Joshua 1:2

Moses my servant Comp. Deuteronomy 34:5. The highest possible title under the theocracy. Joshua as yet is but the "attendant" of Moses. The higher title is given him in Joshua 24:29.

this Jordan one of the most singular rivers in the world, which "has never been navigable, and flows into a sea that has never known a port." Observe

(a) Its name. It is never called "the river" or "brook," or by any other name than its own, "the Jordan" = "the Descender."

(b) Its sources. Far up in northern Palestine, the fork of the two ranges of Anti-Libanus "is alive with bursting fountains and gushing streams," every one of which sooner or later finds its way into a swamp between Bâniâsand Lake Hûleh. Two of these streams deserve special attention, (i) one at Bâniâs, (ii) the other at Tel-el-Kâdy. The former is the upper, the latter the lowersource of the "River of Palestine."

(c) Its course, which is marked by three distinct stages:

(i) Enclosed within the ranges of Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon, which run parallel to the Mediterranean from north to south, its streams for as yet it can hardly be called a single river fall into the lake called of old Merom, then Samaelon ("the High Lake"), now Hûleh. "Half morass, half tarn, this lake is … surrounded by an almost impenetrable jungle of reeds abounding in wild fowl."

(ii) Here it might seem destined to end, like the Barada "the river of Damascus" in the wide marshy lake, a day's journey beyond that city, but "the Descender" is not thus absorbed. Fed, like the lake itself, by innumerable springs in the slopes of Lebanon, and met by a deep depression for its bed, it rushes with increased rapidity three hundred feet downwards into the Lake of Gennesaret, which is about the same length as our own Windermere, but of much greater breadth.

(iii) At the mouth of the Lake it is about 70 feet wide, "a lazy turbid stream, flowing between low alluvial banks" and here again it might seem to have closed its course. But it issues forth once more, now a foaming torrent, and plunges through twenty-seven rapids, with a fall of a thousand feet, on its lowest and final stage, into the Dead Sea.

(d) Its windings. The distance from the Lake el-Hûlehto the Sea of Tiberias is nearly 9 miles, that from the Lake to the Dead Sea about 60 miles. But within this latter space the river traverses a distance of at least 200 miles. Darting first to the right, then to the left, then to the right again, "as if sensible of his sad fate," to use the quaint words of Fuller, "and desirous to deferre what he cannot avoid, he fetcheth many turnings and windings, but all will not avail him from falling into the Dead Sea." See Stanley's Sinai and Palestine, pp. 282, 283; Thomson's Land and the Book; Ritter's Geography of Palestine; Macgregor's Rob Roy on the Jordan.