City of Adam

ADAM, CITY OF (אָדָ֤ם, red). A city in the Jordan Valley where the second largest river of Transjordania, the Jabbok, empties into the Jordan River. Here the Jordan River was dammed, prob. by the collapse of the fortyfoot high banks along this narrow stretch of the Jordan, allowing Israel to pass over dryshod sixteen m. S of Adam (Josh 3:9-17). The name is found in Pharaoh Shishak’s inscr. describing his invasion of Pal. in the fifth year of Rehoboam the son of Solomon and preserved in the Amon temple at Karnak. The modern name is Tell ed-Damiyeh.

Bibliography

B. Mazar, “The Campaign of Pharaoh Sheshonk to Palestine,” Vet Test Supplement IV (1957), 57-66.

International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (1915)

A city in the middle of the Jordan valley near ZARETHAN (Jos 3:16), which see. The name probably survives at the Damieh Ford, near the mouth of the Jabbok twenty miles above Jericho. An Arabian historian asserts that about 1265 AD the Jordan was here blocked by a land slide. The inner gorge of the Jordan is here narrow with high banks which would facilitate such an obstruction as permitted the waters to "pile up" above to Adam and run out below, permitting Joshua’s host to cross on dry land (SWP, II, 15; Wright, SCOTH, 130-34).