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Page 4 of 6
Hezekiah's Tunnel
 From the area of the 3700-year-old towers near the Gihon Spring, we prepare to enter a tunnel dug a thousand years later, in the time of Isaiah.
We shall need flashlights and footwear for walking in water, which will reach at some places up to our waists.
In preparing his revolt against the Assyrian Empire in 705 BC, Hezekiah made a major religious reform, destroying rural pagan cults and centering worship at the Temple in Jerusalem. He expanded the city westward, probably bringing in many rural folk who would otherwise have been in harm's way. It was a period of urbanization and centralization. The strength of the rural clans and extended families diminished. Two units of human existence now became prominent: the nation-state and the individual. The new stress on the individual will be reflected, a century later, in prophecies of Jeremiah and Ezekiel.
Hezekiah did not want to rely on the towers at Gihon to defend the city's water supply. He probably feared, as said earlier, that Assyrian military technology had rendered these fortifications obsolete. The basic problem, we have seen, was the location of the spring within easy range of the Mt. of Olives. He attempted, probably, two solutions, either of which would have sufficed: 1) to lower the level of the shaft known today as Warren's, reaching the spring from inside, as many cities had done by then, e.g., Megiddo; or 2) to dig a tunnel that would lead the water to a point that was protected from the Mt. of Olives.
In any case, Hezekiah's Tunnel was completed in time. Some 533 meters long, it leads the Gihon water to the west side of the spur on which the city was built, invisible from the Mt of Olives. We read in 2 Chronicles 32:30, "This same Hezekiah also stopped the upper spring of the waters of Gihon, and brought them straight below to the west of the city of David."
The Assyrians did besiege Jerusalem, thinking, apparently, that the water supply was still at Gihon and that they would capture it. In 2 Kings 18:27, after the Assyrians have taken Lachish, their envoy comes to Jerusalem and proclaims to its people that unless they surrender they are "doomed to eat their own dung and to drink their own urine." (More)
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| Start of tunnel |
The Assyrians failed to conquer Jerusalem. Hezekiah got off by paying a large tribute. The tunnel is one reason why the Assyrians failed. If they had succeeded, they would have dealt with the Jerusalemites as they had with the northern tribes, dispersing them among their colonies. Like the northern tribes, the exiles would probably have lost their national identity, assimilating to their new surroundings. There would then have been no one to preserve the texts that today make up the First Testament. (The Samaritans did not yet exist.) There would be, today, no Bible, no Judaism, Christianity or Islam. This tunnel, therefore, has a great deal to do with who we are.
After feeling the rush of the spring, we wade through a short, roughly-hewn section, where the water comes up to our waists. A rush of air comes at us from the opening of Warren's Shaft. Then we find ourselves in a long straight section.
From an inscription we'll discuss in a moment, discovered near the southern end, we know that two teams worked from either side, north and south. To judge from the tunnel's winding course, they were probably following water that flowed from one end to the other through karstic fissures, as explained earlier. Else how could each team possibly have known in which direction to chip? There aren't even any air vents: instead, they kept the ceiling high.
After we have waded about 15 minutes, the passage begins to twist and turn, with occasional false starts and corrections. The hewers must have heard each other. Giving up the system they had used till then, each was trying to hack toward the other's voice.
Amid the twists, one can make out a change in height, like a shallow step, in the ceiling. Up to this point, the chisel marks in the sides were made in the direction of our movement. Beyond this point, their direction is against us. This then was the meeting point.
The workers could not have known the full effect of their success on the subsequent history of the world. In breaking through, they shaped who we are.
The achievement seemed important enough, even then, to deserve an inscription, which was carved in the rock near the southern end, in archaic Hebrew letters. A bather discovered it in 1880, when the land was under Ottoman rule. It is in the Istanbul Museum, but a copy appears in the original place on the tunnel wall:
[...when] (the tunnel) was finished. And this was the way in which it was cut through: - - while...] (were) still [...] axes (s) , each man toward his fellow, and while there were still three cubits to be cut, [there was heard] the voice of a man calling to his fellow, for there was a crack [???] in the rock on the right [and on the left]. And when the tunnel was finished, the hewers hewed (the rock), each man toward his fellow, axe against axe; and the water flowed from the spring toward the pool for 1,200 cubits and the height of the rock above the head (s) of the hewers was 100 cubits.
 The tunnel straightens again, and after five minutes or so the ceiling begins to rise, until it is quite high. Apparently, the team that started on the southern end began high on the hill, following water into a karstic fissure, water that the earth seemed to swallow. After meeting the team from the spring, they lowered the floor so that the water from the spring could flow all the way to the chosen place: the Pool of Siloam (Shiloach in Hebrew).
Recently, by the way, geologists took samples from the lowest layer of plaster in the tunnel floor. They found wood in this layer. Carbon-14 tests on the wood returned a date in the First Temple period, which would fit Hezekiah.
We emerge from the tunnel into a pool. Here the Byzantines recognized the Pool of Siloam. It makes sense too that the much earlier pool of Hezekiah's time would have been here. The tunnel, after all, comes out at this point. It is well protected. And, to repeat the passage, "This same Hezekiah also stopped the upper spring of the waters of Gihon, and brought them straight down on the west side of the city of David." (2 Chronicles 32:30.)
This pool's original shape is unknown, but certainly it was bigger than what we see. In the northwest corner stands a pillar. It belonged to a Byzantine church from the mid-5th century. (A church appears at the corresponding place, roughly speaking, on the Madaba map.) Here Christians came to commemorate the miracle in John 9: Jesus smears mud over the eyes of a man born blind; the man washes the mud off at the Pool of Siloam and sees.
But this was not the pool of John 9! After a sewage pipe burst a few years ago, archaeologists had a chance to dig here before the repairs began. They discovered a later pool a few yards to the southeast. The bases of its steps are made of a waterproof cement associated with the Hasmoneans. It appears that Herod re-faced these steps with limestone. By his time the city had its main water supply from elsewhere.
Even the small excavated section of the Hasmonean-Herodian pool testifies to its grandeur. Here are two views, the first looking W:
And this view looks at the pool's NE corner.
This was likely a pool for immersion. It is a good place to read John 9.
On the north, a few yards to the left of the people in the photo above, is a much narrower pool that was probably used for drinking water.
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