Siloam

Siloam is a Jerusalem pool, named in UPDV under three forms: Siloam, Shiloah, and Shelah. It surfaces in four distinct settings — as the city's gentle waters, as a wall feature in Nehemiah's rebuilding, as the place to which Jesus sends the man born blind, and as the site where a tower-collapse killed eighteen.

Waters of Shiloah

In Isaiah's oracle the pool's gentle flow stands as a figure for quiet trust in Yahweh, contrasted with the rushing waters of Assyria: "Since this people have refused the waters of Shiloah that go softly, and rejoice in Rezin and Remaliah's son" (Isa 8:6).

The pool of Shelah in Nehemiah's rebuild

The wall-rebuilding register names the pool by another form when it describes the section worked on at the city's southeast corner: "And the fountain gate repaired Shallun the son of Colhozeh, the ruler of the district of Mizpah; he built it, and covered it, and set up its doors, its bolts, and its bars, and the wall of the pool of Shelah by the king's garden, even to the stairs that go down from the city of David" (Neh 3:15).

"Go, wash in the pool of Siloam"

In the healing of the man born blind, Jesus directs him to the same pool, and the narrator glosses the name: "and said to him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam (which is by interpretation, Sent). He went away therefore, and washed, and came seeing" (John 9:7). When the man recounts what happened, he names the place again: "He answered, The man who is called Jesus made clay, and spread it on my eyes, and said to me, Go to Siloam, and wash: so I went away and washed, and I received sight" (John 9:11).

The tower in Siloam

Jesus uses the pool's location once more when he refers to a recent disaster — the collapse of the tower at Siloam — to refute the assumption that those killed were worse offenders than others: "Or those eighteen, on whom the tower in Siloam fell, and killed them, do you⁺ think that they were offenders above all the men who dwell in Jerusalem?" (Luke 13:4).