StrongerBible

giḥon

גִּיחוֹן

HebrewH1521Proper Noun“Gihon”

Appears 6 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Gen 2:131Ki 1:331Ki 1:381Ki 1:452Ch 32:302Ch 33:14
Root family
Word studyResearch-gradeghee-KHOHNnoun

What giḥon means

1

Gihon: the name of the second river flowing out of Eden, the one said to wind around the whole land of Cush.

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintyContested

The name is a description before it is a label. It is built on a Hebrew verb (גִּיחַ) used for anything that breaks out with force: fighters springing from an ambush, the sea bursting from the womb, a river rushing into an animal's mouth. So the word means roughly "Gusher." It says what the water does, not where the water is.

That is exactly why the name by itself settles nothing about which river Genesis has in mind. Everything hangs on the words that follow it, "the whole land of Cush." Elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible Cush normally means Nubia, the region south of Egypt, and on that reading the Gihon is the Nile, which is how most ancient Jewish and Christian readers understood it. Others have argued that Cush here points to a people living east of Mesopotamia instead, which would put the Gihon in western Iran. Many scholars conclude that the passage is not drawing a map at all.

What every reading has in common is the picture: a single source inside God's garden, dividing into rivers (נָהָר) that run out to the far corners of the world. Two of the four, the Tigris and the Euphrates, are rivers anyone could point to. The other two, including the Gihon, are not, and that mixture of the familiar and the unplaceable may well be the point.

Gen 2:13

Disputed

Which river, if any, the Gihon of Genesis 2:13 names. The question turns almost entirely on what "the land of Cush" means in that verse.

  • majorityThe rivers of Eden depict an ideal, paradisal landscape rather than a route that can be mapped, so the Gihon is not to be matched with any known river.; Claus Westermann, Genesis 1-11: A Commentary, Continental Commentary (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1984); Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15, Word Biblical Commentary 1 (Waco: Word, 1987); Terje Stordalen, Echoes of Eden: Genesis 2-3 and Symbolism of the Eden Garden in Biblical Hebrew Literature (Leuven: Peeters, 2000)
  • minorityCush means Nubia, as it normally does elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, so the Gihon is the Nile.; Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 1.1.3
  • minorityCush here names the Kassites, east of Mesopotamia, which places the Gihon in western Iran, most likely the Kerkha (ancient Choaspes) or the Karun.; E. A. Speiser, "The Rivers of Paradise," in I Studied Inscriptions from Before the Flood, ed. R. S. Hess and D. T. Tsumura (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1994), 175-182
2

Gihon: the spring on the eastern slope of the City of David that supplied Jerusalem with water.

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

Jerusalem's Gihon is not a river but a spring, and it earns its name. It does not flow steadily. Water collects behind a natural bottleneck in the limestone until the pressure breaks, and then it gushes out, several times a day in the wet season and less often when the land is dry. For most of the city's history this was the water that made settling on that ridge possible at all, which is why the oldest part of Jerusalem sits directly above it.

That made the spring a place where things happened. When David wanted Solomon crowned before a rival could take the throne, he sent him down to the Gihon to be anointed, within earshot of the city, while the rival's supporters were still feasting at another spring nearby (עֵין רֹגֵל). Generations later, Hezekiah blocked the spring's upper outlet and channeled its water through the rock to a pool inside the walls (שֶׁלַח), so a besieging army could not cut the city off from its own water. That tunnel can still be walked today.

Many scholars hear a deliberate echo of Eden in the name. On their reading, calling Jerusalem's spring "Gusher" presents Zion as the mountain and garden of God, with living water welling out of it, the image the prophets later develop when they describe a stream running out from the temple to heal the land. Others answer that "Gusher" is simply what anyone would call a strong spring (מַעְיָן), and that the shared name proves nothing on its own.

1Ki 1:331Ki 1:381Ki 1:452Ch 32:302Ch 33:14

What scholars say about giḥon

The proper noun גִּיחוֹן is universally derived from the hollow root גיח / גוח, "to burst or gush forth" (H1518), plus the nominal afformative -on, so BDB glosses the name "a bursting forth" and TWOT renders it "Gusher / Bubbler." The verb is rare but semantically consistent (Judges 20:33; Job 38:8; 40:23; Psalm 22:10; Micah 4:10; Ezekiel 32:2), with an Aramaic cognate at Daniel 7:2 (H1519); the noun גָּחוֹן, "belly" (Genesis 3:14; Leviticus 11:42), is usually assigned to the same root. BDB cites cognates in Late Hebrew, Aramaic and Ethiopic, following Noeldeke (ZDMG 1883, 538); no Akkadian or Ugaritic cognate is listed in the standard lexica, and Arabic and Persian Jayhun for the Oxus is a medieval adaptation of the biblical name rather than an independent cognate. Lexicographers stress that the etymology is descriptive rather than locational, which is why the same name attaches both to a river of paradise and to a Jerusalem spring without implying that the two are identical.

The identification of the Genesis 2:13 river turns on כּוּשׁ. The traditional Nile reading (the Septuagint milieu, Jubilees, Sirach 24:27, Josephus, and the enduring Ethiopian identification with the Abay) takes Cush in its normal biblical sense of Nubia, but faces the geographic objection that the Nile cannot share a source with the Tigris and Euphrates. Speiser argued that this Cush is the eponym of the Kassites (Akkadian Kassu, Nuzi Kussu-, Greek Kossaioi) and that the Samaritan version's rendering points to the Choaspes / Kerkha, anchoring Eden at the head of the Persian Gulf; Zarins extended the same reasoning to the Karun, with Eden beneath the now-flooded Gulf. Westermann, Wenham and Stordalen instead treat the one-into-four river scheme as ideal or symbolic geography, which is the majority position in critical scholarship precisely because the scheme resists any literal map.

The Jerusalem referent is secure: the intermittent karst siphon spring on the eastern slope of the City of David (Ain Umm ed-Daraj, Ain Sitti Maryam), whose surging behavior matches the etymology closely. It is the site of Solomon's anointing (1 Kings 1:33, 38, 45) and the source Hezekiah redirected to the Pool of Siloam (2 Chronicles 32:30), commemorated by the eighth-century Siloam inscription; notably the Chronicler names Gihon where the parallel at 2 Kings 20:20 mentions only the pool and the conduit. Reich and Shukron, excavating from 1995 to 2008, dated the monumental Spring Tower and fortified passage to Middle Bronze IIB on architectural, stratigraphic and ceramic grounds, but Regev, Uziel, Szanton and Boaretto reported radiocarbon dates as late as the terminal ninth century BCE beneath the tower's foundations, and Reich has defended the earlier date; the question is open. Orthographically the name is written fully in Genesis 2:13 and defectively in Kings and Chronicles, a matter of spelling only. The Septuagint has Gheon, the Vulgate Geon; Targum Jonathan, the Peshitta and the Arabic version substitute Shiloah at 1 Kings 1:33 while retaining Gihon in Chronicles. On the theological question, Stager, Clifford, Levenson and Ollenburger read the naming of the spring as part of a wider presentation of Zion as cosmic mountain and Eden, echoed in Ezekiel 47, Joel 4:18, Zechariah 14:8 and Revelation 22; more cautious readers note that no First Temple text explicitly links the two.

Where scholars disagree about giḥon

Whether giving Jerusalem's spring the name Gihon deliberately presents Zion as a new Eden, with life-giving water flowing out of the mountain of God.

  • contestedThe naming is deliberate: the temple city is portrayed as the cosmic mountain and garden of God, and its gushing spring answers to the river of paradise, a picture the prophets go on to develop.; Lawrence E. Stager, "Jerusalem as Eden," Biblical Archaeology Review 26, no. 3 (2000): 36-47; Richard J. Clifford, The Cosmic Mountain in Canaan and the Old Testament, Harvard Semitic Monographs 4 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972); Jon D. Levenson, Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985)
  • contestedThe shared name shows nothing by itself, since "Gusher" is the natural label for any strong spring and no text from the First Temple period connects the Jerusalem spring with the river of Eden.; Daniel I. Block, The Book of Ezekiel, Chapters 25-48, New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998)
In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

  • Brown, Driver, and Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, s.v. גיח, גִּיחוֹןlexicon
  • Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, s.v. גִּיחוֹןlexicon
  • R. Laird Harris, Gleason L. Archer, and Bruce K. Waltke, eds., Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (Chicago: Moody, 1980), s.v. גיחtheological-dictionary
  • E. A. Speiser, "The Rivers of Paradise," in I Studied Inscriptions from Before the Flood, ed. R. S. Hess and D. T. Tsumura (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1994), 175-182article
  • Claus Westermann, Genesis 1-11: A Commentary, Continental Commentary (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1984)commentary
  • Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15, Word Biblical Commentary 1 (Waco: Word, 1987)commentary
  • Terje Stordalen, Echoes of Eden: Genesis 2-3 and Symbolism of the Eden Garden in Biblical Hebrew Literature (Leuven: Peeters, 2000)monograph
  • Richard J. Clifford, The Cosmic Mountain in Canaan and the Old Testament, Harvard Semitic Monographs 4 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972)monograph
  • Jon D. Levenson, Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985)monograph
  • Ben C. Ollenburger, Zion the City of the Great King, JSOTSup 41 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1987)monograph
  • Lawrence E. Stager, "Jerusalem as Eden," Biblical Archaeology Review 26, no. 3 (2000): 36-47article
  • Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron, "The History of the Gihon Spring in Jerusalem," Levant 36 (2004): 211-223article
  • Johanna Regev, Joe Uziel, Nahshon Szanton, and Elisabetta Boaretto, "Absolute Dating of the Gihon Spring Fortifications, Jerusalem," Radiocarbon 59, no. 4 (2017): 1171-1193article
  • Ronny Reich, "The Date of the Gihon Spring Tower in Jerusalem," Tel Aviv 45, no. 1 (2018): 114-127article
  • Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 1.1.3primary-source

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of גִּיחוֹן

noun

גִּחוֹן, גִּיחוֹן

1Ki 1:33, 1Ki 1:38, 1Ki 1:45, Gen 2:13, 2Ch 32:30, 2Ch 33:14