of thirteen miles with a descent of only four and a half
feet to the mile. The average is twenty-two feet to the mile. The width
varies from eighty to one hundred and eighty feet, and the depth from
five to twelve feet. Caesarea Philippi, at the head of the valley,
Capernaum, Magdala, Tiberias, and Tarrichaea were cities on the Sea of
Galilee. Jericho and Gilgal were in the plain at the southern extremity,
and Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboim, upon which the wrath of God was
poured, were somewhere in the region of the Dead Sea.

The Eastern Table-Land has a mountain wall four thousand feet high
facing the river. This table-land, which is mostly fertile, extends
eastward about twenty miles, and terminates in the Arabian Desert, which
is still higher. Here the mountains are higher and steeper than those
west of the Jordan. Mt. Hermon, in the north, is nine thousand two
hundred feet high. South of the Jarmuk River is Mt. Gilead, three
thousand feet high, and Mt. Nebo, lying east of the northern end of the
Dead Sea, reaches an elevation of two thousand six hundred and seventy
feet. Besides the Jarmuk, another stream, the Jabbok, flows into the
Jordan from this side. The Arnon empties into the Dead Sea. The northern
section was called Bashan, the middle, Gilead, and the southern part,
Moab. Bashan anciently had many cities, and numerous ruins yet remain.
In the campaign of Israel against Og, king of Bashan, sixty cities
were captured. Many events occurred in Gilead, where were situated
Jabesh-Gilead, Ramoth-Gilead, and the ten cities of the Decapolis, with
the exception of Beth-shean, which was west of the Jordan. From the
summit of Mt. Pisgah, a peak of Mt. Nebo, Moses viewed the Land
of Promise, and from these same heights Balaam looked down on the
Israelites and undertook to curse them, Moab lies south of the Arnon
and east of the Dead Sea. In the time of a famine, an Israelite, named
Elimelech, with his wife and sons, sojourned in this land. After the
death of Elimelech and both of his sons, who had married in the land,
Naomi returned to Bethlehem, accompanied by her daughter-in-law, Ruth,
the Moabitess, who came into the line of ancestry of David and of the
Lord Jesus Christ. Once, when the kings of Judah, Israel, and Edom
invaded the land, the king of Moab (when they came to Kir-hareseth,
the capital) took his oldest son, who would have succeeded him on the
throne, "and offered him for a burnt offering upon the wall.