RIVER (נָהָר, H5643, river; יְאֹר, H3284, watercourse; נַ֫חַל֒, H5707, brook; פֶּ֫לֶג֒, H7104, channel; אָפִיק֒, H692, stream bed; ποταμός, G4532, river). The lands of the Bible include the two great areas of riverine civilization of the ancient world—those of the Nile and the Euphrates. In these regions, where the river was the life-giver, and was worshiped as such, it was natural that it formed the main geographical feature in the consciousness of the people. Hence the Bible sometimes refers simply to “the river,” or “the great river” (Josh 1:4; Rev 9:14; 16:12), by which the Nile or the Euphrates is to be understood. Hence the basic image of the river as a source of life, and consequently of comfort and peace, which is so frequently encountered in Scripture (e.g., Isa 48:18; 66:12).

Palestine never possessed a riverine civilization comparable to those of the great valleys to the N and S of it. The Jordan is too small in volume, and too entrenched in its deep valley, to provide the kind of irrigation agriculture that supported Egypt or Mesopotamia. Indeed, in Biblical times the valley of the Jordan was sparsely inhabited, filled with dense vegetation and the home of wild animals. Only in Ezekiel’s vision (cf. Ezek 47) does there appear a river large enough to flow down into the Jordan rift and support widespread cultivation; a river of life entering the Dead Sea at the precise point where the Jordan—so often the Bible’s symbolic river of death—enters it in reality, at a point due E of the Temple in Jerusalem. The same image reappears in visionary form (Rev 22).

In the life of Israel, once they left Egypt and its stable civilization by the Nile, rivers appear more often as boundaries or as milestones in their career, than as a source of satisfaction or supply. In an age when there were no bridges (the word does not appear in the OT), the crossing of even so relatively minor a river as the Jordan was a major hazard, requiring divine intervention (Josh 3). Once the people were across the river, they were in every sense cut off from their past: even to return briefly to the E bank of Jordan, they would most prob. have had to wait for the low water season. In the same way, Joshua reminded them of the step their ancestor Abraham had taken when he crossed “the flood” (Josh 24:15 KJV); i.e. Euphrates, on his way to the land of promise; it was a symbolic step, cutting him off from a past to which he would never return.

The Jordan, with its E-bank tributaries, forms the only major river system of Pal., although the mountains of Lebanon to the N feed numerous streams from their snowfields. Many of the smaller rivers of the land flow only seasonally.