The Siloam Inscription — Hezekiah's Tunnel Speaks

In 1880, workers clearing the Siloam Tunnel in Jerusalem discovered an ancient Hebrew inscription carved into the tunnel's limestone wall. The inscription, now held in the Istanbul Archaeology Museums, documents a moment of breakthrough in one of the ancient world's most ambitious engineering projects. It reads in part:

When the tunnel was driven through. And this was the manner of the breakthrough: While the laborers were still lifting up the pick, each toward his fellow, and while there were still three cubits to be bored through, there was heard the voice of one calling to the other that he had lifted up the pick. And on the day of the breakthrough the laborers struck, one toward the other, pick against pick. And the water flowed from the spring to the pool for a thousand cubits.

The inscription provides a direct witness to the engineering technique: two crews began digging from opposite ends of the tunnel and worked toward each other, eventually breaking through and connecting the flow of water from the Gihon spring to the Pool of Siloam. The text captures the physical moment of meeting and the triumph of the completed project.

The tunnel itself — a 533-meter channel carved through bedrock beneath Jerusalem — was designed to secure the city's water supply inside its walls, protecting it during siege. The inscription's Hebrew and script have been studied extensively, and the project is attributed to the time of Hezekiah, the eighth-century Judean king. Archaeological work by Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron, documented in Israel Exploration Journal excavation reports, has examined the tunnel's construction and dating.

The artifact directly corroborates the biblical record that credits Hezekiah with this engineering achievement and provides the only ancient near-Eastern inscription of its kind that describes the actual moment of completion in the words of those who carried it out.