Endnote 17 – How Water Tunnels Worked

A secondary cutting of the upper stairs would explain why they appear less worn than those of the stepped tunnel to the spring in spite of the fact that the pool appears to predate the stepped tunnel and yet to have been still in use right up until the city’s destruction at the end of the Iron Age. There is a further reason to suggest that the upper shaft may have been originally a reservoir. The Hebrew word identifying the early 10th century installation at Gibeon in 2 Samuel 2 and translated “pool” (berekah) seems to be used elsewhere in the Bible for places where water is collected: basins into which water flows, natural pools in which rain water collects and so forth, for instance Isaiah 22:9, 11; Ecclesiastes 7:5. I find no place where the meaning is clearly a source of water or a place from which water flows. One verse is particularly striking. In Nahum 2:8 the prophet writes, “Nineveh is like a pool (berekah) whose waters run away.” The implication, of course, is that the waters should not run away from a berekah: they should be held by it.