This valley is quite unlike any other in the whole world.

It is a volcanic rent in the earth's surface, a broad chasm which has gaped and never closed up.

Naturally, it should terminate at Merom, where the level of the Mediterranean is nearly reached.

By some wonderful convulsion, or at any rate by some unusual freak of Nature, there is a channel opened out from Merom, which rapidly sinks below the sea level, and allows the stream to flow hastily, down and still down, from Merom to Gennesareth, and from Gennesareth to the Dead Sea, where the depression reaches its lowest point, and the land, rising into a ridge, separates the Jordan valley from the upper end of the Gulf of Akabah.

The Jordan valley divides Palestine, strongly and sharply, into two regions.