Encyclopedia Masonica

The slaughter of the Ephraimites at the passages or fords of the River Jordan, which is described in the twelfth chapter of the Book of Judges, is referred to in the Fellow Craft's Degree. Brother Rob Morris, in his Freemasonry in the Holy Land (page 316) says:

The exact locality of these fords or "passages " as the Bible terms them, cannot now be designated, but most likely they were those nearly due east of Seikoot and opposite Mizpah. At these fords, in summer time, the water is not more than three or four feet deep. the bottom being composed of a hard limestone rock. If, as some think the fords, thirty miles higher up, are those referred to the same description will apply. At either place, the Jordan is about eighty feet wide, its banks encumbered by a dense growth of tamarisks, cane, willows thorn-bushes, and other low vegetation of the shrubby and thorny sorts, which make it difficult even to approach the margin of the stream. The Arabs cross the river at the present day, at stages of low water, at a number of fords, from the one near the point where the Jordan leaves the Sea of Galilee down to the Pilgrims' Ford, six miles above the Dead Sea.

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