A 251-kilometre “descending” river named two modern polities
The Jordan River—Nahr al-ʾUrdunn, Nəhar hayYardēn, also Nahr Al-Sharieat—runs about 251 kilometres southward, passing through the Sea of Galilee and ending in the Dead Sea. Jordan and the West Bank take their names from it; the stream is sacred in Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.
One theory ties the name to a Semitic word meaning to descend, fitting its steep fall; another links it to an Egyptian word for a big river. It first appears as Yārdon in the Egyptian papyrus Anastasi I, probably from the reign of Rameses II. After the Crusades, Arab geographers such as Abu’l-Fida recorded Nahr Al Sharieat, the watering place, and Mandaeans use Yardena for any flowing water fit for baptism. Biblical tradition has the Israelites fording it to reach the Promised Land, and John baptising Jesus in its water.
The Dan, carrying roughly 240 to 252 million cubic metres a year, meets the Hasbani from Mount Hermon near kibbutz Sde Nehemia, and the Banias adds its spring water. The upper river tumbles 75 kilometres to shrunken Lake Hula, then falls even more steeply over 25 kilometres into the Sea of Galilee, leaving it at Degania Dam. The last 120 kilometres meander through the Jordan Valley, joined by the Yarmouk and Zarqa, before ending in the Dead Sea about 422 metres below sea level.
Boats explored it in the nineteenth century: Christopher Costigan in 1835, Thomas Molyneux in 1847 and the American William Francis Lynch in 1848. South of the lake it marks the Israel–Jordan border, crossed at the Sheikh Hussein and Allenby bridges, while the Arik Bridge proved vital in the 1967 and 1973 wars.
Flow once reached 1.3 billion cubic metres a year. Israel’s National Water Carrier, fully running from 1964, and Jordanian and Syrian works on the Yarmouk now divert up to 95 percent, and by 2010 only 20 to 30 million cubic metres reached the Dead Sea, which is shrinking fast. Under the 1994 peace treaty Jordan receives 50 million cubic metres a year. Sewage and brackish inflows have gutted the lower 100 kilometres, and in 2007 environmental group FoEME listed it among the world’s 100 most endangered ecological sites. Native fish include the endemic Jordan bream and Jordan barbel.
Source: Jordan River
