“... Ps.-Aristeas’s remarks about the Jordan River explicitly compare it with the Nile, even to the point of exaggeration about the Jordan’s geography and behavior, although the comment could also allude to Josh 3:15, which says that the Jordan overflows its banks during the harvest time. Within the idealizing context of these paragraphs, Ps.-Aristeas’s claim that the Jordan floods like the Nile, encircles the country, and empties into a river that flows to the sea helps to accomplish a literary goal. Whereas earlier we saw that Jerusalem compared very favorably to Alexandria and, in fact, it had fewer problems than the Egyptian city, here the countryside also compares favorably with idealized descriptions from Greek tradition that view Egypt (and India) through a utopian lens. One can compare especially Agatharcides’s descriptions of the Nile and Megasthenes’s reports about the Ganges and Indus rivers (all transmitted in Diodorus Siculus 3.10 [Nile] and 2.35–42 [Ganges and Indus]). ...”