The Bible is true: Ezechias tunnel
- Albert Benhamou
- Mar 1
- 3 min read
Before the fall of the kingdom of Israel, its king and the king of Aram had set out to conquer the kingdom of Judea. The Judean king, Ahaz, was not right in the eyes of God, so He probably wanted to give him a warning at that time:
Ahaz was twenty years old when he began to reign, and he reigned sixteen years in Jerusalem; he did not do what was right in the eyes of the Lord his God, as his grandfather David had done. Instead, he followed the example of the kings of Israel. He even made his son pass through the fire, following the abominations of the peoples whom God had dispossessed for the children of Israel. He offered sacrifices and incense on the high places and on the hills and under every green tree. Then Recin king of Syria and Pekah son of Remaliah king of Israel came to attack him in Jerusalem; they besieged Ahaz, but were unable to defeat him victoriously. (2 Kings 16:2-6)
After the defeat of his enemies, Ahaz could have stopped there, but he made the unfortunate decision to seek help from the king of Assyria:
Then Ahaz sent ambassadors to Tiglath-Pileser king of Assyria, saying, "I am your servant and your son. Come and save me from the hand of the king of Syria and the king of Israel, who have attacked me." Ahaz took the silver and gold that were in the temple of the Lord and in the treasuries of the king's palace and sent them as a present to the king of Assyria. (II Kings 16:7-8)
Ahaz was thus able to maintain the independence of his kingdom, although it had become a de facto vassal of that of Assyria, while the northern kingdoms, Aram and Israel, suffered the blows of successive Assyrian kings.
Let us look at the continuation of the historical and biblical chronologies (for earlier dates, refer to the previous articles since Adam):
year 3006 (754 BCE): vision of the prophet Isaiah, son of Amos
year 3033 (727 BCE): Tiglath-Pileser III conquers the north of the kingdom of Israel
year 3035 (725 BCE): death of Ahaz king of Judea; his son Hezekiah succeeds him
year 3038 (722 BCE): campaign of Shalmaneser V against the kingdom of Israel
year 3042 (718 BCE): Sargon II ends the kingdom of Israel by taking Samaria, its capital
When Hezekiah succeeded his father, he returned to the ways of God, carried out a religious reform to rid his kingdom of any deviation from worship. In particular, he ordered to break down the altars that had been erected in several cities to copy a service of sacrifices outside the Temple of Jerusalem, which was an heresy. He then strengthened the defense of Jerusalem by erecting a city wall. Finally, as the weak point of the city was the Gihon water source which was located outside the walls (although defended by a strong guard tower that the Canaanites had built several hundreds years before), he decided to divert the waters of this source by a tunnel under the ground, so that this tunnel would not be visible to a potential enemy doing siege. The waters followed the gravity of the slope of the city hill, and supplied a retention pool at the bottom of the city. Now the details of this engineering work are mentioned in the Bible and also on an inscription found engraved in the underground tunnel: it is the inscription of Siloam which proves that the biblical story has been confirmed here again by archaeology!
Christians who come on pilgrimage to Jerusalem know well this pool of "Siloam", at the end of the underground tunnel, because Jesus had healed a blind man there according to the Gospel of John (chapter 9:7-11).
To learn more about this inscription and its discovery, read my detailed article on this site by clicking here.
To return to the home page of articles on this theme of "the Bible is true", click here.
Albert Benhamou
Private tour guide in Israel
March 2025
