page_title: Siloam tunnel
section_title: Discovery and interpretation
hierarchical_section_title: Siloam tunnel / Discovery and interpretation
caption_attribution_description: Hezekiah's Tunnel נקבת השילוח
context_page_description: The Siloam Tunnel, also known as Hezekiah's Tunnel, is a water channel that was carved beneath the City of David, located in the Arab neighborhood of Silwan in eastern Jerusalem, in ancient times. Its popular name is due to the most common hypothesis that it dates from the reign of Hezekiah of Judah and corresponds to the "water works" mentioned in 2 Kings 20:20 in the Hebrew Bible. According to the Bible, King Hezekiah prepared Jerusalem for an impending siege by the Assyrians, by "blocking the source of the waters of the upper Gihon, and leading them straight down on the west to the City of David".
  Support for the dating to Hezekiah's period is derived from the Biblical text that describes construction of a tunnel and to radiocarbon dates of organic matter contained in the original plastering. However, the dates were challenged in 2011 by new excavations that suggested an earlier origin in the late 9th or early 8th century BC.
  The tunnel leads from the Gihon Spring to the Pool of Siloam. If indeed built under Hezekiah, it dates to a time when Jerusalem was preparing for an impending siege by the Assyrians, led by Sennacherib.
context_section_description: The tunnel was first described in modern times by Franciscus Quaresmius in 1625. It was later explored in 1838 by the American biblical scholar Edward Robinson, and in 1865 by Charles Warren.
  Neither Quaresmius nor Robinson identified the tunnel with Hezekiah, but in 1871 Warren suggested that the Pool of Siloam may have been "dug by King Hezekiah" and in 1884 following the discovery of the Siloam inscription wrote that: "The inscription thus appears to belong to the later period of the Hebrew monarchy, and may very well be considered to agree with the Biblical account of Hezekiah's preparations for Sennacherib's siege."
caption: Tunnel in 2010
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