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. 

In any case, Hezekiah's Tunnel was completed in time. (Recent chemical tests have confirmed a dating to the late 8th century BC.) Some 533 meters long, the tunnel leads the Gihon water to the west side of the hill, whose end is high enough to protect it from archers on the Mt. of Olives to the east. "It was Hezekiah," we read in 2 Chronicles 32:30, "who blocked the upper outlet of the Gihon spring and channeled the water down to the west side 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 drink their own urine." (More)

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' Shaft.

From an inscription found in the tunnel, we know that two teams worked from either end. 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 work? There aren't even any air vents: instead, they kept the ceiling high. Where the twists and turns begin, 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. A bather discovered it in 1880, when the land was under Turkish rule. The original is in the Istanbul Museum:

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 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).

We emerge from the tunnel (don't bunk your head!) into this pool, or what remains of it. This was the safer place inside the city: the high wall on the east side is banked against the natural hill, which hid and protected the pool. Its 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, which rose above the pool to the north of us. (A church appears at the corresponding place, roughly speaking, on the Madeba 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. It is clear from a pilgrim's account, as Murphy O'Connor (p. 114) points out, that they did not know about the tunnel joining the Gihon Spring with this pool. They thought, as did Josephus (War 5:145) before them, that Siloam was an independent spring.