EN-ROGEL ĕn rō’ gel (עֵ֥ין רֹגֵֽל, meaning spring of the fuller, foot, or spy). A spring just S of Jerusalem in the Kidron Valley.

Today En-rogel is connected with Bir Ayyub (The Well of Job) where a gasoline-powered pump brings up the water which in olden times came up of itself. The one other source of water in E Jerusalem, ’Ain sitti Miriam (Spring of the Lady Mary) or The Virgin’s Fountain, has also been a suggested identification but is a less likely candidate. They are within a few hundred ft. of each other. The latter is now thought to be the Gihon Spring of 1 Kings 1:33 et al., which necessitates its being a different place than En-rogel.

En-rogel first appears in Joshua 15:7 and 18:16 as being on the boundary between the tribes of Judah and Benjamin. It was at En-rogel that Jonathan and Ahimaaz, two of David’s spies, stayed during Absalom’s rebellion (2 Sam 17:17). From that point just S of the city of David they could report to David what a maidservant told them, since they themselves could not enter the city.

En-rogel was mentioned again as the coronation site during the attempted usurpation of the kingdom by Adonijah, who sacrificed animals “by the Serpent’s Stone (Zoheleth KJV), which is beside En-rogel” (1 Kings 1:9). The identification of such a “stone” is uncertain and thus it is no help in determining absolutely which source of water was En-rogel.

Bibliography J. Simons, Jerusalem in the OT (1952), 48f.