Hezekiah's Tunnel and the Siloam Inscription

In 1884, the explorer Charles Warren wrote that an inscription from a Jerusalem tunnel may fit the Bible's account of King Hezekiah's preparations for siege.

Scripture: Now the rest of the acts of Hezekiah, and all his might, and how he made the pool, and the conduit, and brought water into the city, aren’t they written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah?

Jerusalem's main spring, the Gihon, lay on a cliffside above the Kidron Valley, outside easy defence. The Canaanites fortified it, and a tunnel had carried its water since about 1800 BC.

Hezekiah's Tunnel lies in the City of David, in today's Silwan, east Jerusalem. It runs 533 metres, falling only 30 centimetres from end to end.

The Siloam inscription, a text carved in stone, says two teams cut the tunnel from opposite ends and met in the middle. Parts are unreadable now, so it may once have said more.

The tunnel itself shows several directional errors. How the teams met is still not fully understood. Some suggest hammering sounds guided them from above.

Quaresmius described the tunnel in 1625, Robinson explored it in 1838, and Warren in 1865. Neither of the first two linked it to Hezekiah.

The Hezekiah link is a hypothesis drawn from the biblical text. Scientists dated organic matter in the plaster and mineral deposits, and found support. But excavations in 2011 suggested an earlier origin, late ninth or early eighth century BC.

Scripture: The Gihon was already well protected. One scholar, Aharon Horovitz, reads the tunnel as keeping all the spring's water inside the walls, away from besiegers.

Who first found the inscription, and where it is kept today, my sources don't say, so I won't guess. The tunnel itself lies in Silwan.

So the tunnel illustrates the verse, indirectly, without settling every question. May the Lord Jesus Christ be with you today. Follow for more.