The Garden of Jehovah

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jan 20, 1887

The Garden of Jehovah

“But the richest spot in the landscape, the circle of the Jordan, lay eastward, as it were at their feet; where the deep cleft of the river opened into a broad valley, before its waters finally lost themselves in what is now called the Dead Sea. If Sodom and Gomorrah lay in this northern part, they must have risen from amidst its rich verdure, the traces of which still remain, and at once attract the eye of anyone looking down from the hills in the neighborhood of Bethel. The abundant waters, which still gush from the high western plateau, even now support a mass of vegetation before they are lost in the light loamy soil. But utilized as they then were by irrigation, far and wide, they must have made every part of it, as seen by Abraham and Lot, a very garden of Jehovah—recalling the traditions of their own Eastern paradise, or the glorious beauty of the scene they had recently left behind them at Zoan, in Egypt, where the bountiful Nile, led everywhere through the thirsty soil, repaid the care by a fertility and luxuriance that had passed into a proverb.