Bible Synapse
Siloam tunnel
Site · c. 700 BC · Assyria and Babylon · also called Hezekiah’s Tunnel
See it on the map and timeline
- Date
- c. 700 BC (the cutting of the tunnel)
- Found
- City of David (Silwan), Jerusalem, 1838. Described by Franciscus Quaresmius in 1625 and explored by Edward Robinson in 1838 and Charles Warren in 1865.
- Now
- At the site (City of David, Jerusalem), Jerusalem
- Passages
- 2 Kings 20:20, 2 Chronicles 32:2–4, 2 Chronicles 32:30
What it is
A channel cut through the rock beneath the City of David, winding for about 533 metres from the Gihon spring to the Siloam pool with a fall of only about 30 centimetres. Two teams cut it from opposite ends and met in the middle, as the inscription found inside it describes; their changes of direction can still be seen. Radiocarbon dates from plant matter in the original plaster, and uranium–thorium dates from mineral deposits, place it in the Iron Age, around 700 BC.
How it connects to the Bible
Kings remembers how Hezekiah “made a pool, and a conduit, and brought water into the city” (2 Kings 20:20). Chronicles adds that he “stopped the upper watercourse of Gihon, and brought it straight down to the west side of the city of David” (2 Chronicles 32:30), to keep the water from the Assyrian army. Most scholars identify the tunnel with this work.
What scholars debate
Some excavators date the tunnel several decades earlier, to the late 9th or early 8th century BC, on the evidence of pottery; others keep the traditional date in Hezekiah’s reign.