Chapter 48. Basecamp Gilgal
Geliloth is thought to be a variant name for Israel’s Gilgal basecamp and memorial site that may reflect the polytheist basecamp once located there. Geliloth/Gliyowth means circuit/circuits. Before the age of electricity, “circuit(s)” were understood as “circuit rider(s),” preacher(s) traveling to towns without a church, or as the round made by judges on their travels in their jurisdictions. The circuit term for judges and priests originates in prehistory from pilgrimage circuits/cabab, understood in the time of Samuel as going around in a regular tour:
1 Sam 7:16 And he went from year to year in circuit to Bethel, and Gilgal, and Mizpeh, and judged Israel in all those places.
Gelioth/Gilgal was Israel’s basecamp for the Covenant Land campaign. They returned to Gilgal after traveling through the Valley of the Giants/Rephaim to the Stone of Bohan, a marker used later to divide the territories of Judah and Benjamin. Gelioth is the plural format of gilgal/wheel, which summons imageries of multiple wheel sites. In the same line of thinking, gal is gilgal’s second syllable, meaning heap of stones and derives from galal, meaning to roll away. Gilgal’s orthographical and etymological connections indicates Israel’s chosen name for their basecamp was not just a memorial. The erected twelve stones were arranged in a wheel or circular pattern to communicate a warning to the Canaanites that their religious sites and their cities were about to be overturned into ruinous heaps of stones, in the same way Og and Sihon’s empires were utterly destroyed/charam.
As difficult as the four previous campaigns were, the Covenant Land nations, fortified behind their numerous high-walled city-states, would prove more formidable by virtue of the sheer number of their empires and aggregate multitude, bolstered by the bone-crushing superwarrior Rephaim. Knowing this explains Joshua’s encouraging words before crossing the Jordan River: that God would be with Israel when they entered the dragon’s lair to battle the seven Rephaim-infested Canaanite empires.
