Warren's Shaft

Warren Goes Down, and a Theory Goes Up

C. Warren, a Royal Engineers officer digging in Jerusalem for the Palestine Exploration Fund, found the shaft in 1867 and reported it to the Fund by letter that December. It is a vertical hole about thirteen metres deep, reached from inside the ridge by a sloping stepped tunnel and a curving horizontal passage, dropping to a point near the water of the Gihon Spring. The obvious reading was that the inhabitants of the city could stand at the top and lower buckets, drawing water without leaving the walls.

From that reading a second one followed almost at once. 2 Samuel 5:8 has David, before the Jebusite stronghold, saying that whoever strikes the Jebusites should go up by the tsinnor — a Hebrew word of uncertain meaning, which the World English Bible renders "the watercourse". 1 Chronicles 11:6 adds that Joab went up first and was made chief. If the tsinnor was Warren's Shaft, the story becomes vivid and specific: Joab climbed the water shaft in the dark and opened the city from inside. It appeared in commentaries, study Bibles, tour guides and sermons for a hundred years.

What Is Actually Down There

The first of the two findings that undid the tidy reading is not the excavators' at all, and the credit is worth putting where it belongs. D. Gill, a geologist with the Geological Survey of Israel, showed in Science in 1991 that the shaft is not cut. It is a natural karstic chimney — a flaw dissolved in the limestone by water over a very long time — and the whole underground system is a set of natural karst channels that people adapted rather than quarried. Gill's own conclusion was that the adaptation produced a working water supply; the second finding is what disputes that.

R. Reich and E. Shukron excavated the Gihon Spring and its surroundings from 1995 for fifteen years, and their reading of the cutting is that the tunnel now leading to the chimney's head was not driven to reach it at all: the passage was going somewhere else and broke into the chimney by accident, around the eighth century BC, some three centuries after David. On their account the shaft was never used to draw water — its walls are too irregular for a rope and bucket, and the water at the bottom too shallow.

In place of the shaft they exposed something more impressive. Massive fortifications stand around the spring itself: a Spring Tower of very large stones enclosing the water, a second tower at the pool, and a fortified passage running from inside the city down to the protected spring. On the excavators' reading, that rather than a bucket on a rope is how the city drank under siege, and it is a far better piece of engineering than the shaft ever was. Note the qualifier: as the next section says, the date of those fortifications is itself now argued over, so which centuries this arrangement served is not a settled matter.

So the corrected picture is: a fortified spring with a defended approach; and a natural chimney which, on the excavators' reading, was found by accident and never used to draw water at all — a reading that is itself disputed, as the next section says.

A Reading Its Own Excavators Retired

R. Reich and E. Shukron published their conclusion in Biblical Archaeology Review in 1999, and the article's printed subtitle says flatly that the shaft theory of David's conquest is shattered. That wording is not an editorial flourish beside their piece; it is the subtitle of the piece, under their own byline. That is a strong thing to state about a popular reading, and this app states it, because the people who dug the site are the ones who withdrew it. An article that kept Joab climbing the shaft would be teaching a reading the excavators themselves abandoned, and a reader who later opened their report would rightly wonder what else had been left in place because it made a better story.

It is not unanimous, and there are two dissents rather than one. A. Faust replied in the same magazine in 2003, arguing that the shaft was used to draw water after all: the Parker Mission of 1909-1911 demonstrably drew water up it, a tunnel was cut to bring water to its base, and cutting that tunnel required hauling the spoil out by exactly the means R. Reich and E. Shukron say was impractical. D. Gill, whose work established the karst in the first place, has likewise continued to read the shaft as part of a functioning water system, arguing that it served as a well in the Middle Bronze Age. A. Faust's dissent is not a rehabilitation of Joab: on his reading too the shaft's use is a matter of water supply, and he accepts that it was not exposed until around 800 BC, long after David's conquest. D. Gill leaves rather more open than that, and it is fairer to him to say so. His 1991 paper ends by remarking that "knowledge of the subterranean access may have played a role in David's capture of the Jebusite city" — which is a door held open rather than shut. Note what it does not say: it is about knowing the underground system, not about anybody climbing this shaft, and it is a may rather than a did.

The date of the spring fortifications is itself now in play, and this is a live argument between named specialists. J. Regev, J. Uziel, N. Szanton and E. Boaretto radiocarbon-dated the Spring Tower and concluded that it was built in the ninth century BC — not, as had been assumed for two decades, in the Middle Bronze Age. That would make the tower Judahite work rather than Canaanite, and it would mean it was not standing when David arrived. R. Reich answered them in Tel Aviv in 2018 with three arguments, and all three deserve stating rather than the easiest one: that the dated samples could have been carried in by flooding from the Kidron Valley; that the spot sampled may be an Iron Age repair to an older structure rather than the original build; and — the substantive one — that the tower's cyclopean masonry matches Middle Bronze fortifications at Gezer, Hebron and Shechem and looks nothing like Iron Age II fortification in Judah. That argument is open, and this article does not close it.

And the word itself is unsettled. Tsinnor occurs twice in the Hebrew Bible and has been read as a shaft, a water channel, a fortified passage, a hook, a grappling iron and — on one proposal — a windpipe, making the line an instruction about throats rather than tunnels. The honest position is that nobody knows what David told his men to go up, that the shaft is not a good candidate for it, and that the fortified passage beside the spring is a better one without being a proven one.

Scripture references

• 2 Samuel 5:6-8 — The tsinnor, rendered "the watercourse" — the verse the whole theory hangs on
• 1 Chronicles 11:4-6 — Joab goes up first and is made chief
• 1 Kings 1:33 — Solomon brought down to Gihon to be anointed — the same spring
• 2 Chronicles 32:2-4 — Stopping the springs outside the city, the later solution to the same problem

Sources

• Holding institutionPalestine Exploration Fund — The Palestine Exploration Fund · The body that sponsored C. Warren's Jerusalem excavations of 1867-1870 and published his first report of the shaft in its Quarterly StatementSupports: The discovery, its date and its sponsor
• ScholarshipR. Reich and E. Shukron, "Light at the End of the Tunnel: Warren's Shaft Theory of David's Conquest Shattered" — Ronny Reich, University of Haifa, and Eli Shukron, Israel Antiquities Authority · Biblical Archaeology Review 25:1 (January/February 1999), 22-33, 72 — the excavators' own withdrawal of the shaft-and-conquest reading, and the "shattered" is the printed subtitle of their own article rather than an editorial flourish beside it. Their full report is Excavations in the City of David, Jerusalem (1995-2010), Penn State University Press, 2021. Print and subscription only · paywalledSupports: The natural origin of the shaft, the accidental breach, and the retirement of the Joab reading
• ReferenceA. Faust, "Warren's Shaft: Yes, It Was Used to Draw Water" — Avraham Faust, Bar-Ilan University; summarised by the Center for Online Judaic Studies · Biblical Archaeology Review 29:5 (September/October 2003) — the published dissent from R. Reich and E. Shukron's conclusion that the shaft was never a water shaftSupports: The dissenting case in the third section
• ScholarshipD. Gill, "Subterranean Waterworks of Biblical Jerusalem: Adaptation of a Karst System" — Dan Gill, Geological Survey of Israel · Science 254 (6 December 1991), 1467-1471, doi:10.1126/science.254.5037.1467. The paper that established that the shaft and the passages around it are natural karst features adapted by people rather than quarried. The body of the article is behind the publisher's paywall and was not read here; the closing sentence quoted in section three is from the abstract Science itself deposited with Crossref, which is the whole of what could be checked · paywalledSupports: The natural origin of the shaft, credited to the geologist who established it, and his own closing remark about David's capture of the city
• ScholarshipJ. Regev, J. Uziel, N. Szanton and E. Boaretto, "Absolute Dating of the Gihon Spring Fortifications, Jerusalem", and R. Reich's reply — Johanna Regev, Joe Uziel, Nahshon Szanton and Elisabetta Boaretto; Ronny Reich, University of Haifa · Radiocarbon 59:5 (2017), 1171-1193, doi:10.1017/rdc.2017.37 — the ninth-century redating of the Spring Tower. Answered by R. Reich, "The Date of the Gihon Spring Tower in Jerusalem", Tel Aviv 45:1 (2018), 114-119, doi:10.1080/03344355.2018.1412056. Both paywalled; both records confirmed through Crossref, and R. Reich's three arguments are summarised here from the published abstract rather than the article body · paywalledSupports: Both sides of the dispute over the date of the spring fortifications
• ScholarshipJ. Regev et al., "Radiocarbon chronology of Iron Age Jerusalem" — Johanna Regev, Elisabetta Boaretto and colleagues · PNAS 121:19 (2024), e2321024121. Open access. Its Area C results place the Spring Tower in the tenth to ninth centuries BC rather than the Middle Bronze AgeSupports: The later radiocarbon work on the spring fortifications
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Warren's Shaft

Further reading

• Wikipedia: Warren's Shaft
• A. Faust, "Warren's Shaft: Yes, It Was Used to Draw Water" (summary, Center for Online Judaic Studies)

Reflect

A story everyone repeated turned out not to be true, and the people best placed to know were the ones who said so. What would it cost you to correct something you have taught for years?