berekhah

A pool in the Bible is a made thing more often than a found one: a basin cut into rock or built up and sealed so that spring water or runoff collects and stands. Almost every pool the Old Testament names belongs to a town's water supply, and the text treats these pools as landmarks a reader would already know by name.

That is why the word keeps company with channels, walls and gates. Hezekiah is remembered for making the pool and the channel that carried water inside the city (2 Kings 20:20), and Nehemiah measures his wall repairs against the pool of Shelah and "the pool that was made" (Nehemiah 3:15, Nehemiah 3:16). A pool was also a defence. As Assyria closed in, Jerusalem dammed up the water of the lower pool and built a holding basin (מִקְוֶה) between the two walls for the water of the old pool, and Isaiah's complaint is not that they did the engineering but that they never looked to the One who made the water (Isaiah 22:9, Isaiah 22:11).

A pool is also where things happen, because everyone comes to the water:

• two armies meet and sit down on opposite sides of the pool at Gibeon
• dogs lick a dead king's blood at the pool of Samaria
• Assyrian officers take their stand at the channel of the upper pool to shout their terms at Jerusalem
• the bodies of two murderers are hung up over the pool at Hebron

The same word covers quieter water too. Solomon says he made pools to water a growing forest, a love poem compares a woman's eyes to the pools at Heshbon, and Nahum pictures Nineveh as a pool whose water is draining away and cannot be held back. What ties all of this together is water standing and kept in one open place, which is what sets a pool apart from a shaft sunk down to catch rain (a cistern, בּוֹר) and from a reedy natural pond (אֲגַם).