CISON (Hebr. Qitān, "tortuous"). — Biblical name of the torrent whose turbid whirlpools rolled the corpses of Sisara’s army, defeated by the troops of Deborah (Judg. 4:7, 13; Ps. 83:9), and those of the priests of Baal slain by order of the prophet Elias near the torrent (1 Kgs. 18:40).
The biblical data apply precisely to the present-day Nahr el-Muqattaʿ, which lies northeast of Mount Tabor, south of Megiddo and the site of Elias’s sacrifice, and west of Hārōsheth (el-Ḥarithīyeh) at the exit from the plain of Esdraelon. The river, which rises west of Tabor and the mountains of Gilboa, is always dry in summer, but during the rainy season, when it receives the torrential waters from the hills of Nazareth and Bethlehem of Galilee to the north and from Megiddo and Carmel to the south, it becomes a marsh and is impassable. Beyond el-Ḥarithīyeh, at the narrow passage linking the plain of Esdraelon to the maritime plain, in the last 10 km of its course (40 km in total), it becomes perennial, fed by numerous springs; yet before
emptying into the sea, slowed by the sand dunes, it forms a lagoon amid thickets of reeds, oleanders, and roses. At Tabor on 16 April 1799, the Arab-Turkish army, routed by the French, suffered in the river’s whirlpools the same fate as that of Sisara.