For decades, tourists visited the wrong pool. The real one was buried under a garden, waiting for a broken pipe to reveal it.
John 9:7 describes Jesus healing a man born blind with a specific instruction: “Go, wash in the Pool of Siloam” (G4611, Siloam). The name, John notes, means “Sent” — a translation of the Hebrew Shiloach (H7975), from the verb shalach (H7971, “to send”), referring to the water being “sent” through Hezekiah’s tunnel from the Gihon Spring.
For over a century, pilgrims and scholars identified the Pool of Siloam with a small Byzantine-era pool at the southern end of Hezekiah’s tunnel, built in the 5th century CE. It was always an awkward fit: too small for the ritual immersion the Gospel describes, and too late in date.
The accidental discovery
In June 2004, the Jerusalem Water Authority was repairing a sewage pipe in the Wadi Hilweh neighborhood of the City of David, just south of the Old City walls. Workers broke through ancient stone steps. Archaeologists Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron of the Israel Antiquities Authority were called in.
What they uncovered was a monumental stepped pool — far larger than the Byzantine pool, and dating by coin finds and pottery to the late Second Temple period (1st century BCE to 1st century CE). The pool was trapezoidal, with broad stone steps descending on at least three sides, consistent with a public immersion pool (mikveh-style but larger) designed for large numbers of people.
The location was approximately 200 meters southeast of the Byzantine pool, at the lowest point of the City of David, exactly where Hezekiah’s tunnel would have discharged water from the Gihon Spring.
What the pool reveals
The stepped design is significant. Jewish ritual law required living water (mayim chayyim) for purification, and the pool’s connection to the Gihon Spring via Hezekiah’s tunnel provided exactly that. The broad steps would have allowed dozens of pilgrims to immerse simultaneously — consistent with the pool’s role as a purification site for pilgrims ascending to the Temple Mount during the three annual festivals (Deuteronomy 16:16).
John’s account places the healing at a pool that was a public, well-known landmark — a place where a blind man could be sent and could reasonably be expected to find his way. The archaeological evidence confirms that the Pool of Siloam was not a small cistern or private bath but a major public installation, one of the largest water features in 1st-century Jerusalem.
Excavations also revealed a paved stepped street running from the pool uphill toward the Temple Mount — the pilgrims’ road described by Josephus (Jewish War 5.4.1). In 2019, further excavation by the City of David Foundation uncovered additional sections of this road, confirming a processional route from the pool to the Temple.
The geographic precision of John
John’s Gospel is sometimes characterized as the most “theological” and least “historical” of the four Gospels. Yet John consistently names specific locations: the Pool of Bethesda with five porticoes (John 5:2, confirmed by excavation), the Praetorium (John 18:28), Solomon’s Colonnade (John 10:23), and the Pool of Siloam.
The Pool of Siloam discovery fits a pattern: John’s topographical references, when tested against archaeology, have proven remarkably accurate. Urban von Wahlde of Loyola University Chicago catalogued John’s named locations and concluded that the Gospel reflects detailed knowledge of pre-70 CE Jerusalem — the city before the Roman destruction made most of these landmarks unrecognizable.
The pool does not prove a miracle occurred. It proves that the author of John’s Gospel knew the precise location, function, and name of a 1st-century Jerusalem landmark — and that this knowledge was preserved in a text written, at the latest, within a few decades of the pool’s destruction in 70 CE.