THE POOL OF SILOAM DATED FROM about 700BC when the Assyrian King Sennacherib besieged Jerusalem. Hezekiah, the then King of Judah, in view of the Assyrian threat, had built a tunnel to ensure Jerusalem’s water supply, since the only source of fresh water at this time was the Gihon Spring in the Kedron Valley. In those times the task of building a tunnel under the crest of the hill on which the City of David sat was a major undertaking.
Two teams of tunnellers had worked from opposite ends to meet in the middle and an inscription was carved in the tunnel wall to commemorate the feat. Hezekiah’s tunnel is over five hundred metres long and allowed water to flow from the spring to the Pool of Siloam at the other end, today visitors can walk through it.
Why Hezekiah’s tunnel follows a meandering path in unclear, perhaps its builders used natural pre-existing openings in the rock that facilitated the work of the miners explaining the winding path of the two tunnels before they met. There is also the question of ventilation and lighting, since the miners worked by oil lamps which at the tunnelling work had to be ventilated to supply air for both the men and the lamps.
The Pool of Siloam from Hezekiah’s time mentioned in the Bible has not been found, but another that existed at the time of Jesus was by the archaeologists Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron who were working nearby the Gihon Spring where Hezekiah’s Tunnel begins.
A sewer pipe running from the west of the City of David into the Kedron Valley was in the course of repair. The work was watched by the archaeologist Eli Shukron who saw two stone steps uncovered by the excavators. The worked was immediately halted and Shukron called in his colleague Ronny Reich who identified the steps as part of the Pool of Siloam from the Second Temple period. With the authorisation of Israeli Antiquities Authority the site was excavated by archaeologists and a large part of the structure was revealed. The pool would have varied in size depending on the level of the water and the area excavated shows that the pool would have been more than sixty metres wide with the steps on at least three sides of the pool. The pool appears to have had a trapezoidal form, but the exact length is not known at this time.
Coins were found in the plaster that covered part of the steps these were minted under Alexander Jannaeus a Hasmonean king who reigned from 103 to 76 BC, so it could be assumed that the pool was built in the late Hasmonean or early Herodian periods. Then they found a number of coins from the period of the First Jewish Revolt between 66 and 70AD. So it could be concluded the pool was in use from at least 103BC to 70AD, after which the pool fell into disuse and was slowly submerged under a thick layer of mud.
In the fourth century, the Byzantines assumed the Pool of Siloam referred to in the New Testament was at the end of Hezekiah’s Tunnel, so they built a pool and a commemorative church where the tunnel emerges from the rock.
What was the function of the Pool of Siloam, during the time of Herod pilgrims came to Jerusalem for the Passover, Weeks and Tabernacles? It is possible that they camped in the Kedron Valley where drinking water was supplied from the pool. In addition this water would have been suitable for ritual bathing as it is naturally flowing spring water as required by Jewish law for purification.
Reich and Shukron discovered a fortification surrounding the Gihon Spring which they date to the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries BC, which was connected to underground tunnels leading into the Jebusite city. They believe that there was an underground water system that connected the Gihon Spring with Jebusite Jerusalem.
It was in October 1867 when Charles Warren of the Palestine Exploration Fund and his assistant Sergeant Birtles crawled through a chamber connecting the Gihon Spring with what would later be called Hezekiah’s Tunnel. From the tunnel they climbed a vertical shaft to a horizontal passage which, although filled with debris, connected the vertical shaft with the surface above. The vertical shaft has since been known as Warren’s Shaft.
Who built the water system and the cisterns is a major question. The water systems at other sites such as Megiddo, Gibeon and Hazor have been all dated to the tenth century BC at the latest. There is no proof that the water system was Jebusite, that is to say belonging to Canaanite Jerusalem.
Some archaeologists believe that the cisterns were originally natural openings and fissures, in other words not man made, that is to say they existed long before the site was occupied by man. The rock is a mixture of karstic or limestone and softer rock. Rain water forms acid in contact with the rock and eats into over geological time forming caves and crevices. In addition the natural drainage of rainwater flowing over the surface of this rock cuts channels in the softer with time. This has led archaeologists to suspect that the original hydraulic system and its cisterns are much older than had been previously thought.
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The Legacy of Solomon Page 66