Written by Stephen Langfur
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Page 3 of 6
How the Jerusalemites Defended their Water 3700 Years Ago
We have noted the vulnerability of Jerusalem's spring, the Gihon: an army on the Mt. of Olives, across the narrow Kidron Valley, could make things most unpleasant for anyone going to the spring. How did the first Jerusalemites come to grips with this problem? First, here is an overview of the eastern slope above the spring, as seen from the north.
Note again the vulnerability of the spring. (Silwan on the Mt. of Olives continues outside the picture toward us, so that it is directly opposite the spring.) In the 18th century BC, the Middle Bronze Age, the Jerusalemites built their city wall on the slope above the spring. They also made a water shaft (today called Warren's), which began higher up, inside the wall. We shall now study these things in detail.
We head south from the area of the citadel (Area G) until a staircase appears on our left. We descend it, passing the entrance to Warren's Shaft, until, two-thirds of the way down the slope, we find an assemblage of stones on our left (north of us). They belonged to an earlier wall, probably part of a tower.
Based on the pottery associated with these stones, Kathleen Kenyon dated this wall to the 18th century BC. (Later Yigal Shiloh found more of it in Area E to the south.) The stones are large, such as only a giant can move, one might think. Such construction is therefore called cyclopean, after a famous giant in Homer's Odyssey. One may also see it at Shechem in a wall that also dates to this period. (The modern terraces above this wall are recent, built to prevent collapse, but there must have been ancient terraces here as well.) One can imagine David on the roof of his palace above, glancing down and catching sight of Uriah the Hittite's wife.
It is no accident that we had to pass the opening of Warren's Shaft in order to reach this point. We now climb back up to it. (We shall use the word "shaft" to mean the entire underground tunnel, not just the vertical opening at its end. Charles Warren, an intrepid British explorer, discovered and cleared it in 1867.)
The first Jerusalemites, we have seen, had a problem in reaching the Gihon Spring during a siege. They solved this in the 18th century BC, that is, at the time they built the wall we just visited. The idea was to gain access to the spring from inside the city. That explains the placement of the wall and the shaft: both were part of one plan. Karstic processes had already done much of the work: there are many karstic holes in this limestone hill. (On karst.) That is, rainwater picking up carbon dioxide formed carbonic acid, which over a long period dissolved parts of the limestone. The process had probably created caves, joined by fissures, such that water draining into a fissure above came out below near the spring. (By throwing straw into the water, one could trace it.) The early Jerusalemites would have followed the water with their hammers and chisels.
We descend into the shaft. When we reach the bottom of the steps, where the route becomes more horizontal, we are at the point where two teams of hewers met about 3700 years ago, one coming from above and one from the spring; they had followed the water and broadened the karstic openings.
 We continue, and we begin to notice a difference in the shading of the bedrock on the sides. There is an upper layer of soft white limestone, called meleke (royal) because of its high quality, and there is a lower layer of harder, darker dolomite on which we are walking. Only during the most recent excavation by Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron, conducted since 1997, have archaeologists come to realize that the original shaft was dug only through the soft white stone of the upper layer. In other words, when Jerusalemites went to fetch water 3700 years ago, they did not walk where we are walking: they were higher; the top of the dolomite layer served as their floor. We can see this when we come to what used to be the end, for here we find a ladder. Climbing it, we shall enter a passage which, 3700 years ago, was simply the continuation of the Canaanite tunnel. The person who took the picture on the right was standing in this passage. It led, we shall see, to the water of the Gihon Spring.
Before we climb the ladder, however, we must answer the question: who deepened the shaft into the harder, darker stone… and why? The answer lay partly in the passage we shall reach with the ladder. On its floor, Reich and Shukron found a thick deposit of stone chips from the harder dolomite layer, but none from the soft white meleke. They also found sherds of oil lamps from the 8th century BC. But why were they digging? Preparing Hezekiah's revolt against Assyria, they probably did not want to rely on the thousand-year-old Canaanite system of pool and towers. These would have seemed vulnerable in the light of Assyrian military technology, which included a capacity to construct huge ramps and to pick the stones from a wall, as seen in the Lachish reliefs. The Jerusalemites would have wanted a seamless tunnel directly to the spring, as at Gibeon, Gezer, Megiddo and Hazor. In the course of the work, they cut across a karstic opening that descended vertically 40 feet to the water (but they hewed beyond it). The 19th-century explorers saw a metal hook above this opening, so placed that from it one could lower a bucket without impediment to a canal containing water from the spring. This system, however, would have taken too long to supply the whole population. The ultimate answer was an alternative project: Hezekiah's tunnel. It led the spring water to a spot within the city walls on the southern end, at a place protected from Assyrian spears and arrows.
We climb the ladder and at once find, on our left, the opening into a gate 3700 years old. It led to a fortified
area surrounding the Gihon Spring, the city's sole water source. The walls were 10 feet thick. Inside, on its stone floor, Reich and Shukron found sherds from the 18th and 17th centuries BC. (Reich and Shukron , p. 30.) They found similar sherds between the bedrock and the lowest course of stones. This gate, then, was built at the same time as the city wall that Kenyon discovered: the entire system (wall, shaft, and gate) was of a piece.
The Gihon Spring was contained within a huge tower, discovered by Reich and Shukron. They had been summoned to perform what is called a "rescue dig," which is obligatory before one may build in this part of Jerusalem. (The plan had been to erect a Visitors' Center.) In the course of a routine probe, they discovered the tower's inside corner. The tower protected the spring and the passage to it against attacks from the Mt. of Olives, which is a stone's throw to the east. It was made of cyclopean stones, and it dates to 3700 years ago.
Nearby to the south, the Canaanites also dug a reservoir. At some point this was deepened to meet a conduit that was cut from the Gihon. Grooves in the side of its northern rock face (almost 30 feet high) suggest that wooden platforms were inserted. People would have stood on them to draw water.
The conduit from the Gihon split into two, one part to the reservoir, the other to a channel. This channel (once wrongly attributed to Solomon) extended along the edge of the hill. The northern part was cut from above, and the opening was filled with stones too big to fall in. The southern part was dug as a tunnel. Since the Spring Tower was built over its conduit, it must have been cut before that was built, perhaps only shortly before, as part of the whole system.
In antiquity the Gihon gushed intermittently: the word Gihon means gusher. (The rock was later cut in such a way that it would provide a steady flow.) The area around the spring bore, in David's time, the name Gihon. The Bible refers to Gihon as a place: "to Gihon," "in Gihon." When David's son Adonijah had himself anointed king near Ein Rogel, a less regular spring just south of the city, David countered by commanding that Solomon be placed on his (David's) own mule and anointed "in Gihon." (Cf. Zechariah 9:9 .) Solomon probably had the Spring Tower before him, by then 700 years old.
The system may also be related to David's conquest of the city, which then belonged to the Jebusites. In 2 Samuel 5:8 of the American Standard Version, we read:
David said on that day, “Whoever strikes the Jebusites, let him get up to the watercourse, and strike the lame and the blind, who are hated by David’s soul.” Therefore they say, “The blind and the lame can’t come into the house.”
A more literal translation would go as follows:
And David said on that day, "Everyone who strikes a Jebusite v'yigga (and touches) the tzinnor (water duct?)… and the lame and the blind are hated of David's soul, which is why it is said that the lame and the blind shall not enter the house."
There may be a lacuna in the passage. We are not sure what tzinnor meant in Biblical Hebrew, although at a later time it came to mean water pipe. In 1 Chronicles 11:6 we read,
David said, “Whoever strikes the Jebusites first shall be chief and captain.” Joab the son of Zeruiah went up first, and was made chief.
It is tempting to think that the military challenge was literally to touch the water shaft. In order to do so, the army would have had to conquer the old tower guarding the spring and the pool. It would not have been necessary to fight more deeply into the city. Merely by holding the area of Gihon, one would force a capitulation. That may well be what transpired, because there is an indication that Jebusites continued to live in or near the city, at peace with the Judahites, after David's conquest: David later bought a threshing floor from Ornan the Jebusite on the peak of the same hill, which was destined to become the Mountain of Yahweh.
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