IRRIGATION. It is perhaps significant that there is no Biblical equivalent for this term and that the most explicit reference to irrigation is an assertion that the Egyp. practice is irrelevant to the Palestinian hills where “the rain from heaven” would serve as a perpeutal reminder of divine approval or disfavor (Deut 11:10-17), but the contrast was relative, not absolute. From Chalcolithic times, irrigation had become widespread in the Fertile Crescent, and the exiles on the River Chebar (Khabaru Canal?) were renewing contact with a system of perennial irrigation predating Abraham. Though Egypt’s “basin system” of breaching mud walls to inundate adjacent plots was inappropriate in the hills, patches of the Jordan Valley were explicitly reminiscent of Egypt (Gen 13:10). Many a wadi of the Rift wall was channeled into flourishing fields along the escarpment base until disaster and malaria-breeding neglect supervened, while larger centers like Bethshan and Jericho with its powerful springs long remained oases of irrigated productivity.

The role of irrigation in the hill country of ancient Israel is less clear. Canaanite settlement was notably concentrated near the spring lines that margined the hills, and it is no accident that over seventy historic sites of Pal. contain the word ’ein (“spring”) and over sixty have bir (“well”). The land was arid, and the uplands that Israel colonized were largely porous limestone, droughty, yet stippled with springs and increasingly with artificial wells. With the adoption of slakedlime sealing about 1300 b.c. pool and cistern construction increased, largely for domestic and city supply, but also for stock watering and the irrigation of gardens and orchards (2 Chron 26:10; Eccles 2:4-6) for the practice increased per-acreage production tenfold.

Methods varied: spaced apertures funnelled the water of Siloam to terraced gardens, bucketfuls were splashed across riverbank and agricultural terrace (Num 24:7), canals flanked some streams such as the Kishon, while foggaras with their vertical shafts and horizontal tunnels tapped the underground seepages of Syria and Trans-Jordan. Transient flash floods were trapped in soil conserving and irrigating dams, such as the intricate engineering complex of Kurnub in the Negev, where dams, channels and cisterns were later multiplied by Nabateans and Byzantines. Herodian and Rom. times witnessed the extension of reservoir and aqueduct, but irrigation was singularly vulnerable to the vicissitudes of misgovernment and war: its subsequent decline and recent revival largely postdate the Biblical era. See Agriculture.

Bibliography N. Glueck, The River Jordan (1946); M. S. Drower, “Water-supply, Irrigation and Agriculture” in Singer et al., A History of Technology, I (1954), 520-557; A. Reifenberg, The Struggle Between the Desert and the Sown (1955); N. Glueck, Rivers in the Desert (1960); R. O. Whyte, “Evolution of Land Use in South-Western Asia,” in L. D. Stamp (ed.), A History of Land Use in Arid Regions (1961), 57-118.