It happened, when all the kings who were beyond the Jordan, in the hill-country, and in the lowland, and on all the shore of the great sea in front of Lebanon, the Hittite, and the Amorite, the Canaanite, the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite, heard of it;
"The Great Sea in front of Lebanon ..." The Great Sea here is, of course, the Mediterranean but the expression, "in front of Lebanon" is evidently a mistranslation, for the simple reason that in the terminology of those days, "in front of" invariably meant "east of."[6]  The Mediterranean, of course, is west of Lebanon.  The most recent scholarship confirms this judgment by rendering the phrase, "toward Lebanon," instead of "east of Lebanon."[7]