Hezekiah's Tunnel and the Siloam Inscription
A conduit cut through rock, and the workmen who signed it
Scripture says of King Hezekiah of Judah that he "made a pool, and a conduit, and brought water into the city" (2 Kings 20:20), and that he "stopped the upper watercourse of Gihon, and brought it straight down to the west side of the city of David" (2 Chronicles 32:30). Under the oldest part of Jerusalem there is a tunnel that does exactly that. It runs about 533 metres, winding through solid rock from the Gihon spring to the Pool of Siloam, and visitors still wade through it today.
The inscription
In 1880 a sixteen-year-old boy, a pupil of the architect Conrad Schick later identified as Jacob Eliahu Spafford, was exploring the tunnel and found an inscription cut into the wall near the Siloam end. It is written in early Hebrew script. It does not name a king. It tells how two teams of stonecutters dug toward each other from opposite ends, heard each other's voices through the rock, and broke through, "axe against axe," and it gives the length as 1,200 cubits with 100 cubits of rock above the workers' heads. In 1890 a Jerusalem antiquities dealer cut the inscription out of the wall to sell it, and it broke into pieces; the Ottoman authorities recovered it, and it is now in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum. Conrad Schick had already made a plaster cast of it in place.
The date
The style of the letters places the inscription in the eighth century BC. In 2003 a team led by Amos Frumkin, Aryeh Shimron, and Jeff Rosenbaum published radiocarbon dates from plant matter in the tunnel's plaster and uranium-thorium dates from cave deposits in the journal Nature; their result put the tunnel at about 700 BC, which is Hezekiah's reign.
The pool at the other end
Jesus sent a blind man to "wash in the pool of Siloam" (John 9:7). A large stepped pool of the first century was uncovered near the tunnel's outlet in 2004, during repair work on a sewer, and excavated by Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron. It is widely identified as the pool of John 9.
What it shows
That a king of Judah in about 700 BC brought the Gihon spring inside the city through a rock-cut conduit, just as Kings and Chronicles say, and that the engineering matches the biblical description closely: the upper watercourse of Gihon, brought down to the west side of the city of David.
What it does not show
The inscription never names Hezekiah. The link to him rests on the date, the location, and the biblical description, which fit together well, but it is an identification, not a signature.
Where scholars divide
The date is the dispute. Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron argued from pottery found in the rock-cut pool that the tunnel was finished earlier, in the late ninth or early eighth century BC, which would put it before Hezekiah. Frumkin and Shimron have defended the later date. Most scholars still hold the Hezekiah date, but the question is open in the journals.
Tunnel and inscription details from the standard descriptions and the Istanbul Archaeology Museum; A. Frumkin, A. Shimron and J. Rosenbaum, "Radiometric dating of the Siloam Tunnel, Jerusalem," Nature 425 (2003), 169–171; the earlier date as argued by R. Reich and E. Shukron. Sources checked 2026-09-24: Siloam inscription; The Siloam Inscription (City of David). Scripture quotations from the King James Version. This page reports what was found and what it can bear; where a claim rests on tradition or a disputed reading, it says so.