Shiloah
Shiloah is a body of water mentioned in the Old Testament, located in the region of Judea in modern-day Israel. Known today as Pool of Siloam. It appears across 1 verse in Scripture.
Biblical History
Shiloah, meaning "sent" or "sending forth", refers to a gently flowing water channel associated with Jerusalem, drawn from the Gihon Spring and channeled through conduits along the eastern slope of the city of David. Its single Old Testament mention comes in Isaiah 8:6, where the prophet rebukes Judah for rejecting "the waters of Shiloah that flow gently", a metaphor for the quiet faithfulness of divine provision through the Davidic covenant, in favor of seeking alliance with Assyria. The contrast between Shiloah's gentle flow and the overwhelming flood of Assyrian conquest (8:7-8) gives the passage its rhetorical power. The New Testament counterpart to Shiloah is the Pool of Siloam, where Jesus sent the man born blind to wash after anointing his eyes with clay (John 9:7). Jesus' words, "Go, wash in the Pool of Siloam" (which means Sent), play on the root meaning of the name, connecting the healing to the identity of Jesus as the one sent by the Father. Shiloah/Siloam thus bridges both testaments as a symbol of divine sending and redemptive provision.
Archaeological & Historical Notes
The Pool of Siloam, the New Testament successor to Shiloah, was dramatically confirmed by a 2004 archaeological discovery during sewer repair work in the City of David in Jerusalem. Archaeologists Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron uncovered stone steps and a large pool dated to the late Second Temple period (first century BCE-CE), consistent with John 9. An older, smaller Byzantine-era pool had long been identified as Siloam, but this earlier pool is now understood as the actual site Jesus referenced. Hezekiah's Tunnel (eighth century BCE), which channels Gihon Spring water to this pool area, was surveyed in the nineteenth century and remains one of the best-preserved Iron Age engineering achievements in the Levant.
Verse Appearances (1)
Isa
References
- Orr, J. (ed.) (1915) The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia. Chicago: Howard-Severance Company. [Public Domain]
- OpenBible.info (n.d.) Bible Geocoding. Available at: https://www.openbible.info/geo/. [CC BY 4.0]
- Bagnall, R. et al. (eds.) (n.d.) Pleiades: A Gazetteer of Past Places. Available at: https://pleiades.stoa.org. [CC BY 3.0]
- Wikidata contributors (n.d.) Wikidata. Available at: https://www.wikidata.org. [CC0]
- Lawrence, D. et al. (2025) Villages to Empires: a settlement dataset for the Southern Levant. doi:10.5281/zenodo.15111732. [CC BY 4.0]
- Church of England (1769) The Holy Bible, Authorized (King James) Version. [Public Domain]