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Bible Dictionaries
Nile
Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible
or NILE. The Greek name of the river, of uncertain derivation. The Egyptian name was Hopi , later Yer-‘o , ‘Great River,’ but the Hebrew generally designates the Nile by the plain Egyptian word for ‘river,’ Ye’ôr . The Nile was rich in fish, and the home of the crocodile and hippopotamus. It bore most of the internal traffic of Egypt; but it was pre-eminently the one source of water, and so of life and fertility, in a land which, without it, would have been desert. The White Nile sends down from the Central African lakes a steady stream, which is greatly increased in summer and autumn, when the half-dry beds of the Bahr el-Azrek and the Atbara are filled by the torrential rains annually poured on the mountains of Abyssinia. The waters of these tributaries are charged with organic matter washed down by the floods, and this is spread over the fields of Egypt by the inundation. The height of the Nile rise was measured and recorded by the Egyptians from the earliest times: on it depended almost wholly the harvest of the year, and a great excess might be as harmful as a deficiency. The rise begins about June 19, and after increasing slowly for a month the river gains rapidly till September; at the end of September it becomes stationary, but rises again, reaching its highest level about the middle of October. The crops were sown as the water retreated, and on the lower ground a second crop was obtained by artificial irrigation . Canals and embankments regulated the waters in ancient times. The water was raised for the irrigation of the fields by shadûfs , i.e. buckets hung from the end of dipping poles, and handscoops, and carried by small channels which could be opened or stopped with a little mud and cut herbage: by this means the flow was directed to particular fields or parts of fields as might be required. Water-wheels were probably introduced in Greek times. In modern days, vast dams to store the water against the time of low Nile, and steam pumps (in Lower Egypt) to raise it, have changed the aspect of high Nile and revolutionized the system of irrigation; but for the smaller operations the old methods are still practised. The Nile had seven mouths, of which the western (the Canopic) and the eastern (the Pelusiac) were the most important. The former secured most of the traffic with Greece and the islands, the latter with the PhÅ“nicians. The Pelusiac arm, on which Tahpanhes and Pi-beseth lay, would be best known to the inhabitants of Palestine. Now the ancient mouths are silted up; only a western (Rosetta branch) and a central one (Damietta branch) survive. The worship of the Nile-god must have been prominent in popular festivals, but has not left much monumental trace. The Nile was not one of the great gods, and his figure appears chiefly as emblematic of the river, e.g . bringing offerings to the gods; the figure is that of an obese man with water-plants on his head.
The Egyptians seem to have imagined a connexion of the Nile southwards with the Indian Ocean, and the priests taught the absurd notion that it gushed out north and south from two springs at the First Cataract. They also fancied a Nile in heaven producing rain, and another underground feeding the springs. The ‘seven lean years’ in Genesis is paralleled by an Egyptian tradition of a much earlier seven years’ famine under the 3rd Dyn., and years of famine due to insufficient rise of the Nile are referred to in more than one hieroglyphic text.
F. Ll. Griffith.
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Hastings, James. Entry for 'Nile'. Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdb/n/nile.html. 1909.
