And Lot lifted up his eyes. Circumspexit; with a look of eager, lustful greed (cf. Genesis 3:6). The same expression is afterwards used of Abram (Genesis 13:14), where perhaps also the element of satisfaction, though in a good sense, is designed to be included.
And beheld all the plain. Literally, all the circle, or surrounding region ( כִּכָּר, from כָּרַר, to move in a circle; cf. arrondissement, Fr.; kreis or bezirk, Ger.); περίχωρος (LXX; Matthew 3:5); now called El Ghor, the low country (Gesenius).
Of Jordan. Compounded of Jordan, the names of the two river sources (Josephus, Jerome); but, according to modern etymologists, derived from יָרַד, to go down, and signifying the Descender, like the German Rhine, from rinnen, to run.
The largest river of Palestine, rising at the foot of Antilibanus, and passing, in its course of 200 miles, over twenty-seven rapids, it pours its waters first into the lake of Merom, and then into the sea of Galilee, 653 feet, and finally into the Lacus Asphaltites, 1316 feet below the level of the Mediterranean.
It is now called Esh-Sheri'ah, i.e. the ford, as having been of old crossed by the Israelites (Gesenius). That it was well-watered everywhere. Not by canals and trenches, as old interpreters imagined, but by copious streams along its course, descending chiefly from the mountains of Moab.
Before the Lord destroyed—the same word is used for the destruction of all flesh in what is styled the Elohistic account of the Deluge—Sodom and Gomorrha (vide Genesis 14:2). Even as the garden of the Lord.
Paradise in Eden, with its four streams (Genesis if. 10; Calvin, Lange, Keil); though by some this is deemed unsatisfactory (Quarry), and the phrase taken as—hortus amaenissimus (Rosenmüller), and in particular Mesopotamia, which was a land of rare re.
cundity. Like the land of Egypt—which was irrigated by the Nile and by canals from it as well as by machines (Deuteronomy 11:10, Deuteronomy 11:11)—as thou comest unto Zoar—at the south-east corner of the Dead Sea (vide Genesis 14:3).