They Found a 2,700-Year-Old Tunnel That Matches 2 Kings 20

In 1838, the American biblical scholar Edward Robinson was crawling through a flooded passage beneath the City of David in Jerusalem when he realized he was inside a hand-cut rock tunnel. He waded through the entire 1,750-foot length and emerged at the other end, soaking wet and shaking with the realization that the tunnel was clearly ancient.

What he had discovered was the engineering project the Bible attributes to King Hezekiah.

"As for the other events of Hezekiah's reign, all his achievements and how he made the pool and the tunnel by which he brought water into the city, are they not written in the book of the annals of the kings of Judah?" — 2 Kings 20:20

The tunnel was already a known biblical reference. Now there was an actual tunnel matching the biblical description, in exactly the location the Bible put it.

Then it got better.

In 1880, two boys playing in the tunnel discovered an inscription carved into the wall about 20 feet from the southern (Pool of Siloam) end. The inscription was written in ancient Hebrew script and described, in remarkably casual workman's prose, how the tunnel had been cut:

"...the breakthrough. And this is the story of the breakthrough. While the laborers were still working with their picks, each toward the other, and while there were still three cubits to be broken through, the voice of each was heard calling to the other, because there was a zedah in the rock to the south and to the north. And at the moment of the breakthrough, the laborers struck each toward the other, pick against pick. Then water flowed from the spring to the pool, twelve hundred cubits. And the height of the rock above the heads of the laborers was a hundred cubits."

The inscription is now housed in the Istanbul Archaeological Museums (taken there during the late Ottoman period) and is considered one of the most important Hebrew inscriptions ever discovered.

Several things are striking about it:

• The Hebrew letterforms (paleo-Hebrew) match the script style used in the late 8th century BC — exactly the period of Hezekiah.
• The story it tells matches the tunnel's actual physical features. Modern surveys show the tunnel was indeed cut from both ends simultaneously, with the workers meeting in the middle. The "zedah" (a fissure or crack) the inscription mentions allowed the two teams to hear each other and correct their course.
• The tunnel's S-curve — visible to anyone who walks through it today — is exactly the kind of mid-course correction the inscription describes.

The Bible attributes the tunnel to Hezekiah. The tunnel's own builder's plaque dates it to Hezekiah's century. The construction method matches the biblical context (preparing for a siege). Three independent lines of evidence converge on the same conclusion.

The strategic context makes the tunnel's existence even more compelling.

Around 701 BC, the Assyrian king Sennacherib was sweeping through Judah. He had already destroyed 46 fortified cities and was approaching Jerusalem. Hezekiah knew the Assyrians' tactic: cut off the besieged city's water supply and starve them out. The Gihon Spring, Jerusalem's main water source, sat just outside the city walls. If the Assyrians captured the spring, the siege would be over in days.

Hezekiah's solution was engineering: dig a tunnel through the bedrock under the city to redirect the spring's water inside the walls, then conceal the original spring outlet so the Assyrians could not find it. The Chronicler describes this in 2 Chronicles 32:30:

"It was Hezekiah who blocked the upper outlet of the Gihon spring and channeled the water down to the west side of the City of David."

This is exactly what the tunnel does. The northern end starts at the Gihon Spring and runs under the City of David to the Pool of Siloam on the western/southern side of the city. Same starting point. Same destination. Same purpose.

When the Assyrians arrived, Jerusalem had water and they did not. The siege failed. The Bible attributes the failure to a divine intervention — an angel of the Lord struck the Assyrian camp (2 Kings 19:35). Sennacherib's own annals (the Sennacherib Prism, now in the British Museum) admit he was unable to take Jerusalem, though he tries to spin it as a glorious victory by listing all the other cities he conquered.

The tunnel is the engineering side of why the siege failed.

In 2003, geologists Amos Frumkin (Hebrew University) and Aryeh Shimron (Geological Survey of Israel) used radiocarbon dating on plant material trapped in the tunnel's plaster, plus uranium-thorium dating on stalactites that had grown in the tunnel since its construction. Their results: the tunnel was constructed around 700 BC (give or take a few decades) — exactly the reign of Hezekiah.

This was the first time a major Old Testament structure had been dated using modern scientific methods independent of the biblical text itself. The science and the Bible converged on the same date.

"The tunnel is real, but the dating is uncertain." This was the position before the 2003 scientific dating. It is no longer defensible. Multiple independent dating methods now place construction in the late 8th century BC, exactly the reign of Hezekiah. The skeptical position has had to retreat to "okay, it is from his time, but maybe someone else built it."

"The Siloam Inscription does not name Hezekiah." True. The inscription is an oddly modest workman's account that does not mention the king. Some take this as evidence that Hezekiah was not the patron. But this argument cuts both ways: if the inscription were a royal commemorative text, skeptics would dismiss it as propaganda. The fact that it is a craftsman's note about the technical breakthrough makes it more authentic, not less. It is the kind of thing a foreman would write at the moment of completion, not the kind of thing a later editor would invent.

"The Bible could have been written after the tunnel and just described what already existed." Possible for some details, but not for the strategic context. The Bible places the tunnel in the specific context of the Assyrian siege of 701 BC, which is independently confirmed by Assyrian records. The tunnel's military function, its location, its date, and its biblical narrative all line up.

The tunnel is still there. You can visit. For a few shekels, you can take off your shoes, roll up your pants, and wade through 1,750 feet of cold spring water in pitch darkness, your hands brushing the chisel marks left by workers 2,700 years ago. The S-curve where the two crews met is roughly halfway through. You can see where they corrected course.

It is one of the very few places in the world where you can physically inhabit a biblical narrative. The water you are walking through is the same water Hezekiah's engineers redirected. The walls you are touching were cut by men who worked under the threat of an Assyrian army.

A king mentioned in the Bible built a tunnel mentioned in the Bible to save a city mentioned in the Bible from an army mentioned in the Bible. The tunnel exists. The dating matches. The construction method matches. The strategic purpose matches. An ancient inscription describes the breakthrough moment in the workmen's own words.

This is not the Bible defending itself. This is rock and water and chisel marks doing the talking.