The Siloam Inscription

This inscription was engraved on a wall in the underground aqueduct that carried water from the Gihon Spring, in the Kidron Valley east of the City of David, to the Siloam Pool inside the city. It describes the exciting final moments of the digging of the tunnel as two teams of workmen, who had started excavating at opposite ends of the tunnel, broke through the rock separating them. The inscription was placed inside the tunnel, about twenty feet from its western end, near the Siloam Pool, for which the inscription is named. Its purpose is not clear. Although it seems commemorative and was written in a literary style and engraved in a beautiful script on an area of the stone wall that had been smoothed beforehand, it was located in a place where it would rarely be seen. Few other monumental inscriptions from ancient Israel have been discovered, and unlike monumental inscriptions from neighboring states (see “Stela of Mesha, King of Moab”), this one remarkably describes an achievement of the workmen, not the king who sponsored the project, presumably Hezekiah (727–698 BCE), based on 2 Kings 20:20 and 2 Chronicles 32:20.