Archaeologists in Jerusalem’s City of David have unearthed a massive ancient structure that sheds new light on the pages of the Bible, once again pointing to the truth of the biblical account. CBN’s Raj Nair spoke with Danny “the Digger” Herman from Israel for more about the discovery.
RAJ NAIR: So, Danny, before we get into why this is so significant, what is it?
DANNY HERMAN: Well, in one word, a dam. It’s a massive wall at the southern end of the City of David, where the New Testament places the Pool of Siloam, but the origins of the Pool of Siloam go back to the First Temple period and have always been attributed to King Hezekiah.
King Hezekiah was facing a critical threat on his kingdom and his city. The Assyrians were on their way, so he dug a channel that took the water safely from the Gihon Spring to the southern end, where the water accumulated. And that system was still in use in the time of Jesus, so that’s where he later performed a miracle as recorded in the Gospel of John.
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Now, for many, many years, everyone thought that the Pool of Siloam is at a different end of that channel, but I think it was 2003 when my friend Eli Shukrun, who studied archaeology with me, was in charge of some salvage excavations to clear out some flood. And lo and behold, he found a very wide flight of steps leading to a cavity, a lower area, but in a new location. And wide flight of steps in Jewish context is usually a ritual bath. So Jesus performed a miracle of healing that blind man in a very big public ritual bath.
NAIR: So yeah, so that’s the question. This dam is kind of breaking, I guess, a couple ideas that maybe have been the prevailing thought. What are we learning from this? Why is this so significant?
WATCH the Interview Here to See Danny “The Digger” Explain the Discovery:
HERMAN: Yeah, so they found only the corner of that ritual bath. And for many years, the Israeli Antiquities Authority were trying to get a permit to dig the rest of it, but it was Greek Orthodox property. Making a long story short, they managed to buy the property. The Greek church tried to oppose that, to deny the fact that they sold it. But after it was proven in the Israeli court, they finally started digging up the rest of the pool, expecting to find more wide flight of steps. And lo and behold, instead of that, all they found is a big hole. Like someone carried away the rest of the stairs or whatever happened there. And then at the southern end, they found a big dam.
Now that dam was actually recorded only in the 19th century, but only the edge of it. It was called in Arabic, Birket el-Hamra, the Red Pool. And they definitely had no way of dating that dam in the 19th century. Carbon-14, as a system of dating, was not invented yet. It was discovered only in the 1950s.
Now, the new excavations not only use carbon-14, but a few other methods that could fine-tune. You know, when you use carbon dating, it gives you an answer like, oh, in the range of, you know, 50 to even 100 years. So many things can happen in 100 years. I mean, okay, it’s the first century, but is it early first century, mid first century, or late first century? Or in this case, the carbon-14 standard answer would say around the turn of the 9th to the 8th century. No, they managed to date it to a very specific time range of 805 to 795 BC. That’s like a 10-year (range). That’s a very, very specific time range, which I was stunned to read that they can get so accurate now with carbon dating and corroborate it with other methods.
But one thing is for sure, it predates Hezekiah. Okay, it’s about 200 years earlier. We didn’t know that there was a need to build a dam 200 years earlier. And the question is, why did they do this? And who reigned in those days?
So the official publications say that it could have either been King Joash, who reigned until 797, or his successor Amaziah, who reigned from 797 and beyond. But here’s the thing, Joash was actually a very specific king that is known in the Bible for initiating a renovation of the Temple. He called for a renovation of the Temple. Now the Bible usually focuses only on what’s happening on the Temple. I think we can now firmly say that after renovating the Temple, he took maybe some money left and decided to make a dam to the city. It’s a whole new understanding of Yoash as kind of like a miniature King Herod, a builder. The guy liked to build, and he did good for the city.
The article also suggests that there may have been an issue with a little famine or some chaotic behavior of the climate so that dam was really to catch flash floods because Jerusalem witnessed in that specific time frame a flash flood. This is a result that can only come out of what’s called an interdisciplinary research, meaning it’s not just classical archaeology of studying layers and pottery, but also bringing ancient climate experts and asking them, what do you think happened around the beginning of the 8th century? Okay, so we all of a sudden get these nuances in data that was never available before for archaeological research. I love it.
NAIR: Okay, so does that mean that King Hezekiah did not build the Pool of Siloam or that he was maybe doing something in addition to what already existed? What can we learn from this, from what the Bible tells us?
HERMAN: He was, in my opinion again, everything is my opinion, he was connecting the dots. You had the Gihon Spring on one hand, and you had now the dam on the other hand, which was, by the way, being supplied by Gihon Water through the Canaanite Tunnel. People tend to forget, but there was a Canaanite Tunnel built already in the Middle Bronze Age, taking the Gihon Spring water to that southern end.
Okay, that dam was to collect water of the Gihon Spring on regular days and flash floods if you had indeed these extreme sudden rains. But there was one problem with the Canaanite Tunnel. It wasn’t secure enough. It had outlets. It could have been accessed from the Kidron Valley, and if the Assyrians were to show up, it would have been useless. I have to make a new channel, what’s known as the Hezekiah Tunnel or the Siloam Tunnel, and I have also to create a proper water reservoir to contain all of this water, not just a dam.
Okay, so he had some of the infrastructure already there, and he, as I said, connected the dots and made it all a proper, secure water system.
NAIR: What I love about archaeology in and around the City of David is just how, you know, give it a couple years and wait for what they dig up next. When it comes to this tunnel, the Hezekiah’s Tunnel, famously, how do we know that this was Hezekiah’s Tunnel that’s connecting these two things? Obviously, there was a major archaeological find with some writing on it. Can you maybe tell us what that was?
HERMAN: Well, first of all, the Bible itself tells us when it concludes Hezekiah’s life that he also, and I quote, straightened the water of Jerusalem towards the west, which is a kind of a vague term, but it definitely fits the creation of a channel that would take the water to a new safe location. But in the late 19th century, kids playing inside that tunnel noticed at the end of it that there’s an engraved inscription, and it was pulled out and nearly stolen, but Konrad Schick, a German engineer and an archaeologist, managed to make a copy of it, and later the Turks took it, and you can see it to this day in Turkey. They took it to Istanbul where it’s kept to this day, and the text is quite clear. It’s a specific inscription that expresses the joy of the people who carved that tunnel and expressing how they completed the job and the water started flowing.
Unfortunately, why do they not tell us? Who told them to do this tunnel? When and why? But if we corroborate it with what the Bible tells us, it’s quite clear that it’s the King Hezekiah’s project, plus the fact that the style of the letters is from the 8th century, the time of Hezekiah.
So in archaeology, we rarely have a clear, perfect answer to any question, but the circumstantial evidence is quite clear. Almost all scholars agree that that was a project made by Hezekiah, and now we have a better understanding that he was using an infrastructure set up by King Joash nearly 200 years earlier.
NAIR: Wow. It’s just so cool, Danny. You have the coolest job in the world. We’re not talking about stuff from 300 years ago, which by itself would be really fascinating. We’re talking about the validation of things from 3,000 years ago. It’s just so cool.
Danny, the Digger Herman, you’re one of one, my brother. God bless you.
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