In 701 B. C.E., in preparation for the Assyrian siege, King Hezekiah equipped Jerusalem with a third water system. Unlike Warren's Shaft and the Siloam
2.10 The inscription from Hezekiah's Tunnel. Courtesy of Zev Radovan/BibleLandPictures. com.
Channel, water still flows through Hezekiah's Tunnel today. The tunnel begins at the Gihon spring and ends at a storage pool (the current pool of Siloam) on the southwest side of the City of David. Hezekiah's Tunnel is a marvel of ancient engineering. It is entirely underground and was hewn through bedrock by two teams of men who started at either end (that is, one team at the Gihon spring and the other team at the outlet end with the pool), as indicated by the cutting marks left by iron tools. The difference in the level of the floor from beginning to end is 30 centimeters — a gradient of just 0.6 percent! Although the tunnel winds back and forth for a distance of more than 500 meters — about twice the distance from the spring to the pool, as the crow flies — the two teams met roughly in the middle. How they managed to do this is still a mystery. According to one theory, the teams followed a natural crack in the bedrock through which water was already flowing. But if this is true, why is the ceiling of the tunnel so much higher at the outlet end than at the spring end (where it drops to under five feet in height)? Why would the workers have expended so much unnecessary effort? Furthermore, false starts are clearly visible in the tunnel — that is, places where the teams began to cut through the bedrock in one direction, but then stopped and continued in another direction — which makes no sense if they were following an existing stream of water.
Why did Hezekiah find it necessary to provide Jerusalem with a new water system when the other two systems were still functioning? According to 2 Chronicles 32:2—4: “When Hezekiah saw that [the Assyrian king] Sennacherib had come and intended to fight against Jerusalem, he planned with his officers and his warriors to stop the flow the springs that were outside the city; and they helped him. A great many people were gathered, and they stopped all the
2.11 The pool of Siloam of the late Second Temple period. Courtesy of Zev Radovan/ BibleLandPictures. com.
Springs and the wadi (or stream) that flowed through the land, saying, 'Why should the Assyrian kings come and find water in abundance?'" (NRSV) This passage indicates that Hezekiah made a new water system because the Siloam Channel lay outside the city's fortifications. Hezekiah wanted to prevent the Assyrians from having access to the water in the Siloam Channel (“the wadi or stream that flowed through the land"). Therefore, he blocked off the Siloam Channel and redirected the water into this new underground tunnel, which carried the excess water from the Gihon spring to a new storage pool on the southwest side of the City of David, an area that was inside a new city wall.
After capturing the Old City in the 1967 Six-Day War, the state of Israel decided to rebuild the ruined Jewish Quarter. In advance of the renewal project, the Israeli archaeologist Nahman Avigad conducted excavations in the Jewish Quarter that brought to light remains of various periods. Because the Old City is a densely built-up, living city, archaeologists rarely have an opportunity to conduct excavations on such a large scale. The remains discovered by Avigad included part of a new city wall built by Hezekiah on the eve of the Assyrian invasion in 701 B. C.E. Avigad was able to date the wall to Hezekiah's time because it was built on top of — and therefore put out of use — houses that were occupied until the late eighth century B. C.E. The wall is so thick (more than 20 feet!) that Avigad called it “the Broad Wall." This wall encircled the western hill and terminated at the southern tip of the City of David. By the late eighth century the settlement in Jerusalem had spread onto the western hill, swelled
By refugees who poured into the city after the kingdom of Israel fell to the
Assyrians. Hezekiah built the wall because the new suburb on the western hill
Was unfortified and therefore vulnerable to attack by the Assyrians.
World History
