 The City Of Jerusalem Today
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Sept. 11, 2003 — Modern science has thrown its weight behind Biblical historians, backing their account of an Old Testament king who drove a tunnel under Jerusalem to ensure water supplies for his besieged subjects.
The underwater aqueduct is known as the Siloam Tunnel or "Hezekiah's Tunnel" in honor of the embattled Hebrew king reputed to have ordered its construction in order to bring water from Gihon Spring, outside the city, to Siloam Pool in Jerusalem's ancient heart.
Historians have long contended that this event is described in two Old Testament texts, 2 Kings 20:20 and 2 Chronicles 32:3,4.
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These recount how Hezekiah (727-698 B.C.) had to grapple with denying water to the besieging Assyrian king Sennacherib, yet also provide water for the besieged:
"When Hezekiah saw that Sennacherib had come, intent on making war against Jerusalem, he consulted with his officers and warriors about stopping the flow of the springs outside the city and they supported him."
"A large force was assembled to stop up all the springs and the wadi that flowed through the land, for otherwise, they thought, the king of Assyria would come and find water in abundance ..."
"It was Hezekiah who stopped up the spring of water of Upper Gihon, leading it downward west of the City of David."
The historical record, however, was only indirect, and no evidence has ever been found that directly links the tunnel to Hezekiah.
Now, however, science has provided powerful backing, thanks to forensic evidence found buried in the tunnel's walls and the latest tools in chemical analysis.
Israeli scientists took samples from a layer of ancient lime plaster that the tunnellers used to line the aqueduct to prevent the precious water from draining back into the Earth.
They found the plaster — since covered with other protective smotherings over the years — included tiny pieces of bone, rare charcoal and ash to bind it, as well as chips of wood and "extraordinarily well-preserved" plant fragments.
Radiocarbon-dating at a laboratory at Oxford University put the age of the wood sample at between 822-796 B.C., and that of two plant samples at 790-760 B.C. and 690-540 B.C. respectively.
That gave a ballpark date of 700 B.C. which also tallied with a radioisotope estimate of an ancient stalactite found in the tunnel's ceiling.
"Our dating agrees well ... with the date commonly assigned to King Hezekiah," the authors said.
"The three independent lines of evidence — radiometric dating, palaeography and the historical record — all converge on about 700 B.C., rendering the Siloam Tunnel the best-dated Iron-Age biblical structure so far."
The study is authored by Amos Frumkin of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Aryeh Shimron of the Geological Survey of Israel; and Jeff Rosenbaum, a postgraduate researcher at Reading University in southern England.
It appears in Thursday's issue of the British weekly scientific journal Nature.
The tunnel itself is a remarkable achievement of engineering.
It runs about 1,749 feet (one-third of a mile) yet was dug with primitive hand tools and without any intermediate shaft, an addition which would have provided air, light, food and water to the toiling diggers and made it easier for them to meet up.
Indeed, a carved inscription — found in 1880 by a young bather in the spring and which is now in the Museum of Istanbul — testifies to this feat of Iron Age tunnelling.
It dramatically describes the moment when two groups of hewers, working from opposite ends of the tunnel, finally met up: "There was heard a man's voice calling to his fellow ... the hewers hacked each toward the other, axe against axe — and the water flowed from the spring to the pool."
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