Where was Hezekiah's tunnel?

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Accepted Answer

Hezekiah's tunnel runs through the rock under the City of David, the ridge south of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, from the Gihon spring in the Kidron valley on the east side to the Pool of Siloam at the southern tip of the ridge. It winds for about 533 m, though the map's points for the spring and the pool are only about 300 m apart in a straight line. It still carries the spring's water, and visitors wade through it in the City of David park in Silwan, East Jerusalem. History Globe's articles on the City of David, Gihon and Siloam tell more; this answer keeps to where the tunnel ran. Chronicles says exactly where it went: “This same Hezekiah also stopped the upper watercourse of Gihon, and brought it straight down to the west side of the city of David.” Before Sennacherib came, Hezekiah and his princes resolved “to stop the waters of the fountains which were without the city”, so that the kings of Assyria should not “come, and find much water”; Kings sums it up, “how he made a pool, and a conduit, and brought water into the city”. Isaiah speaks of the same works: “ye gathered together the waters of the lower pool… Ye made also a ditch between the two walls for the water of the old pool.” The map dates the tunnel to about 700 BC, just before the siege of 701. In 1880 an inscription was found cut in the wall near the tunnel's lower end. It tells how two gangs of hewers worked towards each other, heard each other's voices through the rock and met, and how the water then flowed 1,200 cubits from the spring to the pool; it is now in the Istanbul Archaeological Museums. Radiocarbon dating of plant matter in the plaster, published in 2003, fits Hezekiah's reign; Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron have argued that the tunnel was begun earlier, about 800 BC, so the attribution to Hezekiah is disputed. Why the tunnel winds is also argued: the hewers may have followed a natural fissure in the karst.