The Holy Land and Syria

by Frank G. Carpenter

We need an escort for the trip over the barren wastes to the River Jordan, for Bedouin brigands still occasionally relieve the unwary tourist of his valuables

CHAPTER XVII
THE DEAD SEA AND THE JORDAN

The Jordan! How shall I make you see it as it winds its way through this great gash in the thirsty face of old Mother Earth?

All day long I have been travelling upon its banks in the lower part of its course. I have visited the ford where Joshua crossed with his army of Jews when he took possession of Canaan; have stood on the spot where it is said that Jesus was baptized of John, and have gone over the place where the waters were parted by the cloak of Elijah. Here at Jericho I am within a short gallop of the Dead Sea, into which the Jordan flows, and sitting on the steps of my hotel I can see Mount Nebo, where Moses stood when he viewed the Promised Land, which he was not to enter. In former travels I have seen the Jordan, near the Sea of Galilee, and have been not far from its source in the Lebanon Mountains.

The Jordan Valley is the cellar of the world. It is a great trench, which begins a thousand or more feet above the sea in the Lebanon Mountains, and within a distance of one hundred and sixty miles, as the crow flies, cuts its way down to thirteen hundred feet below sea level, where it ends in the Dead Sea. The bottom of that sea is a half mile below the surface of the Mediterranean, and in Jericho, where I am writing, we are almost four thousand feet below the highest point in Jerusalem. There is no other part of the earth uncovered by water where for an equal distance the land is sunken even two hundred feet below the level of the ocean. This is the strangest trough of the world. Though often associated with the idea of going to heaven, the Valley of the Jordan is emblematic of hell. Most of it is as parched as the dry sands of the Sahara, and just now its heat is as torrid as Tophet. The plain over which I rode to-day on my way to the river was covered with thorn bushes. The only green I saw after leaving the irrigated farms about Jericho was that bordering the gully through which the Jordan runs. For the rest, the alkaline earth cut up by the floods into castles and mounds, makes bare gullies and hills of all sizes and shapes.

The mean temperature of Jerusalem, only fourteen miles away, is 64° Fahrenheit. It is temperate throughout the year and snow falls there in the winter. The heat here is as great as that of the centre of Nubia. For six months in the year the mean temperature in the Jordan Valley averages 100° Fahrenheit.

But this is not the character of the whole course of the Jordan. Let me give you a bird’s-eye view of the river, or, better, let us suppose we have taken an aeroplane and are going from its source in the Lebanon Mountains to where it loses itself in the great sea of salt below here. It rises on the foot of Mount Hermon, whose peak is covered with snow the greater part of the year. It has two or three different sources. One is near Dan, and higher up is another at Banias, near the spot where Christ said: “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock will I build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

It is at Banias that the Jordan has its chief source. It comes from a cave in the limestone rock which is now choked up with stones, but out of which the water flows in a great volume, cold, sweet, and pure. There are trees about the cave and the stream runs through a beautiful park down to Lake Huleh, which is only seven feet above the sea. The spring of Banias has always been noted for its sweetness and purity. It is said the waters and cave were formerly dedicated to the god Pan, and that from him came the name Banias, or Panias. Greek tablets have been found near by, and ruined temples and columns show that the place was once the site of a considerable city. It has now only a mud village of about fifty huts.

Flying down to Lake Huleh, we see a marshy catch basin into which run other streams and from which the Jordan flows out. There is little activity about the lake. Near it live a few Bedouins whose only business seems to be making mats of the papyrus reeds growing on the shores. These are the waters of Merom beside which Joshua and his men of war battled with the Canaanites for the Promised Land.