Everything You Ever Knew About Jerusalem Is Wrong (Well, Almost) - The BAS Library
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Rewriting Jerusalem History

Everything You Ever Knew About Jerusalem Is Wrong (Well, Almost)

By Hershel Shanks

To say that you should throw out all your books on the archaeology of Jerusalem would be going too far, especially since I wrote two of them.1 But it is true that books on the archaeology of Jerusalem, including my own, now contain a lot of misinformation. More bluntly, they are wrong. The lesson: The archaeological story is never finished. You have been told that King Hezekiah built a 1,750-foot tunnel under Jerusalem in the late eighth century B.C. to bring water into the city from the 022Gihon Spring, the city’s only natural water source, which was located outside […]

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Footnotes

1.

If you have missed BAR’s previous articles on Jerusalem’s ancient water systems, you may read them on our Web site: www.bib-arch.org.

Endnotes

1.

Hershel Shanks, The City of David: A Guide to Biblical Jerusalem (Jerusalem: Bazak, 1973), Jerusalem: An Archaeological Biography (New York: Random House, 1995).

2.

See Kathleen M. Kenyon, The Bible and Recent Archaeology, rev. ed. by P.R.S. Moorey (Atlanta, GA: John Knox, 1987), p. 91.

3.

Karst is a geological term that describes an irregular region of sinks, caverns and channels created by groundwater seeping and flowing through underground rock formations. See Dan Gill, “How They Met,” BAR 20:04 (available on our Web site: www.bib-arch.org).

4.

See Hershel Shanks, “The City of David After Five Years of Digging,” BAR 11:06.

5.

See Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron, “Light at the End of the Tunnel,” BAR 25:01 (also available on our web site: www.bib-arch.org).

6.

But it took Harvard Professor Lawrence Stager to point this out to me.

7.

Although the Siloam Channel carried water to the southern part of the city (and the royal gardens), the water could also be siphoned off by a separate short tunnel (called Tunnel III in Louis-Hugues Vincent’s numbering) that connected the Siloam Channel to the pool adjacent to the Gihon Spring. That pool was protected by the so-called Pool Tower that Reich and Shukron have discovered and, presumably, by another similar tower on the other side of the pool. Incidentally, Vincent designated Hezekiah’s Tunnel as Channel I and the Siloam Channel as II.

8.

See Nitza Rosovsky, “A Thousand Years of History in Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter,” BAR 18:03.

9.

See Dan Gill, “How They Met,” BAR 20:04.