The Lebanon, our Land: notes on Torah & Topography
We often are preoccupied with the challenging stresses of geopolitics and conflicts and forget to examine the historical and material records that can direct us toward lasting peace. When one considers both Torah and topography (let’s reserve archaeology for another essay), we may see how to resolve current conflicts in ways that will last.
Israel has been suffering assaults from Elam-Persia, now called “Iran” (“Aryan” in Farsi). These attacks have been brought through elite elements of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Hezbollah (“party” or “army of Allah”) that has de facto rule of Lebanon, and artificial state named after an ancient mountain range, “the Lebanon” which is the Hebrew word for “moon.”
In previous essays we presented evidence detailing that Iran, with its ally-client, Syria, has occupied and ruled the Lebanon since Israel was pressured by America to leave the area by 1983. So now, “Lebanon is in the hands of Hezbollah. The security of Lebanon, the border and the sea are in the hands of Hezbollah” (Memri #1215).
Speaking “about the appointed time…of the End,” the prophet Habakkuk states “Hamas will inundate, Hamas-land will destroy” because you, Babylon, “pillaged the city,” that is, Jerusalem (2:3-8). Hamas means “violence” or violent plunder, “pillage” and we have discussed how Iran coordinates the violence of Hamas and Hezbollah via Damascus (Memri # 1228). When Babylon thus afflicted Judah and the Jewish people with Hamas its empire was based in Mesopotamia and included ancient Aram (similar to today’s Syria), and the Lebanon. Today again, via the Shiites and Jihadists like Muktada al Sadr, Elam-Persia and Babylon again are linked as a site of violence and source of imperialist aggression and pillage.
And their violence inundates the “Kiryah,” the nickname for the HQ of the Israeli General Staff near Tel Aviv and the word Habakkuk uses for “city” in his prophecy. Thus “the Carmel, the Bashan, and the flower of the Lebanon is devastated” (Nahum 1:4).
This context helps us to clarify a point critical to genuine peace in the region: the Lebanon is part of the Promised Land and inheritance of the nation of Israel, by etymology, by Scriptures, and, for those who prefer an empirical – ecological framework, by topography.
Many verses in Deuteronomy, the last of the five books of Moses denotes that “the Lebanon” mountain ranges and surrounding land are part of the Land promised to the Jewish people for an eternal settlement. “Hashem spoke to us saying, ‘turn and come to the Amorite mountain and all its neighbors, in the Arabah, on the mountain, and in the lowland and in the south, and at the seacoast; the land of the Canaanite and the Lebanon until the great river, the Euphrates River. See, I have given the Land before you: come and possess the Land that Hashem swore to your forefathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to give them and their children after them” (Deuteronomy 1:7-8).
After detailing the inheritance of two and a half of the tribes in the Gilead and Bashan, east and northeast of the Jordan, Moshe pleaded intensely with the Eternal One to be allowed to see this inheritance of the children of Israel, the people he had shepherded for forty years. “Let me now cross and see this good Land that is on the other side of the Jordan, this good mountain and the Lebanon” (3:24-5).
After teaching Israel its foundational prayer, “Hear O Israel, Hashem is One” and reiterating it (Deut. 6 and 11) Moshe reminds Israel that the commandments are for the Land and that its boundaries stretch “from the wilderness and the Lebanon, from the river, the Euphrates River, until the Western Sea” (11:24).
The region that now is “Hizbollah/Hamas-land” clearly is within the Promised Land. The topography of the Lebanon mountain ranges indicates that the word of G-d regarding the inheritance of Israel is reflected and grounded in the natural order and flow of the topography.
The Lebanon consists of parallel mountain ridges split by the long, north to south valley of the Litani River that drains them and turns due west to flow into the Mediterranean north of Tyre. This valley is a northern extension of the Jordan valley whose lowest point is filled by the Salt (“Dead”) Sea and that continues south into central Africa. The western ridge of the Lebanon range is an extension of the mountains that hug the western edge of the Hula valley and the Kinneret (the “Sea of Galilee”) and then split, one line curling west into the northern line of the Carmel range and the other swirling in a bend and then south into the eastern edge of the many-folded mountains of the Shomron and Judea.
Feeding the Litani-Jordan valley from its orient slopes, the eastern range of the Lebanon, heading south, splits to form the mountains surrounding the high plateau of the Golan Heights (in the midst of which is located ancient Israel’s northeastern “city of refuge,” Golan (Deuteronomy 4:42-4) and then joins to continue south in the rugged folds of the mountains of Moab through the territories of Menashe, Gad and Reuben. This range of mountains parallels the Jordan rift valley to its east and curls into numerous lines running east rich in the history of ancient Israel. Split by several narrow valleys, principally the Yarmuk, Jabbok, and Arnon, this eastern edge of the mountains of the Promised Land hugs the Salt Sea’s east side and continues south to the Gulf of Eilat.
When one looks at a finely detailed topographical map of the Promised Land one sees the truth of the modern scientific dictum that energy behaves sometimes like a particle and sometimes like a wave; the mountainous, intricate and unique Land flows to reflect the powerful energies that formed and established its ecological and spiritual integrity. One sees the material logic and wisdom as well as the amplitude of the gift of Hashem G-d to His people: a land of modest size but infinite complexity and far more spacious, in its mountainous quality than any ‘flat’ map suggests.
Above all, for the purposes of this essay, which is dedicated to understanding and peace, it demonstrates how intrinsically “the Lebanon” is entwined in its essential forms with the more familiar, modern areas of Israel as well as those denoted in the Scriptures. For not only do the mountain ranges of Israel swell and extend down the east of the Jordan – Litani valley, but both of their main lines west of this valley extend south: one enters the Negev, breaks and then concludes at the Gulf of Eilat; the other curls southwest through the Sinai’s entire central and southern areas till the Gulf of Suez and the Reed (“Red”) Sea, where a smaller broken series of mountains rounds back east to Mt. Karkom in Israel’s Negev. The Sinai Peninsula, historically an unclaimed area never permanently inhabited is ecologically intrinsic to the mountains and southern deserts of the Promised Land and the long, north-south valley at its center…
Since the Jewish people’s unending return to their Land picked up irreversible force early in the eighteenth century, the Lebanon has continued, into our days, to be a site from which they are attacked and from which they are forcibly barred. This imperial and geo- political situation is anomalous from both the earthly and Scriptural – divine perspective. The earth itself bears witness, just as contemporary conflicts suggest that the days approach when “the Lebanon will be insufficient kindling” for the wrath of the aroused lion of Israel and all “the beasts” that infest it with Hamas “will be insufficient for elevation offerings” to the Holy One and Creator.
As geology and environmentalism suggest, only when we understand history and human productivity via the realities of our miraculously structured world will humans be able to recognize their rightful place in it and, as Scripture states, rule over it and tend it as the Jewish people were commanded to settle, tend and love all the land Promised to them, integral and one.