catan with the family, though!). I am always interested in games that involve the Bible in some way. People stopped playing Bible trivia games with me a long time ago, but there are some excellent games out there that help in understanding the Bible. I came across a seemingly comphrensive list recently that is well worth looking at, since it includes games of complexity levels and quality. I am particularly interested in Credo , a game that allows one to play a role in the eary church councils and argue for one of the Christological views. But it is apparently impossible to find.

 A game that just came out a few months ago I was able to find and acquire. The name of the game is the Campaigns of King David. I've only played it a few times, but it is quite fun. It is a game based on the nations around Israel during David's time. There can be two to five players. Two players play Philistia and Judah, and each additional player plays Aram, Phoenicia, and Moab. The game is fairly extensive, with 20 or so pages of rules. The turn order is completely random, which injects a fun element into the game. There might be several turns of excess food, and then a famine for a few turns, for example. There might be five battle episodes before a time to raise new armies. While the two player game is rather lame, more players give a real feel for what the politics of the time period were like and what David and other kings actually faced. A full game with five players would probably take six or seven hours (I've not actually finished one yet), so it is not a game for the weak-willed, but it is a great game to help introduce the geography and politics of the time period. And you can get the random "Ark of the Lord" card to help you in battle!