The river takes its name from the Hebrew verb yarad, 'descend'—it is "the one that goes down," quite literally, fed by the snow melt of Mount Hermon, at more than 3,000m above sea level, to the Sea of Galilee (about 212m below sea level), and then to the deepest lake on earth, the Dead Sea, at about 400m below sea level. This descent is best seen as divided into two level, the Upper Jordan (north of the Sea of Galilee) and the Lower Jordan (from Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea).
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River Jordan near its sources in Caesarea Philippi
The river has four main sources in the mountains of Lebanon. They fed into the swampy Huleh basin from whence they descend to the Sea of Galilee. The gradient of this stretch—the Upper Jordan—is steep and swift, falling some 280m over a distance of just over 16km, and today is a popular venue for white-water rafting. Lower Jordan leaves the Sea of Galilee just west of the southern end of the Sea. Though the straight line distance between this point and its entry into the Dead Sea is a mere 100km, the serpentine meandering the river almost doubles its length, and dotted along its length may be found numerous small but obsolete ox-bow lakes. Along the way the volume of its water is also doubled by those from the other nine perenial tributaries that feed into it, principally the Yarmuk, Jabbok, and the Wadi Far'ia. Despite the fanciful idea found in some Christian writings, such as the Left Behind series, the Jordan was never navigatable by boat. In fact, the earliest references to the Jordan is found in ancient Egyptian documents, in which the main concern was how and where best to ford the river.
The River Jordan just before it joins the Sea of Galilee
The (Lower) Jordan may not be a large river but fording it was never an easy task due to the nature of the rift-valley through which it flows. "One may say that thre are three terraces, with two steep hill-sides between them, leading to the Jordan, whether approaching it from Palestine to the west or from Transjordan to the east," observes Nelson Glueck (The River Jordan, 71). The first terrace is what geographers now call the ghor, the broad (and in the northern half, usually cultivated) bottom of the rift-valley about 40m above the river itself. Going down the deeply bissected slopes one comes to the qattara, or katar, a band of eroded nightmarish marl hills. Down another steep slope and we come to the zor where the river flows. Here the vegetation used, in biblical times, to be lush and thick, and was often referred to as the ga'on hayyadan, "the jungle of the Jordan" (RSV), "the thickets of the Jordan" (NIV, NASB, NRS) in the OT; here wild animals—including lions (Jer 49:19; 50:44)—used to roam. Even today this is home to more than a 100 species of birds, "23 of which are unique to the Jordan valley and 45 of which use the valley as a migration route" (Henry Thompson, ABD, 3.955). Sadly much of this is fast disappearing due to growing human demands on the resources of the river.
Eroded marl hills of the qattara.
In modern times, both the pumping of water from the Sea of Galilee and the river for the insatiable needs Israel's and Jordan's agriculture has reduced the amount of water flowing finally into the Dead Sea so significantly that the river where it now passes under the Allenby Bridge is little more than a big drain, and the level of the Sea has gone down by tens of meters in the last half a century.
The River Jordan, together with the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee, makes up the most prominent geographical feature of the land of Israel, serving to divide the land into what is called CisJordan (to the west of the river, Canaan) and TransJordan (the east of the river). That the river also served as a barrier between the tribes living in the regions is evident in the TransJordan tribes—after they have helped the other tribes conquer Canaan and before they return to their homes—setting up "an imposing altar on the border of Canaan by the Jordan," the rest of the Israel threatened to go to war against them, charging them for breaking "faith with the God of Israel like this?" (Jos 22:9-20). In response the TransJordan tribes replied:
If this has been in rebellion or disobedience to the Lord, do not spare us this day. If we have built our own altar to turn away from the Lord and to offer burnt offerings and grain offerings, or to sacrifice fellowship offerings on it, may the Lord himself call us to account. No! We did it for fear that some day your descendants might say to ours,"What do you have to do with the Lord, the God of Israel? The Lord has made the Jordan a boundary between us and you—you Reubenites and Gadites! You have no share in the Lord.' So your descendants might cause ours to stop fearing the Lord. That is why we said,"Let us get ready and build an altar—but not for burnt offerings or sacrifices.' On the contrary, it is to be a witness between us and you and the generations that follow, that we will worship the Lord at his sanctuary with our burnt offerings, sacrifices and fellowship offerings. Then in the future your descendants will not be able to say to ours,"You have no share in the Lord.' And we said,"If they ever say this to us, or to our descendants, we will answer: Look at the replica of the Lord's altar, which our fathers built, not for burnt offerings and sacrifices, but as a witness between us and you.'
So too has the river entered into Christian imagination as a boundary as attested to its use in numerous hymns; to cross over the Jordan is to cross over from the toils of our earthly life through death into eternal rest, to arrive home.
©ALBERITH
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