Jordan River

The book of Joshua stages the entry into the land as a second Exodus. The priests carrying the ark step into the water, the flow stops upstream, the people pass over on dry ground, and twelve stones are taken from the riverbed and set up at Gilgal so that children would ask what they meant. The river is thereafter the eastern edge of the promised land, and the point where a people stopped wandering.

Rachel Havrelock's study takes that boundary as its subject and shows how unstable it is. Two and a half tribes settle on the eastern bank and have to be argued back into Israel; Judges 12 has the men of Gilead killing fugitives at the fords by making them pronounce the word shibboleth; Ezekiel and Numbers draw the border differently; and the river's function as a line, rather than any quality of the water, is what the texts keep returning to.

The prophetic cycle attaches to it too. Elijah strikes the water with his rolled cloak and crosses dry, and is taken up on the far side; Elisha strikes it and crosses back, inheriting the office. The Syrian general Naaman is told by Elisha to wash seven times in the Jordan to be cured of his skin disease, is insulted by the smallness of the river compared with those of Damascus, and is healed when he does it anyway, a story about the ordinariness of the means that later Christian writers used constantly.

All four Gospels place John at the Jordan, and the baptism of Jesus there, with the opened heaven, the descending dove and the voice, is among the few episodes all four report. From it Christian baptism took its form, and the eastern churches kept the river itself in the rite: at Theophany on 6 January Orthodox clergy bless water and in many places throw a cross into a river, lake or harbour for swimmers to retrieve, an annual re-enactment of what happened here.

The Mandaeans made the river a category. Their masbuta, the repeated immersion that is the centre of their religious life, requires living flowing water, and every such water is called a yardna, from the name of this river, wherever in the world the community now lives. Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley's work follows that community from southern Iraq and Iran into a diaspora now scattered across several continents, still needing running water to practise.

The modern river is a fraction of what it was. Israel, Jordan and Syria between them divert the great majority of its flow, the lower reaches carry agricultural runoff and treated effluent, and the Dead Sea it feeds is falling by about a metre a year. The traditional baptism site on the eastern bank at al-Maghtas and the western site at Qasr al-Yahud both sit in a former military zone; the minefields around the western churches were cleared only from 2018.