Part 15 - Hezekiah's Tunnel & the Pool of Siloam

March 27 - This morning we hired a taxi to drive us to the City of David.  I always thought the "City of David" was just a poetic way of saying "Jerusalem," but that's not the case.  It was the original walled city just south of Mount Moriah that David conquered from the native Jebusites.  This Jebusite city had been built on a long, narrow hilltop.  David built his palace here, his son Solomon built the Temple on the hill to the north, and over the centuries Jerusalem slowly and gradually moved north.  Today, this area lies just outside the southern wall, adjacent to the Dung Gate.

We walked up the hill starting from the Pool of Siloam at the bottom.  In David's day, the city stood on the hilltop, surrounded by walls.  They excavated some ruins near the top, and we listened in as a guide explained how it looked 3000 years ago.  As it turns out, this was a neighborhood for the rich and famous.  And just how did the archaeologists figure out it was a wealthy suburb?  In one of the houses, they found evidence of a bathroom.  Yes, 3,000 years ago, only the elite had bathrooms in their houses.  (In the Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 25b, Rabbi Yosi defined a rich person as "whoever has a toilet near his table."). 

The Dung Gate

From the City of David, this picture views north and east across the Kidron Valley.  It was even steeper in David's day.  There are thousands of Jewish graves on the Mount of Olives awaiting the resurrection

I wanted to see Hezekiah's Tunnel and the Pool of Siloam, both in the City of David.  As you may recall, King Hezekiah tried to appease the Assyrians by giving them a ton of gold and 11 tons of silver, but to no avail.  This is about $100 million in current dollars.  Sennacherib of Assyria sent his messengers to the city walls, and taunted the Israelites.  He encircled Jerusalem with 185,000 men.  But that very night, God sent the plague, and all of the soldiers died.  Interestingly enough, the Greek historian Heroditus has an account of this story which confirms the Biblical account. (See 2 Kings 18, 19)

Hezekiah knew the Assyrians were coming.  All of Israel to the north had fallen, the Jews taken captive and the land wasted.  Hezekiah acted to secure their water source, and to deprive the Assyrians, by diverting the Gihon Spring to a collecting pool inside the walls.  Starting from both ends, workers picked a tunnel through solid rock with hand axes and miraculously met in the middle.  The ending point, the famous Pool of Siloam, lie safely inside the city walls. 

2 Chronicles 32:1  "Sennacherib king of Assyria came and entered Judah; .......... And when Hezekiah saw that Sennacherib had come, and that his purpose was to make war against Jerusalem, he consulted with his leaders and commanders to stop the water from the springs which were outside the city; and they helped him.  Thus many people gathered together who stopped all the springs and the brook that ran through the land, saying, “Why should the kings of Assyria come and find much water?”................  30 "This same Hezekiah also stopped the water outlet of Upper Gihon, and brought the water by tunnel to the west side of the City of David."

We walked the length of the tunnel.  It seemed to go on, and on, and on.  I found out later it was 1,750' long, or about 1/3rd of a mile.  It was pitch black inside, but Denita had a tiny gift shop flashlight that helped immensely.  The tunnel ranged between 5.5' to 6.5' in height, and as we walked our shoulders brushed both sides.  It was about 2.5' wide.  Although not difficult, I would not recommend the trek to anyone who is the least bit claustrophobic.  

When we finally exited Hezekiah's Tunnel, this is where it came out.

The Pool of Siloam was intimately connected with the Feast of Booths.  To kick off this feast, a little ritual was added to the daily burnt offering called the water-drawing ceremony.  As the burnt offering was being prepared, a procession of priest would wind their way down from the temple to the Pool of Siloam accompanied by the playing of flutes and singing.  There, a priest would fill a golden flask with water while a choir repeated Isaiah 12:3: "With joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation" (Mishnah Sukkah 4:9; 5:1). The priests returned to the temple via the Water Gate on the south side of the Temple Mount.  Upon arriving at the Water Gate, a blast was made on a ram's horn. The shofar was used to announce the beginning of the Sabbath, new moons or in this case, the Feast of Booths.

John 9:1.  Now as Jesus passed by, He saw a man who was blind from birth. And His disciples asked Him, saying, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”  Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but that the works of God should be revealed in him.  I must work the works of Him who sent Me while it is day; the night is coming when no one can work.  As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”  When He had said these things, He spat on the ground and made clay with the saliva; and He anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay.  And He said to him, "Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which is translated, Sent). So he went and washed, and came back seeing.

This is the Pool of Siloam as it looks today.  The two row of stones at bottom left is the beginning of the pool as it existed in Jesus' day.

This is a mural, an artists rendition, of what the Pool of Siloam looked like in the first century

The inscription of Siloam - In 1880, a young lad walked up the tunnel from the Pool of Siloam to the Gihon Spring. There, at water level, 18' inside the tunnel, he discovered an inscription that had been chiseled into the side.  It was later cut out of the tunnel wall and cleaned.  This inscription tells, in an abbreviated fashion, of the time when two groups of diggers, who had started from opposite ends, met in the middle.  The six lines of text read:

"and this is the story of the tunnel while ...

the axes were against each other and while three cubits were left to cut? ... the voice of a man

called to his counterpart, (for) there was ZADA in the rock, on the right ... and on the day of the

tunnel (being finished) the stonecutters struck each man towards his counterpart, axe against axe and water flowed from the source to the pool for 1200 cubits. and 100 cubits was the height over the head of the stonecutters"