aphiq

This is the ordinary meaning of the word and covers almost every place it appears. It names the channel itself, the groove in the land that water flows through, rather than the water. In dry country that channel is a wadi: bone dry most of the year, then suddenly roaring with a flash flood after the winter rains. Both faces of that image show up in the Bible. It can be the surge of water that rescues, as when the poet prays that God would restore his people like streams pouring back into the parched southern desert, or the failure of water that dooms, as when a thirsty man discovers his so-called friends are like a wadi that runs dry exactly when he needs it.

Because the word points to the channel and not the water, it stretches easily to any long hollow groove or pipe. It describes the deep channels of the sea laid bare when God rebukes the waters, and even the hollow leg bones of the great beast Behemoth, pictured as tubes of bronze.

Biblical writers reach for it constantly to sketch a landscape. Ezekiel in particular pairs it with mountains, hills, and valleys in a set phrase that means every fold of the terrain. The same channels that give life by carrying water can be turned to horror: Ezekiel pictures the ravines running with a slain Pharaoh's blood instead of the seasonal flood, a deliberate reversal of the life-giving picture elsewhere.

A small number of scholars, and the older lexicons, treated this as simply a stretched use of the water word. Most modern reference works now read it as a separate word that happens to be spelled the same, meaning strong or mighty. It turns up clearly in only one verse, where the line describes God humbling the powerful: he loosens the belt of the strong, set in parallel with pouring contempt on nobles. The ancient Greek and Aramaic translations both understood strong people here, which is the main reason scholars are confident the meaning is real and not a guess.

The deeper history may tie the two words together: the root behind both seems to carry an idea of a firm bounding edge, which fits both a channel that holds water in and the notion of firmness or strength. But for a reader today the practical point is simple. In this one verse the word does not mean a stream at all; it means the mighty.