Siloam Inscription

Found by a Boy in the Water

Hezekiah's Tunnel runs about 533 metres under the City of David, cut through solid limestone to carry water from the Gihon Spring, outside the wall, to the Pool of Siloam inside it. People have waded it for centuries. In 1880 a schoolboy exploring the tunnel with a friend slipped in the water a few metres from the Siloam end and, getting up, noticed cut letters on the wall below the waterline. They turned out to be six lines of paleo-Hebrew — the older script Israel used before the exile — in a smoothed panel prepared for the purpose.

Credit for the find is worth handling carefully, because the version usually printed is tidier than the record. The boy told his teacher, the architect and surveyor Conrad Schick, who went back with him, documented the inscription properly, and published it — and it was Schick who became known as its discoverer while the boy stayed anonymous. The name now attached to the boy, Jacob Eliyahu, comes from a claim made years afterwards by Bertha Spafford Vester of the American Colony, who said the finder was her adopted brother. That is the basis for the name, and it is a later recollection rather than a contemporary record.

The text is not a royal proclamation. It is the workmen's account of their own job: while three cubits still remained to be cut through, each man's voice could be heard calling to his fellow through the rock; on the day of the breakthrough the quarrymen struck each toward the other, pick against pick; and the water flowed from the spring to the pool, twelve hundred cubits, with a hundred cubits of rock above the workers' heads. It is one of the longest monumental Hebrew inscriptions known, and among the most human.

Hezekiah's Water Project

2 Kings 20:20 says Hezekiah made the pool and the conduit and brought water into the city; 2 Chronicles 32:30 says he stopped the upper spring of Gihon and brought it straight down on the west side of the City of David, and that he did it because Sennacherib was coming. The tunnel matches that description well — it takes an oddly winding S-shaped course, it was cut from both ends at once, which is what you do when you are in a hurry, and it moves the city's water supply out of an attacker's reach.

The inscription itself, though, names nobody. There is no king in it, no date, no dedication — which is unusual enough that scholars have suggested the workmen cut it themselves rather than an official ordering it. So the connection to Hezekiah rests on the tunnel's identification, the script's date, and the biblical notice, not on the stone saying so.

The Dating Challenge, and How It Was Settled

In 1996 John Rogerson and Philip Davies argued that the letter forms fit the Hasmonean period, some five centuries later than Hezekiah, and that the tunnel had been misdated. Almost every specialist in Hebrew epigraphy rejected the proposal — the script is a good fit for the late eighth century and a poor one for the second — but it was a serious challenge that had to be answered on more than authority. It was: in 2003 a team led by Amos Frumkin radiocarbon-dated organic material in the tunnel's original plaster and uranium-thorium-dated stalactites formed in it, and both methods placed the cutting around 700 BC. The traditional dating is now unusually well anchored for an ancient inscription.

The stone did not fare so well. About ten years after it was found, an antiquities dealer cut it out of the tunnel wall to sell it, breaking it into several pieces in the process; the Ottoman authorities tracked him down, confiscated the fragments, and sent them to Istanbul, where the inscription has been ever since. Israel has repeatedly asked for its return. What visitors see in the tunnel today is the empty scar where it was.

Scripture references

• 2 Kings 20:20 — "He made the pool, and the conduit, and brought water into the city"
• 2 Chronicles 32:2-4 — Stopping the springs so the Assyrians would find no water
• 2 Chronicles 32:30 — Gihon's waters brought down to the west side of the City of David
• Isaiah 22:9-11 — Isaiah on Jerusalem's water works, and on trusting the engineering rather than its Maker
• John 9:1-11 — The Pool of Siloam, the tunnel's outlet, centuries later

Sources

• Holding institutionCity of David: The Siloam Inscription — Ir David Foundation, which operates the City of David archaeological site · Gives the 1880 discovery by a schoolboy, Schick's role and fame, Bertha Spafford Vester's later identification of the boy, and the removal and transfer to IstanbulSupports: The find story, the contested credit and the inscription's present home
• ScholarshipAmos Frumkin, Aryeh Shimron and Jeff Rosenbaum, "Radiometric dating of the Siloam Tunnel, Jerusalem" — Amos Frumkin, Aryeh Shimron and Jeff Rosenbaum · Nature 425:6954 (2003), 169-171 — radiocarbon on plaster organics and uranium-thorium on speleothems, both giving an Iron Age II date · paywalledSupports: That the tunnel dates to around 700 BC, against the proposed Hasmonean date
• ScholarshipJ. W. Rogerson and P. R. Davies, "Was the Siloam Tunnel Built by Hezekiah?" — J. W. Rogerson and P. R. Davies · The Biblical Archaeologist 59:3 (1996) — the Hasmonean redating this section describes and answers. A rejoinder by Ronald S. Hendel followed in the same journal, 59:4 · paywalledSupports: The dating challenge named in section three, cited to the scholarship that actually made it
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Siloam inscription

Further reading

• Wikipedia: Siloam inscription
• Bible Odyssey (SBL): Jerusalem