What is Gilgal in the Bible?

Gilgal, like many locations mentioned in the Old Testament, is difficult to pin down. It’s mentioned all throughout the history of ancient Israel.

Here are the passages in the Bible that mention Gilgal:

• Book of Joshua, chapters 4 and 5

• Book of Deuteronomy, chapter 11

• Book of 1 Samuel, chapter 15

• Book of 2 Samuel, chapter 19

• Book of Hosea, chapter 9

• Book of 2 Kings, chapter 2

It’s difficult to determine whether these passages refer to the same place, and modern archeological evidence seems to reveal several candidates for the exact spot, although all of them are in a similar range in modern-day Israel.

Where is Gilgal today?

Figuring out the exact location isn’t very meaningful. Locations (and even kinds of plants or animals) are notoriously difficult to pinpoint in any ancient text, and even in the modern day, names for locations carry on for reasons that may be lost to time.

For example, imagine an American town founded in the mid-1800s, where the central feature was an orchard planted by a wealthy landowner. Over time, the dirt path next to the orchard started to get called “orchard lane” by the locals, and by the 1900s, when paved roads and street signs were implemented, the street might have been officially named “Orchard Lane.”

But let’s say that in 1920, the landowner moved his orchard to the other side of town, and the original location of the orchard got turned into a dirt lot. The people from that generation would still have remembered the orchard where the dirt lot used to be, but in 1950 the dirt lot was paved over, and by 1980 it was turned into a shopping mall. Meanwhile the new orchard, now planted across town, continued to be called Orchard Lane as well, such that by 2020 you’d have two places that were called Orchard Lane, perhaps one officially and one unofficially. In another hundred years, the original orchard may be forgotten, but there would be two different locations that—in cultural memory—are called ”orchard lane”. Historians might have a hard time identifying the original orchard that the town was founded upon. In time, the exact story might be lost all together.

I’m not saying this process is exactly what happened with the different locations named Gilgal. There could be many different reasons why there were multiple locations with the same name, but it’s useful to have a sense of why names for locations can change—and especially how their original meaning can be obscured. With the example of Orchard Lane, the original meaning could easily become obscured in a couple hundred years. With Gilgal, we’re talking about locations several thousand years old.

Gilgal and crossing the Jordan River

As with most details of the Old Testament, it’s less important to figure out the exact technical facts about the situation than it is to understand its spiritual significance. Facts, while important, are not edifying unless we put them in a moral framework that can speak to us. Gilgal is a good example of an Old Testament story that is useful in expanding how we think about the world.

Perhaps the most interesting passage about the location of Gilgal is in Joshua, chapters 3-5. Joshua describes Gilgal as the place where the ancient Israelites encamped after they had miraculously crossed the Jordan river. Joshua, the successor to Moses, was leading the Israelites through the desert, when they encountered the Jordan river, which could not normally be passed. The Jordan was no mere trickle of a stream; it was a large river, and at the time it was the flooding season, when the river’s current would have been at its strongest—a non-trivial obstacle in their journey.

Another important part of the story is the fact that the Israelites were traveling with the Ark of the Covenant, a gold-covered chest of wood that contained Israel’s holiest objects: the budded staff of Aaron, the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments, and a jar of holy manna. The ark was one of the major ways in which God was physically present with the Israelites. So, given all these ingredients, what happened in the journey to cross the Jordan?

Joshua chapter 3 gives the full account of how this happened. Joshua instructed the priests who were carrying the ark of the covenant to wade into the water, and when they did, the flow of the river stopped upstream, and all the water piled up “in a heap” (Josh 3:16). The water continued to accumulate upstream as though it were dammed up. Joshua ordered them as follows:

Now therefore, take for yourselves twelve men from the tribes of Israel, one man from every tribe. And it shall come to pass, as soon as the soles of the feet of the priests who bear the ark of the Lord, the Lord of all the earth, shall rest in the waters of the Jordan, that the waters of the Jordan shall be cut off, the waters that come down from upstream, and they shall stand as a heap. So it was, when the people set out from their camp to cross over the Jordan, with the priests bearing the ark of the covenant before the people, and as those who bore the ark came to the Jordan, and the feet of the priests who bore the ark dipped in the edge of the water (for the Jordan overflows all its banks during the whole time of harvest), that the waters which came down from upstream stood still, and rose in a heap very far away at Adam, the city that is beside Zaretan. (Joshua 3:12-16)

The priests bearing the ark of the covenant stood in the midst of the river until all of the Israelites crossed over the now-dry riverbed. But then Joshua instructed the Israelites to do something interesting. While the priests were still standing in the middle of the dry riverbed, and before the waters had returned, Joshua appointed twelve men—one from each of the twelve tribes of Israel—to come into the riverbed, pick up a large stone from the place where the priests were standing, and bring the stones out of the riverbed to the place where the Israelites were camping.

After they had finished, Joshua commanded the priests who were carrying the ark to come up out of the Jordan. As soon as they crossed over onto the shore, the waters of the Jordan flowed back down and filled up the riverbed once again. Then, Joshua took the twelve stones and set them up in Gilgal. Keep in mind that these stones were not small: Joshua tells the twelve men to “take up a stone on his shoulder” (Josh 4:6, my emphasis). Presumably, there were huge stones on the bottom of the Jordan river, and it was with these stones that Joshua constructed a monument. He told the Israelites that this monument would be a memorial for them to remember (and to remind their children) of what God had done.

What does Gilgal mean spiritually?

But there’s more to it than a simple memorial. The very next thing that happened is that Joshua ordered all of the males to be circumcised. Circumcision is an odd thing for modern people to wrap their heads around, and deserves its own discussion, but the short answer is that it was both a kind of physical sacrifice (cutting off a part of your body and offering it as a sacrifice) and a kind of permanent marking, like a tattoo. The reason the Israelites needed another round of circumcision was because after decades of travel through the desert, the generation born in the wilderness had yet to be circumcised, while the old generation—which had been circumcised—had died in the wilderness.

These stories are probably how Gilgal got its name. Following these two events—the Lord miraculously stopping the flow of the Jordan and the circumcision of the males of the tribe—the Lord said to Joshua, “‘this day I have rolled away the reproach of Egypt from you.’ Therefore the name of the place is called Gilgal to this day” (Joshua 5:9). This line employs something of a play on words: that God “rolled” away the reproach of Egypt means that the Israelites were separating themselves from Egyptian influence and re-establishing themselves as their own people. But the stones were also something ”rolled” to make the monument that marked the crossing of the Jordan. And the tools used for the circumcision were “flint knives” (Joshua 5:2)—and flint is of course a type of stone. So there is a double meaning of “rolled away” in its connection to both the stone monument and the stone tools of the circumcision.

But there are two additional layers of imagery if you want to read this passage in a Christian way. First of all, the crossing of the Jordan River is a spiritual symbol for baptism, since it establishes a separation between the old life in Egypt and the new life in the promised land—very like the difference St. Paul makes between the “old man” and the “new man” (Ephesians 4:22-24). That this separation between old and new involves circumcision also lines up with baptismal imagery: early Christians viewed baptism as the new circumcision, taking the place of and fulfilling the role that circumcision previously played as the rite of initiation into the people of Israel. Instead, baptism was the Christian's initiation into the life of Christ.

The second image has to do with the Resurrection of Jesus. God “rolling away” the reproach of Egypt is reminiscent of the way that the stone sealing Christ’s tomb was “rolled away” (Mark 16:4; Luke 24:2) after Jesus returned from the dead—the ultimate image of new life.

This way of reading the Old Testament is how the early Church read it, but it would be a mistake to think that they thought of the Old Testament as “just symbolism,” even if it was symbolism for Jesus. They believed that these ancient events really did happen, but they also believed that real, historical events could have spiritual meaning and cosmic significance. That’s because they viewed the world differently from us: they believed that the physical and the spiritual world were not really separable from each other. This way of thinking was called “sacramental” thinking by the early church (if you’re interested, you can read more about this in my short book, Journal to Reality: Sacramental Life in a Secular Age). Sacramental thought is one of the major reasons that the early Christians kept the Old Testament as a part of their scriptures, even though the Jewish converts of the early church rapidly became the minority. Early Christians viewed history and historical events as having a sacred character: historical events could be prophetic images for things that came later. And when early Christians examined the Old Testament from this angle, they saw image after image connected to the life of Jesus. In sacramental thought, arguing about the factual details of the Old Testament is less important than understanding its true spiritual meaning.