Hezekiah’s Tunnel
“He said Hezekiah's Tunnel would not be any deeper than my knees!”
I was excited to finally be able to tour through Hezekiah’s tunnel. On previous trips to Jerusalem, I had arrived on a Friday evening at the beginning of the Sabbath and the tunnel would be closed—but this trip was an exception. The tickets to tour Hezekiah’s Tunnel are now purchased in advance at the City of David, Jerusalem Walls National Park, just outside the Dung Gate.
The Bible gives us some information about Hezekiah’s Tunnel.
2 Chronicles 32:2-4
And when Hezekiah saw that Sennacherib was come, and that he was purposed to fight against Jerusalem, He took counsel with his princes and his mighty men to stop the waters of the fountains which were without the city: and they did help him. So there was gathered much people together, who stopped all the fountains, and the brook that ran through the midst of the land, saying, Why should the kings of Assyria come, and find much water?
2 Kings 20:20
And the rest of the acts of Hezekiah, and all his might, and how he made a pool, and a conduit, and brought water into the city, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah?
2 Chronicles 32:30
This same Hezekiah also stopped the upper watercourse of Gihon, and brought it straight down to the west side of the city of David. And Hezekiah prospered in all his works.
What the Bible doesn’t say is that the first step into the water channel in the tunnel is the deepest and that the spring water can be cold.
This is not an adventure for the claustrophic. The walls are narrow and it is not the imagination that the walls are closing in—for they are closing in. The tunnel begins to make s-turns as the channel advances. Then, the ceiling begins to descend as even with my somewhat short 5’5” stature, I had to stoop as I walked through parts of the tunnel to prevent my head from hitting the ceiling.
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I am walking under
150 feet of bedrock.
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What is impressive is the ever-present chisel marks on the walls. The walls aren’t smoothed with time, the walls of Hezekiah’s Tunnel still hold all the chisel marks from workers chipping away at this piece of solid rock 2700 years ago. There is a meeting point where the chisel marks change the direction of their slant as workers were digging from both ends of the channel hoping to meet in the middle.
I had to think about those men that worked so desperately on this project 2700 years ago. Sennacherib was about to lay siege on the City of Jerusalem and in his own words he made claim that he held the city as a bird in a cage.
What he didn’t record was that he never was able to take the city of Jerusalem. The city held out against the superior Assyrian army because they had a water source which was accessible from within the city. That was because Hezekiah had built a tunnel.
“As for Hezekiah, the Judean, who did not submit to my yoke, 46 of his strong fortified cities as well as the small cities in their vicinity, which were without number—I besieged and conquered.... Himself, like a cage bird, I shut him up in Jerusalem, his royal city.... the terrifying splendor of my majesty overcame him, and he sent rich tribute to me in Nineveh.”
A remarkable project, the tunnel was begun from the vicinity of the Pool of Siloam at one end and the Gihon Spring on the other, and by miraculous feat and a number of turns, the two tunnels finally met in the middle.
The inscription was found within Hezekiah’s tunnel in 1880 by a young boy who was bathing in the waters within the tunnel. The Siloam inscription is six lines of Hebrew text identifying how the tunnel was finished.
“[...] the tunneling; and this was how the tunneling was completed: As [the laborers employed] their picks, each crew toward the other and while there were still three cubits remaining, the voices of the men calling out to each other [could be heard], since it got louder on the right [and lef]t. The day the opening was made, the stonecutters hacked toward each other, pick against pick. And the water flowed from the source to the pool [twel]ve hundred cubits, (despite the fact that) the height of the rock above the stonecutters’ heads was one hundred cubits.”
posted by ~serapha~ at 7:58 PM
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