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How Hezekiah’s Tunnelers Met

By Hershel Shanks

I’ve been writing about Hezekiah’s Tunnel for 35 years. (I can be seen with a long beard standing in my undershorts up to my hips in water in the picture of Hezekiah’s Tunnel in the standard archaeological encyclopedia of the Holy Land;1 the photo was taken in 1972.) A trip through the tunnel—from the first foot into the water, bending down to navigate a less-than-5-foot ceiling, finding the place where the two crews of tunnelers met, exploring the “false” tunnels, examining the place where the famous Siloam Inscription was carved, looking up at the ceiling nearly 17 feet […]

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Footnotes

1.

Dan Gill, “How They Met: Geology Solves Long-Standing Mystery of Hezekiah’s Tunnelers,” BAR 20:04.

2.

See Neil Asher Silberman, “In Search of Solomon’s Lost Treasures,” BAR 06:04.

3.

Jo Ann Hackett, Frank Moore Cross, P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., Ada Yardeni, André Lemaire, Esther Eshel and Avi Hurwitz, “Defusing Pseudo-Scholarship: The Siloam Inscription Ain’t Hasmonean,” BAR 23:02.

4.

The maximum overburden above the tunnel is 100 cubits (about 170 feet), but the overburden above the area of the meeting point is between 25 and 80 feet.

Endnotes

1.

S.V. “Jerusalem,” The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1993), vol. 2, p. 710.

2.

James B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, third edition, with supplement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969) p. 88.

3.

The most recent suggestion, by Amos Frumkin and Aryeh Shimron, is that zdh refers to a false echo as the two teams were trying to find each other. This accounts, in their view, for the hewing deviations.

4.

Henry Sulley, Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund (1929), p. 124.

5.

Ruth Amiran, Qadmoniot 1 (1968), p. 13 (Hebrew). See also, Arie Issar, “The Evolution of the Ancient Water System in the Region of Jerusalem,” Israel Exploration Journal 26 (1976), p. 130.

6.

Dan Gill, “Subterranean Water Works of Biblical Jerusalem: Adaptation of a Karst System,” Science 254 (1991), p. 1467.

7.

Amos Frumkin and Aryeh Shimron, “Tunnel Engineering in the Iron Age: Geoarchaeology of the Siloam Tunnel, Jerusalem,” Journal of Archaeological Science 33 (1976), p. 227. See also Amos Frumkin, Aryeh Shimron and Jeff Rosenbaum, “Radiometric Dating of the Siloam Tunnel, Jerusalem,” Nature 425 (2003), pp. 169–171.

8.

Hershel Shanks, Jerusalem—An Archaeological Biography,” (New York: Random House, 1995), p. 91. See also Ronny Reich and Eli Shimron, “Reconsidering the Karstic Theory as an Explanation of the Cutting of Hezekiah’s Tunnel in Jerusalem,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 325 (2002), p. 75.