The second of two strong earthquakes struck the Levant and destroyed all the villages in the Beqaa Valley.

The 1759 Near East earthquakes shook a large portion of the Levant in October and November of that year. This geographical crossroads in the Eastern Mediterranean were at the time under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. The ruins of Baalbek, a settlement in the Beqaa Valley of Lebanon east of the Litani River, were badly damaged. These 1759 events, along with the earlier 1202 Syria earthquake, are likely the strongest historical earthquakes in the region.

The Levant is a subregion of West Asia that borders the Eastern Mediterranean sea to the west and forms the core of the Middle East. In its narrowest sense, which is in use today in archaeology and other cultural contexts, it is equivalent to Cyprus and a stretch of land bordering the Mediterranean Sea in Western Asia that is, the historical region of Syria, which includes present-day Syria, as well as Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, and the southern part of Cilicia. Its overwhelming characteristic is that it represents the land bridge between Africa and Eurasia. In its widest historical sense, the Levant included all of the Eastern Mediterranean with its islands; that is, it included all of the countries along the Eastern Mediterranean shores, extending from Greece in Southern Europe to Egypt and Cyrenaica in Northern Africa.

The Beqaa Valley is a fertile valley in eastern Lebanon and its most important farming region. Industry, especially the country's agricultural industry, also flourishes in Beqaa. The region broadly corresponds to the Coele-Syria of classical antiquity.