The Jordan River

Nothing in this riverbed can be excavated for the crossing. The Jordan shifts its channel inside the flood plain, its banks are soft marl, and no physical trace of a nation walking over could survive or be expected to. The twelve stones Joshua set up in the middle of the river have not been found, and they could not reasonably be found. The page says that plainly rather than hinting at evidence that does not exist. What can be described is the river itself. It runs in a trench inside a trench. Albert Barnes put it in terms that still hold: the Jordan “flows at the bottom of a deep valley, which descends to the water’s edge on either side in two, occasionally in three, terraces”, and in the lowest of these the stream, “ordinarily less than 100 feet wide in this lower part of its course, is confined”. Geographers name the same three levels: the broad valley floor, the badlands of soft marl below it, and at the bottom the flood plain beside the water, dense with tamarisk and willow scrub. That thicket is what the prophets call the thickets of the Jordan, where lions lay up and out of which they came when the river flooded. The flood is seasonal and it is explained by the mountain. Joshua 3:15 says the Jordan overflows its banks throughout the harvest season, and Joshua 4:19 dates the crossing to the tenth day of the first month. Adam Clarke set out the reason in 1832 and it has not changed since: the river rises at the foot of Mount Hermon, the snow on that mountain holds through the winter, and when it melts in spring the water runs past the channel the river keeps the rest of the year. The barley harvest in the valley falls in the same weeks. Israel came to the water at the one season a nation could not ford it. How the waters were stopped is genuinely disputed, and this page prints both readings. The text says the water stood still, backed up as far upstream as Adam, a city in the area of Zarethan, and drained away below toward the Salt Sea, and that it returned the instant the priests came up out of the riverbed. Joshua's own summary is that the LORD dried up the waters of the Jordan, and he sets the event beside the Red Sea. One reading holds that God used the ground. At the Damiya narrows the river cuts through high, soft marl banks that collapse when the valley shakes, and a collapse there can block the channel and empty the river downstream for a matter of hours. John Garstang set this out in Joshua-Judges in 1931, and Amos Nur and Dawn Burgess took it up in a seismological frame in 2008. Two of the historically reported landslide dates at Damiya are well attested: the Arab historian and geographer Abu'l-Fida recorded a blockage of about sixteen hours in 1267, and the 1927 earthquake at Jericho produced a landslide that blocked the river for about twenty-one hours. Its strength is that the text supplies the detail itself, naming Adam well upstream as the place the water piled up, which is where such a block would form. On this reading the wonder is the timing and the word spoken beforehand. The other reading holds that Scripture names no agent at all. Adam Clarke argued in 1832 that this crossing was in some respects more strikingly miraculous than the Red Sea, because at the sea a strong east wind is named and here nothing whatever is; Matthew Henry made the same point from the flood stage in 1710, that whatever advantage the obstacle has, omnipotence divides it. That is the older reading and it is this site's tradition. Both readings agree on the same three facts: the river was at flood stage, the hour was announced in advance, and the water came back the moment the priests stepped clear. Adam is commonly placed at Tell ed-Damiyeh, beside the Damia crossing, well upstream of the fords opposite Jericho. Most scholars identify Tall Damiyah with the biblical Adam. Zarethan is a different matter. Its location is not settled, and this page does not place it. Where John was baptizing is the second open question. John 1:28 reads Bethany beyond the Jordan in nearly all the ancient manuscripts. Origen, writing his commentary on John in the middle of the third century, could find no Bethany east of the river and proposed reading Bethabara instead, a place then being shown as where John baptized. Albert Barnes and Adam Clarke both record that history and both hold that Bethany is the true reading and that Bethabara traces to Origen's conjecture. The dated witnesses run in order: Origen between about 248 and 253; the church of John the Baptist built on the eastern bank under the emperor Anastasius, who reigned from 491 to 518; the pilgrim Theodosius, who recorded that church between 518 and 530; and the sixth-century Madaba mosaic, which labels the place Bethabara and puts it west of the river. Two earlier pilgrim witnesses also name the site: the anonymous Bordeaux Pilgrim, writing in AD 333, records reaching the Jordan where the Lord was baptized by John and notes the hill on the far bank from which Elijah was taken up, and Egeria, in the account of her travels from about AD 381 to 384, likewise visited the Jordan where John baptized. Two sites hold the tradition. Al-Maghtas, in the Wadi al-Kharrar on the eastern bank, was excavated by Mohammad Waheeb from 1997, reopened to visitors in 2002, and inscribed by UNESCO in 2015 under criteria three and six, the inscription covering the eastern side only; within it, Tell el-Kharrar, also called Elijah's Hill, carries a separate tradition as the place of Elijah's ascension. Qasr el-Yahud, on the western bank, carries its own long pilgrimage tradition. The case for the east rests on John 1:28 placing the site beyond the Jordan, on the Byzantine church and the Theodosius notice, and on the excavated monastic remains around the springs. The case for the west rests on the Madaba mosaic and on continuous pilgrimage at Qasr el-Yahud. Scripture gives no coordinates and says John worked the whole region around the Jordan. This page names both traditions with their witnesses and settles neither. One distance is worth stating carefully. The river lies roughly five to six miles east of Jericho. John Gill, writing in the eighteenth century, cites a traveller's figure of six miles between the city and the water, and that is an eighteenth-century estimate rather than a modern measurement. Adam itself lies much farther upstream: gazetteers place it roughly sixteen miles from Jericho as the crow flies, with the river's own bends adding to that distance along the water.