The mountain range (and the country that now bears its name) running along the Mediterranean coast north of Israel, famous through the whole ancient Near East for its cedar forests — timber tall, straight, and rot-resistant enough that Solomon imported it by the shipload for the Temple (1 Kings 5, forthcoming on this shelf), floated down the coast in log-rafts under a treaty with Hiram of Tyre. Egyptian and Assyrian kings alike boast in their own inscriptions of cutting Lebanon's cedars. ⚠ Isaiah 40:16 uses that very reputation for a deliberately impossible image: naming the whole forest as fuel too small for a single burnt offering, and its entire wildlife too few for the offering itself — the richest natural resource the ancient world knew, called insufficient.