Eric Cline

And of course, Lord Allenby fights in World War I there and actually mimics the tactics of Thutmose III from more than 3,000 years earlier.

So at one point, I thought that I agreed with Napoleon

who supposedly said that the Jezreel Valley and Megiddo is the most perfect battlefield on the face of the earth.

But I looked through everything, I think, that Napoleon wrote, and I can't find him having said that.

I think he was actually talking about Belgium, but I can't prove that.

So anyway, this is why I think Armageddon made its way into the New Testament.

Because they already knew that so many battles have been fought there, and they thought that one of the final ones would also take place there.

So it makes a lot of sense to me to explain it that way.

Yes, absolutely.

Megiddo today is in what would be considered northern Israel, but it's not very far into the north.

The Jezreel Valley, the Valley of Esdraelon, cuts across all of modern-day Israel.

It's shaped like a triangle on its side.

So the tip is over in modern-day Haifa, and the base of the triangle is over at the Jordan River.

So that's about, what, 30 or 40 miles east-west across modern Israel.

But north-south...

It is only three miles wide at its narrowest and seven miles wide at its widest.

So,

If you're cutting across, it's actually like Napoleon supposedly said, it's a perfect battleground there.

But more importantly, for our purposes, there was a highway that led from, well, from Egypt up to Turkey, if you want to go in one direction, or from Turkey down to Egypt, the other.

In other words, if you're an Egyptian and you want to go visit a Hittite, you take the Via Maris, the way of the sea.