Siloam Inscription The Siloam Inscription is a passage of text found in the Siloam tunnel—also known as Hezekiah’s tunnel—which was dug underneath the City of David in ancient Israel. The tunnel brought water from the Gihon Spring into the pool of Siloam in Jerusalem. It was built by Hezekiah of Judah in the late 7th or early 8th centuries as he prepared for an imminent siege by the Assyrians, led by Sennacherib. The tunnel was first discovered in modern times by Franciscus Quaresmius in 1625, however, he was unable to explore the canal and is unable to give information about the canal (Robinson, 337-338). It was then discovered by Edward Robinson in 1838, however, he and a few excavators after him never came across the inscription described above. The inscription itself was found accidentally by a boy in 1880 on the eastern side, about 19 feet from the pool. The inscription dates to 701 BCE and talks about how two groups of workers started from opposite ends of the tunnel and dug until they met in the middle.
The inscription itself describes one of these groups heard the sounds of pickaxes that helped lead them through the tunnel when “there was a fissure in the rock.” Most researchers agree that the inscription was commissioned by the [Hezekiah’s] tunnel’s chief engineer toward the completion of the tunnel and was inscribed at the location in the middle where the workers met. It was cut off from the wall in 1891 by thieves and broken into fragments. After being sold to a dealer, it was confiscated by the Ottoman Turkish Empire—who controlled Palestine during this time—and sent to the Istanbul Archaeology Museum. The inscription is on the lower part of a rectangular piece of stone 50 cm high and 66 cm wide, although the top 27 cm are left blank (Hirsch). There are six lines of a very distinctive, ancient font—each separated by a dot between them. Although the inscription is not very long, it tells an important story and provides historical evidence for the construction of Hezekiah’s water tunnel in the eighth century BCE. It reads:
“[The account] of the tunneling. This is the account of the tunnel. While [the excavators were wielding] their pickaxes, each man toward his co-worker, and while there were yet three cubits for the tunneling, a voice [was hea]rd each man calling to his co-worker; because there was a cavity in the rock (extending) from the south to [the north]. So on the day of the tunneling, the excavators struck, each man to meet his co-worker, pick-axe against pick-[a]xe. Then the water flowed from the spring to the pool, a distance of one thousand and two hundred cubits. One hundred cubits was the height of the rock above the heads of the excavat[ors.]” The many brackets surrounding some letters and complete words represent points in the text that may have been unreadable, but historians have been able to fill in the missing parts through techniques such as paleography and orthography. The script is similar to that found in the Moabite and various Phoenician inscriptions. Emil Hirsch writes that “While the tops of the letters are angular, the tails are long and curved, thus presenting a characteristically more cursive appearance.” She goes on to note that this type of writing characteristics must have come from a group of people who had been writing for a long time. The inscription discusses how the workers started simultaneously digging on each side until they met up. There was a problem in the digging, as the tunnelers were unable to meet up in the middle to complete the tunnel. The archaeology of the tunnel shows many winding routes in the middle rather than a straight line, serving as evidence of the tunnelers’ struggles. The inscription also serves as evidence that the tunnel was almost certainly constructed during Hezekiah’s reign in the 8th century BCE, as “confirmed by the style of the letters (paleography) and the distinguishing elements of grammar and spelling (Hirsch).” An example of this can be seen with a careful examination of the text. In the inscription’s title, the workers are called “חוצבים”, ‘laborers’, and not “נוקבים” ‘borers’. The root ‘נקב’ appears several times in the Hebrew Bible when describing workers. This unique choice of words meant that the title refers only to the last phase of the tunneling when the two groups came in contact with each other (Faust 2000: 5). So the inscription was only meant to describe the completion of the tunnel. Avraham Faust goes on to point out that the inscription was found deep in a dark tunnel where no one could see it. The location of this inscription is hard to explain, unless it was located at the meeting place of the workers. According to the inscription, the total length of the tunnel was around 1200 cubits. At about 18 inches per cubit, the total length was nearly 1800 feet. Modern measurements confirm that the tunnel is indeed almost 1800 feet long (Rollston). At one point, the inscription states that the height of the ceiling is about 100 cubits (or 150 feet). Although there are places where the ceiling is about this high, there are also many places where it is less than six feet high. The inscription does not mention the width of the tunnel, but it is around shoulder height (Rollston).
There are two biblical references that talk about the construction of Hezekiah’s tunnel. The first comes from מְלָכִים ב, chapter 20, verse 20 and reads:
כ וְיֶתֶר דִּבְרֵי חִזְקִיָּהוּ, וְכָל-גְּבוּרָתוֹ, וַאֲשֶׁר עָשָׂה אֶת-הַבְּרֵכָה וְאֶת-הַתְּעָלָה, וַיָּבֵא אֶת-הַמַּיִם הָעִירָה: הֲלֹא-הֵם כְּתוּבִים, עַל-סֵפֶר דִּבְרֵי הַיָּמִים--לְמַלְכֵי יְהוּדָה. This translates to “Now the rest of the acts of Hezekiah, and all his might, and how he made the pool, and the conduit, and brought water into the city, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah?” This passage is the only direct reference to Hezekiah being the constructor of the tunnel, and the Siloam Tunnel Inscription helps confirm this as it can be traced back to the 8th century during Hezekiah’s rule. The second biblical reference that alludes to Hezekiah’s water tunnel comes from 2 Chronicles 32:2-4. It reads “2 When Hezekiah saw that Sennacherib had come and that he intended to wage war against Jerusalem, 3 he consulted with his officials and military staff about blocking off the water from the springs outside the city, and they helped him. 4 They gathered a large group of people who blocked all the springs and the stream that flowed through the land. ‘Why should the kings[a] of Assyria come and find plenty of water?’ they said.” From these verses, we learn that king Hezekiah was afraid of the Assyrian’s impending siege so he blocked the water from outside the city by diverting it through the Siloam tunnel. The inscription is significant in our study of the archaeology of ancient Israel because it provides additional evidence for the construction of Hezekiah’s water tunnel. It is the earliest known Hebrew Inscription found in Jerusalem and is important for commemorating the waterway and its part in the Biblical narrative. The genre of the inscription is an ancient narrative, as it tells a story of the construction of the water tunnel. It is important because it is one of the oldest inscriptions found that provides evidence for the ancient biblical narrative, and uses the Paleo-Hebew alphabet in a way that cannot be seen in many other places.

Works Cited Faust, Avraham. "A Note on Hezekiah's Tunnel and the Siloam Inscription*."Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 25.90 (2000): 3-11.
Hirsch, Emil, and Philippe Berger. "Siloam Inscription." Jewish Encyclopedia. N.p., n.d. Web. . Rendsburg, Gary A., and William M. Schniedewind. "The Siloam Tunnel Inscription: Historical and Linguistic Perspectives." Israel Exploration Journal(2010): 188-203. Robinson, Edward. "Biblical Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai, and Arabia Petrœa. A Journal of Travels in the Year 1838, by E. Robinson and E. Smith. Undertaken in Reference to Biblical Geography. Drawn up from the Original Diaries, with Historical Illustrations." (1841), p. 377
"2 Kings Chapter 20 מְלָכִים ב." 2 Kings 20 / Hebrew. Mechon Mamre, n.d. Web. 15 May 2016. .
Rollston, Christopher. "The Siloam Inscription and Hezekiah’s Tunnel." Bible Odyssey. N.p., n.d. Web. .