Joshua 1:2

2. This Jordan This celebrated river was in full view from the elevation on which the Israelites were encamped. Thus far in Scripture history the Jordan has acquired no special importance. But henceforth, in

Jewish and Christian literature, in sacred song and figurative expression of Christian hope, this humble stream occupies a larger place in the world’s thinking than the broad Amazon or the majestic Mississippi. In the poetic language of Tacitus, “The Lebanon nourishes and pours out the Jordan.” It flows entire through the first and second lake, and is retained by the third. These lakes (each with a triple name) are the Merom of the Old Testament, called Samochonitis in ancient classics, and Huleh in modern geography, the second the Sea of Galilee, or Lake of Gennesaret, called also Tiberias; the third lake is the Dead Sea, called in the Old Testament the Salt Sea and the Sea of the Plain. The river, which in most of its course flows in a deep trench, is at the Dead Sea 1308 feet below the level of the Mediterranean. The general course of its current is to the south, but the river has a number of sharp bends, which deflect the regular flow of its waters. From the rapidity of the flow it may be styled almost a continuous cataract. From the first lake to the second, a distance of less than 9 miles, is a descent of 600 feet; and from the Lake of Tiberias to the Dead Sea are 27 great rapids, besides a great many of less magnitude. The average descent through its whole course is nearly twelve feet in a mile, justifying the name of “the Descender.” Its length is about two hundred miles from the roots of Anti-Lebanon, where it bursts forth in all its purity, to the Sea of Salt, where it is lost in a briny, seething caldron. Yet the distance by a straight line between these points is less than ninety miles. There are shallows where it can be forded. It is subject to periodical overflows when the snows of Lebanon melt. At these times it overflows the first of the two terraces which constitute its banks. Within its lowest banks it varies in width from seventy feet, where it enters the Sea of Galilee, to one hundred and eighty yards at the Dead Sea.

All this people Numbering, according to the last census, 601,730, from twenty years old and upwards. See Numbers 26:51. Migrations on so vast a scale are not without parallel in the East. As late as the last century a whole nomadic people 400,000 Tatars retreated under cover of a single night from the confines of Russia into their native deserts.

The land which I do give to them Canaan, or the Land of Promise; so called because it had been promised to the patriarchs centuries before.