City of David, Israel
The two teams pressed on through the darkness—one team consisting
a crew of desperate men, frantically swinging hammers upon stone chisels as
they attempt to carve a tunnel out of the bedrock beneath the city—the other, a
class of eager college students armed with headlamps and digital cameras
playing follow-the-leader through the very same tunnel nearly 2,700 years
later.
For my classmates and I preparing to enter the tunnel, this
was a passage of exploration and adventure, a reliving of a vivid history. But
for the men with the chisels preparing to dig the tunnel, this was a daring
undertaking that held the city, the king, and the rest of the country on its
metaphorical shoulders.
The year is about 700 BC. The ancient city of Jerusalem is
in danger of attack—Sennacherib and the Assyrians are coming. The city is
defensible on nearly all sides, except for one major drawback—the city’s
natural water source, the Gihon Spring, is outside the city walls on the east
side. An attacking force could easily capture the spring once the city closes
its gates during a siege. A city surrounded without water is a dead city.
King Hezekiah knows this. As the Assyrians make their way
towards Jerusalem to drive the final nail in Judah’s coffin, Hezekiah prepares
his capital city for war. He reinforces the walls surrounding the Temple mount
and the western hill of the city with a wall that stands 8 meters high (26
feet) and 7 meters thick (23 feet). But it will take more than just brute
strength and a lot of rocks to keep the spring and the water out of enemy
hands.
As the horde of Assyrians draws near, Hezekiah launches a daring
attempt to save the water supply—he decides to divert the water from the Gihon
Spring (on the eastern edge of the city) to the Siloam Pool on the southern end
of the city via underground tunnel
aqueduct.
Cold water from the spring—liquid gold 2,700 years ago—ran
over my dusty feet, rushing into the dark tunnel before me. The anticipation of
undertaking this historical subterranean experience was apparent in every
excited whoop and yell that the class let out as we started our descent. But
one can only imagine the sense of immediacy and urgency burning within men
assigned to cut this life-giving path into the rock.
Our voices reverberated through the tunnel as our headlamps
pierced the thick darkness. In the artificial light, chisel marks could still
be seen on the damp, narrow walls. The tunnel itself was small and slender,
three feet wide and about five feet high; just enough space for a grown man to
crouch through. It was clear from the dimensions of the tunnel that these men had
been hasty in their efforts—water was the priority and time was of the essence.
For the next twenty minutes our class of thirty-two crouched and ran through
the space between rocks with nothing but the light of our lamps before us and
the rushing of the water at our feet.
Unlike our singular stream of bodies that moved in one
direction with the current, King Hezekiah had commissioned two separate teams
to accelerate the tunneling process: one team starting from the spring to the
east and the other at the Pool of Siloam to the south, digging towards each
other. The teams could hear voices through the rock as they neared each other
and attempted to connect the two tunnels. From a hundred feet deeper in the
tunnel, our guide informed us that here, where the chisel marks abruptly
changed directions, was where the two teams had met in the middle, connecting
water from the spring of Gihon to the pool of Siloam. Fresh water rushed into
the Pool, giving a city under siege a fighting chance to live another day.
Thirty minutes after going into the depths of the rock
beneath the city, we emerged out of the darkness into the Israeli sunshine on
the other side of the city. Hezekiah’s 1,750-foot tunnel, chiseled by hand
under the direst of circumstances, still stands and still works. The
2,700-year-old tunnel has been converted into a tourist attraction today but
the water continues to flow and the incredible history still lives within its
dark, damp walls.
Two teams surfaced from the tunnel. One team created it
while the other team relived its origins; but now both are witnesses to the
miracle that once brought waters of life to a city on the edge of extinction.
