For, behold, I will raise up against you a nation, house of Israel," Says Yahweh, the God of hosts; "And they will afflict you from the entrance of Hamath to the brook of the Arabah."
The ‘Arabah, (it is now well known,) is no other than that deep and remarkable depression, now called the Ghor, which extends from the lake of Gennesareth to the Red Sea . The Dead Sea itself is called by Moses too “the sea of the Arabah” Deuteronomy 3:17; Deuteronomy 4:49, lying, as it does, in the middle of that depression, and dividing it into two, the valley of the Jordan above the Dead Sea, and the southern portion which extends uninterrupted from the Dead to the Red Sea; and which also (although Scripture has less occasion to speak of it) Moses calls the ‘Arabah . A river, which fell from Moab into the Dead Sea without passing through the Arabah, would not be called “a river of the Arabah,” but, at the most “a river of the sea of the Arabah.” Now, besides the improbability that the name, “the river of the Arabah,” should have been substituted for the familiar names, the Arnon or the Jabbok, the Arnon does not flow into the Arabah at all, the Jabbok is no way connected with the Dead Sea, the corresponding boundary in the Book of Kings. These were both boundary-rivers, the Jabbok having keen the northern limit of what Moab and Ammon lost to the Amorite; the Arnon being the northern border of Moab. But there is a third boundary-river which answers all the conditions.