Genesis 13:10

10. Lot… beheld all the plain of Jordan ככר , here rendered plain, means the region around, or circuit; η περιχωρος , Matthew 3:5. “At the time when Abram and Lot looked down from the mountain of Beth-el on the deep descent beneath them, and Lot chose for himself the circle of the Jordan, that circle was different from any thing that we now see .

It was well watered everywhere… as the garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt And this description is filled out in detail by subsequent allusions. It is described as a deep valley, distinguished from the surrounding desert by its fertile fields. If any credence is to be attached to the geological conclusions of the last fifty years, there must have been already a lake at its extremity, such as that which terminates the course of the Barada at Damascus, or of the Kouik at Aleppo. Then, as now, it must have received in some form or other the fresh streams of the Jordan, of the Arnon, of En-gedi, of Callirrhoe, and at the southern end, as Dr. Robinson has observed, more living brooks than are to be found in all the rest of Palestine. On the banks of one or some of these streams there seems to have been an oasis, or collection of oases, like that which is still, from the same causes, to be found on a smaller scale in the groves of En-gedi and of Jericho, and in the plain of Gennesareth, or, on a larger scale, in the paradise of Damascus. Along the edge of this lake or valley Gentile and Jewish records combine in placing the earliest seat of Phoenician civilization. Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboim, are (with Lasha [probably Laish] by the sources of the Jordan, and Sidon on the seashore) mentioned as the first settlements of the Canaanites. Genesis 10:19. When Lot descended from Beth-el, ‘the cities of the round’ of the Jordan formed a nucleus of civilized life before any city, except Hebron, had sprung up in Central Palestine . ” STANLEY: Sinai and Palestine, p . 281 . The mention of the garden of the Lord shows how the traditions of Eden still lingered in the thoughts of men, and Lot’s recent sojourn in the valley of the Nile would naturally prompt the comparison of the well-watered Jordan valley to the land of Egypt. The words, as thou comest unto Zoar, are not to be connected, grammatically, with land of Egypt, but with plain of Jordan, from which they are separated by the intervening description of the Jordan plain.