Siloam Inscription

Overview

The Siloam Inscription is a text carved into the wall near the southern outlet of a water tunnel that runs beneath the ancient City of David in Jerusalem. The tunnel is commonly called "Hezekiah's Tunnel." The inscription is written in the Paleo-Hebrew script, an ancient alphabet derived from the Phoenician script that predates the square letters used in Hebrew Bibles today. Six lines survive, and part of the opening has broken away. It is considered one of the most representative extrabiblical texts from ancient Israel.

Background

Jerusalem's principal water source is the Gihon Spring, located in the Kidron Valley east of the city. Because the spring lay outside the city walls, its water was difficult to protect during a siege. The Bible reports that King Hezekiah brought the water into the city. According to 2 Kings 20:20, Hezekiah "made a pool, and a conduit, and brought water into the city." Second Chronicles 32:30 records that he "stopped the upper watercourse of Gihon, and brought it straight down to the west side of the city of David." Second Chronicles 32:2–4 also relates that he stopped up the springs outside the city when Sennacherib, king of Assyria, invaded. Many scholars link these accounts, the tunnel, and the inscription to a single construction project and date it to the late eighth century BC.

History

• Discovery in 1880: A local boy who had entered the tunnel is said to have been the first to notice the letters carved into the wall. European scholars living in Jerusalem subsequently copied and deciphered the text.
• Content: The inscription records the final day of the work. Stonecutters tunneling toward each other from opposite ends heard one another calling out while three cubits (an ancient unit of length measured from the elbow to the fingertip) still remained between them. At last the tunnel was broken through as pick struck against pick, and the water flowed 1,200 cubits from the spring to the pool. The text also notes that the rock above the stonecutters' heads was 100 cubits high. It names no king and gives no date.
• Removal in 1891: The inscription was cut from the tunnel wall without authorization and broke into several pieces in the process. The Ottoman authorities, who then governed the region, recovered the fragments and transferred them to Constantinople (present-day Istanbul). The inscription is now held by the Istanbul Archaeology Museums in Turkey. Israel is reported to have requested its return.

Significance and Influence

The Siloam Inscription has become an important source for the letterforms, grammar, and spelling conventions of Hebrew around the eighth century BC. It is also frequently noted that, unlike official inscriptions commemorating royal achievements, it vividly describes the construction from the perspective of the laborers themselves.

Water still flows through the tunnel, and visitors can walk through it. It is a frequent stop on Holy Land pilgrimages organized by Korean churches. The Pool of Siloam, to which the tunnel leads, is also known from the New Testament as the place where Jesus told a blind man to go and wash (John 9:7). For this reason, the site is often presented together with the account of the healing of the man born blind.

Assessment

Most scholars date the inscription to the late eighth century BC, during the reign of Hezekiah, on the basis of its script and language. Because the inscription does not name a king, however, its date has been debated. In the 1990s, some proposed a much later date in the Hasmonean period (second to first centuries BC), but many scholars rejected this view on the basis of paleographic analysis. In the early 2000s, a study reportedly dated plant remains and other material in the tunnel's plaster to around 700 BC. Among believers, the inscription is often cited as archaeological evidence supporting the historical record of the Bible. Some scholars, however, hold that because the inscription itself does not identify a particular king, connecting it to the biblical text remains a matter of interpretation.