2 Kings 20:20 records that Hezekiah 'made the pool and the tunnel by which he brought water into the city.' In 1880, a boy wading in the Pool of Siloam found the inscription that confirmed it.
In 701 BCE, the Assyrian king Sennacherib marched on Jerusalem. King Hezekiah of Judah had a problem: the city’s primary water source, the Gihon Spring, lay outside the walls. If the Assyrians controlled the spring, Jerusalem would fall within weeks.
2 Kings 20:20 states: “As for the other events of Hezekiah’s reign, all his achievements and how he made the pool and the tunnel by which he brought water into the city, are they not written in the book of the annals of the kings of Judah?” 2 Chronicles 32:30 adds that he “blocked the upper outlet of the Gihon spring and channeled the water down to the west side of the City of David.”
The tunnel is still there. You can walk through it today.
The engineering
Hezekiah’s Tunnel runs 533 meters through solid limestone bedrock beneath the City of David, connecting the Gihon Spring on the east to the Pool of Siloam on the southwest. The straight-line distance is only about 325 meters; the tunnel follows an S-shaped curve, likely following natural fissures in the rock.
Two crews cut from both ends simultaneously, working with iron pickaxes in a passage roughly 60 centimeters wide. The meeting point is visible in the tunnel ceiling: the height drops abruptly, and tool marks shift direction. Amos Frumkin of the Hebrew University, using high-resolution mapping published in Journal of Archaeological Science (2003), confirmed that the tunnel’s path correlates with a natural karstic dissolution line — the geological feature both teams likely followed to navigate toward each other in the dark.
The inscription
In 1880, a boy — reportedly a student of Conrad Schick, a German architect working in Jerusalem — was wading in the channel near the Pool of Siloam when he noticed carved letters on the tunnel wall. The Siloam Inscription is a six-line text in paleo-Hebrew script:
“…while there were still three cubits to be cut through, the voice of a man was heard calling to his fellow, for there was a fissure in the rock on the right… and on the day of the breakthrough, the stonecutters struck each man towards his fellow, axe against axe, and the water flowed from the spring towards the pool for 1,200 cubits…”
The inscription names no king. It records the experience of the laborers — the moment they heard each other through the remaining rock. Paleographic analysis dates the script to the late 8th century BCE, consistent with Hezekiah’s reign (approximately 715-686 BCE).
Where it is now
The Ottoman authorities removed the inscription in 1890. It was transferred to the Imperial Museum in Constantinople (now the Istanbul Archaeology Museum), catalog number 2195, where it remains today.
What the tunnel confirms
Sennacherib’s own account, preserved on the Taylor Prism (British Museum), describes besieging Jerusalem and shutting up Hezekiah “like a caged bird” — but notably does not claim to have conquered the city. The Assyrian account and the biblical account agree: Sennacherib came, besieged, and failed to take Jerusalem.
The tunnel — datable by the inscription’s paleography, confirmed by the biblical text, and corroborated by the Assyrian record — represents one of the cleanest convergences of text and artifact in ancient Near Eastern studies. It is 533 meters of limestone with pickaxe marks, a first-person account of the breakthrough, and a Bible verse that says exactly what happened.