Will King Hezekiah Be Dislodged from His Tunnel?

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It is one of the most famous sites in Jerusalem—right up there after the Dome of the Rock, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Western Wall. And it is also one of the most exciting to visit—Hezekiah’s Tunnel. But is it really his?

The story is well known and oft told. In preparation for the Assyrian king Sennacherib’s attack on Jerusalem, which in 701 B.C.E. came, as the poet Lord Byron said, “like a wolf on the fold,” King Hezekiah of Judah dug his famous tunnel to ensure the city besieged would have adequate water. The city’s only supply of fresh water, the Gihon Spring, lay outside the city wall, so Hezekiah’s tunnelers excavated a remarkable 1,750-foot, S-shaped tunnel under the city that connected the spring to the Siloam Pool on the other side of the city.

Hezekiah’s extraordinary achievement is even recorded in the Bible:

When Hezekiah saw that Sennacherib intended to attack Jerusalem, he planned with his civil and military officers to stop up the water of the springs outside the city; and they helped him. They gathered together a large number of people and stopped up all the springs and the stream which flowed through the land. ‘Why should the king of Assyria come here and find much water?’ they asked … Hezekiah closed the upper outlet of the waters of Gihon and directed them down to the west side of the City of David.

(2 Chronicles 32:2–4)

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This was doubtless one of Hezekiah’s major accomplishments. It is also referred to in the Book of Kings: “The rest of the deeds of Hezekiah, his exploits and how he made the [Siloam] pool and the conduit and brought water into the city are recorded in the Book of Chronicles of the Kings of Judah” (2 Kings 20:20).

I have my own special relationship with Hezekiah’s Tunnel. Forty years ago I went through the tunnel when the City of David was largely deserted. (Today, more than 400,000 tourists visit each year.) An elderly Arab in a robe and keffiyeh sitting at the entrance sold us candles to light our way in the pitch black tunnel. My wife, Judith, took the hand of our 5-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, and I held 3-year-old Julia in my arms as we walked through the water. The kids maintain they still remember their excitement and fear. It was a thrilling experience for all of us.

So far Hezekiah has successfully resisted efforts to dislodge him from his tunnel, but a recent effort may be more formidable.

The September 1996 issue of Biblical Archaeologist, a publication of America’s leading professional organization of Near Eastern archaeologists, raised the question: “What if it’s not Hezekiah’s tunnel after all? … Will a walk through the Hasmonean tunnel still be thrilling?”¹ Two respected scholars, John Rogerson and Philip Davies of the University of Sheffield in England, contended that the tunnel was dug only in the Late Second Temple period. “The bottom line can be simply stated,” they wrote. “The tunnel was not built by Hezekiah but several centuries later.”

Their argument was based largely on an inscription in the tunnel wall discovered in 1880 by boys swimming in the waters of the tunnel. The inscription was incised into the tunnel wall near the southern exit and records the dramatic moment when the two teams of tunnelers digging from opposite directions met in the middle. Vandals chiseled the inscription out of the wall. It ended up on the antiquities market but was seized by the Ottoman authorities, who sent it to Istanbul, where it now resides. Known as the Siloam Inscription, the incomplete text reads as follows:

… breakthrough. And this was the account of the breakthrough. While the laborers were still working with their picks, each toward the other, and 054 while there were still three cubits to be broken through, the voice of each was heard calling to the other, because there was a zdh [perhaps “split,” “crack” or “overlap”] in the rock to the south and to the north. And at the moment of the breakthrough, the laborers struck each toward the other, pick against pick. Then the water flowed from the spring to the pool for 1200 cubits. And the height of the rock above the heads of the laborers was 100 cubits.

Look at the plan of the tunnel: Near the midpoint, it takes little zigzags where the two teams of tunnelers are searching for each other—just as the Siloam Inscription, quoted above, says. They even went in the wrong direction at a couple of points and had to correct themselves to find the other team of tunnelers. We can tell just where the meeting point was because of the change in direction of the pickax marks on the walls of the tunnel.²

Unfortunately the Siloam Inscription does not include Hezekiah’s name. Maybe it was somewhere in the inscription that has not survived. Another suggestion is that his name was never there because this inscription celebrated the tunnelers’ accomplishment; it is they who were celebrating; the inscription, 20 feet inside the tunnel, was never meant for public display. Or maybe the inscription was never completed; the panel for it cut into the wall is only partly filled as if work stopped before the inscription was finished.

The inscription nevertheless provided Rogerson and Davies’s central argument in their effort to dislodge Hezekiah from his tunnel. They analyzed the letters in the inscription paleographically, concluding that the “handwriting” was that of a Hasmonean hand (second century B.C.E.) and not from Hezekiah’s time. It may have looked like the writing from Hezekiah’s time, but in the Hasmonean period this style of handwriting was revived and imitated, although careful examination would disclose that this was the imitation, not the original of the earlier period. So they argue.

Because of the extraordinary significance of Rogerson and Davies’s conclusion, BAR assembled a star-studded group of scholars to respond: Frank Cross and Jo Anne Hackett of Harvard, Kyle McCarter of Johns Hopkins, André Lemaire of the Sorbonne, and Ada Yardeni, Avi Hurvitz and Esther Eshel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Summing up their conclusion, Rogerson and Davies’s arguments were, as one scholar told us, “off the wall.” We titled the section containing BAR’s response to their publication in Biblical Archaeologist “Defusing Pseudo-Scholarship.”^a As Jo Ann Hackett put it, the Siloam Inscription “cannot be a Hasmonean inscription.” Kyle McCarter described Hackett’s analysis as “irrefutable and decisive.” Frank Cross suggested that Rogerson and Davies were like “a tone-deaf musician 055 who wishes to conduct an orchestra.” The other scholars we assembled concluded likewise. Rogerson and Davies never responded to this collection of articles, and no one has defended their position since.³ Hezekiah’s Tunnel was saved!

The next effort to dislodge Hezekiah from his tunnel came in a 2010 article by three geologists (Amihai Sneh, Eyal Shalev and Ram Weinberger) from the Geological Survey of Israel in the prestigious, peer-reviewed journal of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR), known to scholars as BASOR.⁴

The geologists very carefully calculated the length of time it would have taken to dig Hezekiah’s Tunnel. The rock, they noted, was very hard, massive dolomite stone. They consulted local Jerusalem masons familiar with this rock formation to determine how much could be hewed in an hour. They knew the size of the tunnel. They knew the tunnel was dug by two crews working from opposite ends. Based on all of this, they assumed a 24-hour working day with six 4-hour shifts of workers a day. Their conclusion: It took “about 3 years” to dig plus “one year for planning,” or a total of four years.

Therefore this tunnel could not have been the one Hezekiah urgently needed in 701 B.C.E. to withstand Sennacherib’s attack that was obviously coming. The geologists suggest that another tunnel is referred to in the Biblical passage that describes the provisions, including a “conduit,” that Hezekiah made to bring water into the city during the siege. That conduit, they argue, is so-called Channel II, which other scholars consider centuries earlier than Sennacherib’s attack. In the ­geologists’/authors’ view, what we know as Hezekiah’s Tunnel was actually dug by Manasseh (697–642 B.C.E.), Hezekiah’s son and successor. To be accurate, they say, we should be calling it Manasseh’s Tunnel, not Hezekiah’s Tunnel.

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Two leading archaeologists, one Israeli and one American, Aren Maeir of Bar-Ilan University and Jeffrey Chadwick of Brigham Young University, have explained to me why this doesn’t work. The geologists who make the argument know their geology, but they failed to consult the historical records. (Maeir and Chadwick also wondered why this fatal flaw wasn’t picked up by the peer reviewers who assessed the manuscript before its scholarly publication.)

What the geologists ignore—or are unaware of—are the historical Assyrian records. These records reveal that Hezekiah actually had four years to prepare his defense, precisely the amount of time the geologists say was needed to plan and hew the tunnel.

Years before Hezekiah revolted against Sennacherib in 705 B.C.E., other rulers in the west had tried to escape Assyrian domination. For example, Ashdod had revolted in 714 B.C.E. Hezekiah declined to join this revolt, which occurred during the reign of Sennacherib’s father and predecessor, Sargon II. When Sargon died in battle in 705 B.C.E. and Sennacherib assumed the throne, he faced revolts from numerous vassals. Hezekiah soon joined a coalition of states that revolted. He refused to pay tribute to the Assyrian ruler. But for three years Sennacherib was occupied with suppressing a Babylonian revolt in the east.⁵ Only then did Sennacherib turn west. In the words of Johns Hopkins Biblical scholar Kyle McCarter, “Sennacherib sent an army across the Euphrates—his only western campaign—with Jerusalem as its principal target and final destination.”⁶

According to the Bible, Sennacherib’s messengers even taunted the people of Jerusalem: “On what do you trust to enable you to endure a siege in Jerusalem? Hezekiah is seducing you to a death of hunger and thirst” (2 Chronicles 32:10–11). From the wall of Jerusalem, the Assyrian messengers harangued the Judahites in their own language, Hebrew, rather than in the messengers’ diplomatic lingua franca, Aramaic. At one point, Hezekiah’s men asked Sennacherib’s messengers to “speak to your servants in Aramaic, for we understand it. Do not speak to us in the language of Judah in the hearing of the people on the wall” (2 Kings 18:26).

In short, this was not a surprise attack. The attack came in 701 B.C.E., four years after Hezekiah revolted, exactly the time it took, according to the geologists, to build Hezekiah’s Tunnel! Hezekiah could clearly see the attack coming. He surely heard of Sennacherib’s victories along the way. In a famous inscription, Sennacherib brags about conquering 46 of Hezekiah’s fortified cities before coming to Jerusalem.⁷

The bottom line is that there was sufficient time before the Assyrian attack on Jerusalem for Hezekiah to construct his tunnel to ensure that the 057 city would have an adequate water supply during the siege—even if it took four years to plan and hew. (An extended discussion of these arguments by Aren Maeir and Jeffrey Chadwick may be found on our website; see box opposite at bottom.)

Ronny Reich, who excavated this area, questions the geologists’ conclusion on other grounds.⁸ Did Hezekiah’s Tunnel really take four years to dig? The geologists asked masons how much time it would have taken to hew rock like that in Hezekiah’s Tunnel.⁹ But masons use small hand tools; they do not hew with a pickax as the tunnelers did. The geologists should have gotten some experienced hewers with pickaxes to attack the same kind of rock on the other side of the Kidron Valley from the Gihon Spring. They might have gone much more quickly than masons working with hand tools.

Perhaps we should add at this point that Sennacherib’s siege of Jerusalem was unsuccessful. Sennacherib brags that he had Hezekiah besieged “like a bird in a cage,” but he makes no claim to having conquered Jerusalem.¹⁰ According to the Bible, Jerusalem was saved by a miracle; in a single night the Lord slew 185,000 Assyrians encamped outside Jerusalem (2 Kings 19:35).

In any event, we must judge the geologists’ effort to attribute Hezekiah’s Tunnel to Manasseh just as unsuccessful as Sennacherib’s siege of Jerusalem.¹¹

The final and most recent effort to dislodge Hezekiah from his tunnel is also the most formidable. Written by Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron, the team that had been excavating in the City of David near the Gihon Spring for a decade and a half, this recent article maintains that the tunnel was actually dug not by Hezekiah’s successor (as the geologists argue above) but by one of Hezekiah’s predecessors, perhaps as early as the time of King Jehoash (835–801 B.C.E.), in which case it would be Jehoash’s Tunnel.¹² In their words: “An unavoidable historical conclusion of this study is that the hewing of the Siloam [Hezekiah’s] Tunnel cannot be attached to Hezekiah. This project was carried out under one of the Judahite kings who predated him, probably during a period as early as the days of Jehoash.”

(Interestingly, Jehoash [or Yehoash in Hebrew] is the king of Judah who is purported to have written 058 the so-called Yehoash Inscription, charged by some as a forgry and defended by others as authentic and involved in a recent forgery trial that ended in acquittal.^b If it is genuine, it would be the first royal Israelite inscription.)

To understand Reich and Shukron’s argument, it is necessary to understand the complex underground water system emanating from the Gihon Spring, ancient Jerusalem’s only fresh water supply. This had been meticulously explored and mapped in a rogue excavation in the early 20th century known as the Parker Mission. Based on imaginings of the Swedish savant Valter Juvelius, English captain Montague Parker sought to find the tunnel that led to the long-lost treasures of Solomon’s Temple.^c Fortunately, Parker agreed to allow a prominent Jerusalem scholar, Father L.-H. Vincent of the École Biblique et Archéologique Française, to serve as “archaeological advisor” to the mission. Father Vincent was knowledgeable and capable. His maps and plans are precise, detailed, clear and almost always reliable.

Vincent gave Roman numerals to each of the underground tunnels explored by the Parker Mission. Like his plans and drawings, his names for the underground tunnels are still used by scholars today. The most important ones for understanding the argument here are Channel II and Tunnels IV and VI. Hezekiah’s Tunnel is Channel VIII. The beginning point for our exploration is the Gihon Spring (see plan).

All agree that before Hezekiah’s Tunnel was dug, an earlier system transported the waters of the Gihon Spring. The major one is Channel II, an open channel covered with stone slabs, which led the water south along the eastern side of the City of David. Channel II is nearly 8 feet higher in elevation than Hezekiah’s Tunnel. Therefore the tunnelers of Hezekiah’s Tunnel could not have begun at the Gihon Spring; if they had, the water from Channel II would have flowed down and drowned them. As Reich and Shukron put it, “Given that [Hezekiah’s] tunnel is at a lower level, the hewers 059 would have drowned instantly had they begun at the point of the spring proper.”

Reich and Shukron believe they have found where the diggers began—from Tunnel IV.^d Tunnel IV proceeds to the northern part of Hezekiah’s Tunnel from the Rock-cut Pool (excavated by Reich and Shukron) that was part of a huge Middle Bronze Age tower with related channels that was built to conserve and protect the waters of the spring centuries before Hezekiah (more precisely 1750–1650 B.C.E.).

Tunnel IV, as the drawing shows, reaches Hezekiah’s Tunnel not at the beginning but about 40 feet from the spring. At this point the diggers turned west, according to Reich and Shukron, into the northern part of Hezekiah’s Tunnel, hoping to meet up with the team of diggers that were digging from the opposite end.

The final step was to dig from the northern end of Hezekiah’s Tunnel to the spring, a distance, as noted, of some 40 feet. This 40-foot tunnel is designated Tunnel VI. Chisel marks on the walls of Tunnel VI support this view, for they demonstrate the tunnel was dug from west to east, from the northern part of Hezekiah’s Tunnel to the Gihon Spring.

If you’ve followed thus far, the rest is relatively easy. Go back to the beginning of Tunnel IV in the Bronze Age Rock-cut Pool. Within the Rock-cut Pool is the “Round Chamber,” which had already been explored by the Parker Mission. According to Reich and Shukron’s reconstruction, the work on the northern part of Hezekiah’s Tunnel began from Tunnel IV, the beginning of which was in the Round Chamber.

When Reich and Shukron examined the entrance to Tunnel IV from the Round Chamber, they saw a 15- by 19-inch plaque excised on the right side of the opening, a plaque that had apparently been prepared for an inscription. (Vincent saw it too.) At this point, we go back to the inscription near the southern exit of Hezekiah’s Tunnel that was discovered by the boys swimming in the tunnel in 1880. It was engraved on a similar panel cut into the rock. Reich and Shukron suggest that the original intention was to have two commemorative inscriptions, one at the beginning of the tunnel and the other near the end. “For reasons unknown to us,” they admit, “an inscription was incised only on the southern rock plaque.” That there were two plaques, however, does suggest a connection between the entrance to Tunnel IV in the Round Chamber with Hezekiah’s Tunnel, lending support to Reich and Shukron’s claim that the northern part of Hezekiah’s Tunnel began here.

Finally—the coup de grace. Reich and Shukron believe they have pottery evidence that dates Tunnel IV to before Hezekiah’s time. How do they do this? After Tunnel IV and Hezekiah’s Tunnel were dug, no water could flow into the Rock-cut Pool with its Round Chamber. At some point someone built a house here. He apparently wanted his house 060 to be somewhat higher than the bottom of the chamber, so he filled it with debris and wood that actually blocked the entrance to Tunnel IV. Reich and Shukron dug under the house and recovered this debris and wood. There they found a quantity of pottery from the latter part of the ninth century or early eighth century B.C.E. (Iron Age IIa).¹³ When the house was built, Tunnel IV had to have been already blocked and water no longer flowing into the Rock-cut Pool and its Round Chamber; otherwise, the site would have been under water. Reich and Shukron date the house’s construction to the late ninth or early eighth century based on the pottery found underneath it. If this is correct, at that time Tunnel IV (leading to Hezekiah’s Tunnel) must already have been dug. Reich and Shukron say that what we call Hezekiah’s Tunnel must also have been dug before these Iron IIa pottery sherds were deposited here, presumably by the builder 061 of the new house. Q.E.D., Hezekiah’s Tunnel must have been dug before Hezekiah’s time, and the tunnel is no longer Hezekiah’s!

Has Hezekiah been dislodged from his tunnel? The analysis of Reich and Shukron has not yet drawn the analysis of the coterie of scholars who study the puzzles of the Siloam (perhaps formerly Hezekiah’s) Tunnel. But, if the past is any guide, it will surely come.¹⁴

Here’s my suggestion: Tunnel VI and Tunnel IV together comprised an earlier water system that carried water from the Gihon Spring to the Rock-cut Pool (and to the base of Warren’s Shaft), where it could be collected from above. When Hezekiah later decided to dig his tunnel, he began at a point in this earlier water system.

Lending support to this theory is the similar quality of Tunnel IV and Tunnel VI; the quality of Hezekiah’s Tunnel (narrow and straight—just look at the plan) is entirely different. When Hezekiah decided to build his tunnel, a simple blocking wall continued to send the water from the spring to the Rock-cut Pool until the completion of Hezekiah’s Tunnel.

Ronny Reich strongly doubts my suggestion. Tunnels IV and VI are 8 feet higher than Hezekiah’s Tunnel. The water would flow into the tunnel as the workers began to tunnel, quickly drowning them, Reich argues. But a wall could have diverted the water from Tunnel VI at the point where Hezekiah’s Tunnel begins. Such a wall could have been built gradually during the times when the spring did not flow, for the Gihon Spring is (or was) an intermittent spring. Sometimes it did not flow. In some seasons the dry spells were longer. In the mid-19th century, the American orientalist Edward Robinson, who was the first to explore Hezekiah’s Tunnel, reported that Arabs living near the spring believed that a dragon lived beneath the cave in which the spring is located. That is why, they claimed, the water did not always flow. And when Nehemiah returned to Jerusalem after the Babylonian Exile and made his famous night tour around the city (Nehemiah 2:13), he started at the “Dragon’s Spring.” In short, there was enough time when the spring did not flow for a blocking wall to be intermittently constructed so tunnelers would be protected from the flow of the spring water while they dug Hezekiah’s Tunnel.

Ronny is very doubtful. He may be right. What seems certain is that this is just the beginning of the discussion.¹⁵

It is one of the most famous sites in Jerusalem—right up there after the Dome of the Rock, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Western Wall. And it is also one of the most exciting to visit—Hezekiah’s Tunnel. But is it really his? The story is well known and oft told. In preparation for the Assyrian king Sennacherib’s attack on Jerusalem, which in 701 B.C.E. came, as the poet Lord Byron said, “like a wolf on the fold,” King Hezekiah of Judah dug his famous tunnel to ensure the city besieged would have adequate water. The city’s […]