Biblical Hebrew Blog by ClassicalHebrew.com

The main source of water in ancient Jerusalem was the Gihon spring, located just outside the city walls. When the Assyrians waged an attack against Judah towards the end of the 8^th century BCE, led by king Sennacherib, king Hezekiah realized that in order to sustain throughout an Assyrian siege, the city must be better protected and the water must be accessible from inside the walls of the city. Hezekiah, considered to be one of the better kings of Judah both from a moral standing and as a leader of the people, substantially enlarged the area surrounded by a defensive wall to include more civilians, and built a tunnel that led the water from the Gihon spring into the city. Thus, when the Assyrians attacked in 701, Jerusalem withstood their attack and they eventually withdrew. The great importance of Hezekiah’s building projects is emphasized in the summary of his reign: “And the rest of the deeds of Hezekiah and all his might and the building of the pool and the tunnel bringing the water into the city are written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah” (2 Kings 20:20).

While the tunnel had been well known, the Siloam inscription was discovered by accident in 1880 by a young student from the nearby mission, who happened to look up while walking through the dark tunnel and noticed the inscription. The Siloam tunnel is a rare case in which we have an archaeological finding, including a written inscription, which enriches our knowledge of a biblical report of events. In order to build the tunnel, the workers split into two teams, digging from either end of the future tunnel while following a crack in the rock. When the two work-teams approached each other, they heard the sound of the axes of the other team and knew that the breaking through of the tunnel was almost complete. The inscription they placed at the place of the meeting of the two teams describes the day on which this meeting occurred.

The Siloam inscription is one of the only pieces of written evidence surviving from the First Temple period. Aside from the historical data it provides, it also supplies us with knowledge of the scribal practices of the time (separation of words using dots), the evolution of Ancient Hebrew handwriting, and facts about grammar and pronunciation which are very valuable to the linguistic research of biblical Hebrew.
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