Giychon

גיחון


From Giyach (גיח) or Go'ach (גוח) = "to break out", "burst forth"; used for a river breaking from its source, or a child from the womb; the latter particularly interesting in that Giychon was (see below) one of the four rivers of Eden, and the breaking of the waters in childbirth is reflected in the breaking of the waters of the Raki'a (רָקִיעַ) or Firmament in the Creation, a concept not terribly different from the (Aristotelian)-Ptolemaic Primum Mobile which was the core of western cosmology until Copernicus; it assumed that the sky ended at a solid point, a heavenly ceiling to which the sun, moon and stars were fixed, and on the other side of which the gods lived.

Genesis 2:13 speaks of a river encircling all the land of Kush (Cush) and forming one of the four rivers of Eden. Kush is the name used for both Ethiopia and a region of Mesopotamia, the former of which would make this the Nile - highly implausible in the context of Eden; there are many locations suggested through ancient lore for the location of Eden, but these never include Egypt. Kush, the son of Cham (Ham) ben No'ach, is regarded as the brother of Mitsrayim (Egypt), Kena'an (Canaan) and Put (Libya), so clearly the name places him in north Africa and it cannot be that Kush which is intended.

Jeremiah 13:23 refers to the colour of his skin, but only figuratively, comparing it to the leopard changing its spots; the inference is negroid, and again this links him to Africa. The word Kushi is still used, in a derogatory manner, by some people, in modern Ivrit, an equivalent of the n-word elsewhere. 

HOWEVER, Kush's other sons, named in Genesis 10:6-7, are Seva (סְבָא), Chavilah (חֲוִילָה), Savtah (סַבְתָּה), Ra'amah (רַעְמָה), and Savtecha (סַבְתְּכָא), all of which are generally identified as Mesopotamian. See the links to each of these.

1 Kings 1:33 associates it with the pool of Shilo'ach (שלוח), a stream in Yeru-Shala'im which was probably a natural spring (water "breaking forth" from the ground) at a place named Shilo'ach, which is to say a "sending forth"; the stream in question, according to Josephus (Wars 5.9.4 and elsewhere), was an aqueduct at the foot of Mount Tsi'on (Zion), on the west side of Yeru-Shala'im, running towards the south-east under the hill of Ophel. Shilo'ach, Shilo'am and Shiloh are often mistaken one for the other, or confused with one another, and it is not easy to determine whether they were one, two or three.

2 Chronicles 32:30 names it Hezekiah's Tunnel (the link here is to a video that takes you on a tour through the aquaduct), after the king who had it built, or dug, in order to make a siege-proof supply of water inside the city walls of Yeru-Shala'im, by re-routing the stream Giychon (see also 2 Chronicles 33:14). The description however makes clear that the tunnel "topped the upper spring of the waters of Giychon, and brought them straight down on the west side of the city of David", which suggests that there were at least two separate pools which bore the name Giychon, as the existence of an "upper" implies the existence of a "lower" (cf Isaiah 22:9), so it is feasible that one of these springs was also known as Shilo'ach, thereby explaining the apparent existence of two names for the same place.

Shiloh, the third part of the confusion, is most definitely somewhere else - click here - despite the famous Isaiac reference (Isaiah 8:6) to "the waters of Shiloh which run so deep. The Yehudit text for the Isaiah doesn't say Shiloh anyway, but Shilo'ach (שִּׁלֹ֔חַ); the Shiloh named in Genesis 49:10 is the one we need, though it should more accurately be written as Shiylo (שִׁיל֔וֹ) - cf Psalm 78:60, because this is the standard spelling. Except that it isn't. The one named in Joshua 16:6 is definitely Shiloh (שִׁלֹה), though its full name on that occasion is Ta'anat Shiloh. But then we have situations like 1 Samuel 1, where verse 9 has Shiloh but verse 24 has Shiylo, and they definitely intend the same place.

But either way, not Giychon.

Which may or may not have been the same as Shilo'ach, or indeed Silo'am.

It was unquestionbly Silo'am in Jesus' time (cf John 9:6), but that may simply be one more example of words changing over the course of time (click here for a map of Celtic Britain, drawn up using the names from the Celtic period, in which the area we now call Essex was then called Landejn, presumably the origins of the city name London). There is in fact no reference to it by the name Silo'am in the Tanach. Shilo'ach is the norm (cf Isaiah 8:6), although Nehemiah 3:15 names it Shelach (שֶּׁלַח).

Gachon (גחון) stands for the belly of a reptile, as in Genesis 3:14 and Leviticus 11:42, though it is common in figurative language to describe a river as a snake. The snake also represented the creation of life in its Ophic appearance - the serpent wrapped around the cosmic egg, which the god sliced in half in order to free the egg for hatching. Bifurcation, or cell division, in modern scientific terminology. Look at the Argaman logo below, and see if you can distinguish between the Ophic serpent of the pool of Giychon, and a diagram of a helix in a Physics textbook.

The verb Gachan means "to bow down" in Syriac.



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