David’s adventurous life drew towards its end. An old man at the age of seventy years, the king was nursed by the fair Abishag of Shunem. His fourth son, Adonijah--the two eldest having met violent deaths, and the third being perhaps also dead--was supported by his cousin Joab and by Abiathar the priest. On the rock Zoheleth,[108] beside En-rogel--a precipice visible from the upper city--he slew sacrifices, and proclaimed himself king. The old lion was roused by the news to renew his oath to Bathsheba. Nathan the prophet, and Benaiah the commander who had superseded Joab, were sent with the swordsmen and light troops--two regiments of guards distinguished like those of Assyrian and Egyptian armies--to escort Solomon, on the king’s mule, “down to Gihon.” There he was anointed by Zadok the priest, with oil brought from the tent in which the Ark still abode; and apparently the choice of the place was due to the position of Zoheleth, which was nearly opposite to it on the east side of the Kidron ravine, Gihon being thus in sight of Adonijah’s adherents. The piping of pipes, the shouts of the people, and the sound of the trumpet were heard by Joab and Adonijah as they feasted, and they fled to take sanctuary at the altar.[109] [Sidenote: GIHON] It is here assumed that Gihon was another name of the spring En-rogel, though this is, of course, not absolutely certain. The word means “spouting forth,” and the title is not applicable to a tank, while it recalls the sudden gush of the Kidron spring as already described. Gihon lay in a ravine (_naḥal_), a term which is applied in many passages to the Kidron Valley, as contrasted with the _gai_ or gorge of Hinnom. It is also described as a “source” (_moṣa_), which word is used of the Kidron spring in Hezekiah’s inscription at Siloam. The wall of Ophel, moreover, is said to have run “westwards to Gihon in the _naḥal_,” so that it is clear that this “source” was not on the west side of Jerusalem.[110] In the fourteenth century, it is true, the old map of the city shows the “Upper Pool of Gihon” (at the _Birket Mâmilla_), and the “Lower Pool of Gihon” (at the _Birket es Sulṭân_), but such pools are never mentioned in the Bible, or by Josephus, though the misunderstanding survives even now. The lower of these pools was made by the Germans about 1172 A. D., and it is not mentioned by any writer before that age. Gihon was not a pool or tank, and the term seems most clearly to apply to a source which spouted out at intervals in the Kidron ravine, and which was otherwise named En-rogel because of a water channel down which the stream was led.