Garth Gilmour, Contributor

Gilmour

According to recent reports, the Mayor of Jerusalem has officially requested that Turkey return an object known as the Siloam Inscription that was removed from the wall of an underground tunnel in the city in 1880 and taken to Istanbul.

The request calls to mind Hezekiah's Tunnel, one of the most remarkable features ever to be found in Jerusalem. Indeed, it is one of the most impressive engineering achievements of the pre-technological age to be found anywhere. The tunnel is cut into the hard rock scores of meters beneath the surface of the oldest part of Jerusalem, the ancient City of David. Running for nearly 600 metres, it links the Gihon Spring, the city's only permanent, regular source of water, to a large pool created at the southern end of the city.

The year is 702 BC, Hezekiah is on the throne of the southern kingdom of Judah, some 18 years after the destruction of the northern kingdom and its capital Samaria by the Assyrians. Already king at the time of the northern destruction, Hezekiah witnessed the ruling families being led off to exile along with large numbers of other citizens. Foreigners were brought in from elsewhere, a deliberate policy of the Assyrians to cut the emotional ties between people and their land, so as to discourage nationalistic revolts against their imperial rule.

Provoked the Assyrians

Above are different views of Hezekiah's Tunnel 702 BC.

For those that remained, old animosities were forgotten as refugees migrated south, seeking refugein the southern kingdom of Judah, and particularly in Jerusalem. Many did not make it, instead being taken to work in the olive fields and factories of the Philistines, newly wealthy and powerful again after the Assyrians made Philistia, and their city Ekron in particular, the centre of olive oil production for the whole empire. Within a short time, over a million litres of olive oil a year were produced there, and the labourers were mostly northerners taken into captivity and forced to work at the hands of their ancient enemy, the Philistines.

In these circumstances, one would expect Hezekiah to be smart and keep his head down. But politics, it seems, is never logical and leaders seldom behave sensibly. He provoked the Assyrians by capturing the king of Ekron and jailing him in Jerusalem in the hope of freeing the Israelite captives working there, or at least of lessening the severe burden on them. The Assyrians, far from being uninterested in events in this relative backwater of their empire, came down "like the wolf on the fold" to teach Hezekiah a lesson. No rebellion would be tolerated. Hezekiah, and Judah with him, had to be punished.

This Siloam Inscription from Jerusalem is about 15 inches high and 29 inches wide. It affirms the story in the Bible how King Hezekiah of Judah brought a new water-supply into Jerusalem while the city was under siege by the king of Assyria. It states, "The boring through is completed." This is the beginning of an inscription that was originally written in ancient Hebrew and discovered at the tunnel that King Hezekiah had built. (Source: http://www.bible-history.com) - Contributed

It was to Hezekiah's advantage that he had time to prepare his defences. He strengthened the walls of the city, in some places widening them, in other places enclosing suburbs that had sprung up outside the walls, due to the rapid population growth of the preceding years. He had special storage jars made andstamped with the royal seal, and distributed them to towns across the kingdom where they were filled with essential supplies necessary to withstand a long siege. And, he ordered a tunnel cut in Jerusalem to direct the water from the Gihon Spring and its nearby small pool to the new, larger Siloam pool in the south of the city.

All this is recorded in Isaiah 20:9-11 (and see also 2 Kings 20:20 and 2 Chronicles 32:30), where the prophet berates the king for taking all these steps instead of trusting in God's deliverance. Perhaps we should be grateful, in a perverse way, for Hezekiah's disobedience and his provocation of the prophet to list the steps he took which so nicely confirm the archaeology!

Amazing engineering

Jerusalem Hezekiah's Tunnel 702 BC. - Photo by R. Brabazon

The tunnel itself is an amazing feat of engineering. It is hard enough to imagine how such a feature could be cut through the rock, when the workers knew that an advancing army was approaching the city. But when one considers that the rock they cut through was not the soft and porous limestone that much of Jerusalem is built on, but the hard, impervious dolomite that lay beneath it, the feat becomes more dramatic. Two teams, one at each end, worked toward the centre until amazingly, unbelievably, they met in the middle.

The disputed inscription, now to be seen at the Istanbul Museum, was cut into the rock wall of the tunnel some distance away from the southern end. Its location, in the dark, unseen by any except those who knew of its existence, and the scrawly, unprofessional script suggest that it was not an official inscription deliberately carved for political reasons, but a personal recording of the achievement by one of the men involved in its execution. It describes with great vividness how the two teams worked toward each other, and upon hearing each other through the rock, they became excited and toiled ever harder and stronger until thebreakthrough was made.

That would be amazing enough, but there is more. Geologists working in the tunnel have now learned that while the water flows from north to south, originally the slope was the other way, from south to north. After the two teams had toiled so hard, under such pressure of time and national emergency, to make the breakthrough, a third team then had to recut the floor of the tunnel to reverse the slope, so that the water flowed from the spring in the north to the pool in the south. Remarkably, the slope of the floor over 550 metres is only 32 centimetres, or about 13 inches.

While the politicians may bicker over the ownership of the inscription and where it should be displayed, let us take our hats off to those ancient engineers and workers who created the stunning tunnel that it describes and commemorates.

Dr. Garth Gilmour is a biblical archaeologist based at the University of Oxford. Send feedback to mark.dawes@gleanerjm.com