Archaeologists Shocked by Gigantic Ancient Find in Jerusalem

Archaeologists in Jerusalem's City of David have unearthed an absolutely massive ancient structure that sheds new light into the pages of the Bible. Well, Danny the Digger Herman joins us now from Israel. So, Danny, before we get into why this is so significant, what is it? Well, in one word, a dam. It's a massive wall at the southern end of the City of David where the New Testament places the Pool of Siloam, but the origin of the Pool of Siloam go back to the First Temple period and have always been attributed to King Hezekiah. King Hezekiah was facing a critical threat on his kingdom and his city. The Assyrians were on their way, so he dug a channel that took the water safely from the Gihon Spring to the southern end where the water accumulated, and that system was still in use in the time of Jesus, so that's where he later performed the miracle as recorded in the Gospel of John. Now, for many, many years, everyone thought that the Pool of Siloam is at the different end of that channel, but I think it was 2003 when my friend Eli Shukron, who studied archaeology with me, was in charge of some salvage excavations to clear out some flood, and lo and behold, he found a very wide flight of steps leading to a cavity, a lower area, but in a new location, and wide flight of steps in Jewish context is usually a ritual bath, so Jesus performed the miracle of healing that blind man in a very big public ritual bath. So yeah, so that's the question. This dam is kind of breaking, I guess, a couple ideas that maybe have been the prevailing thought. What are we learning from this? Why is this so significant? Yeah, so they found only the corner of that ritual bath, and for many years, the state, the Israel Antiquities Authority, were trying to get a permit to dig the rest of it, but it was Greek Orthodox property. Making a long story short, they managed to buy the property. The Greek church tried to oppose to that, to deny the fact that they sold it, but after it was proven in the Israeli court, they finally started digging up the rest of the pool, expecting to find more wide flight of steps, and lo and behold, instead of that, all they found is a big hole, like someone carried away the rest of the stairs, or whatever happened there, and then at the southern end, they found a big dam. Now, that dam was actually recorded only in the 19th century, but only the edge of it. It was called in Arabic, Birket el Hamad, the red pool, and they definitely had no way of dating that dam in the 19th century. Carbon 14, as a system of dating, was not invented yet. It was discovered only in the 1950s. Now, the new excavations not only use carbon 14, but a few other methods that could fine-tune, you know, when you use carbon dating, it gives you an answer like, oh, in the range of, you know, 50 to even 100 years. So many things can happen in 100 years. I mean, okay, it's the first century, but is it early first century, mid first century, or late first century? Or in this case, the carbon 14 standard answer would say around the turn of the ninth to the eighth century. No, they managed to date it to a very specific time range of 805 to 795 BC or BCE. That's like a 10-year. That's a very, very specific time range, which I was stunned to read that they can get so accurate now with carbon dating and corroborate it with other methods. But one thing is for sure, it predates Hezekiah, okay? It's about 200 years earlier. We didn't know that there was a need to build a dam 200 years earlier. And the question is, why did they do this? And who reigned in those days? So the official publications say that it could have either been King Joash, who reigned until 797, or his successor Amatziah, who reigned from 797 and beyond. But here's the thing. Joash was actually a very specific king that is known in the Bible for initiating a renovation of the temple. He called for a renovation of the temple. Now, the Bible usually focuses only on what's happening on the temple. I think we can now firmly say that after renovating the temple, he took maybe some money left and decided to make a dam to the city. It's a whole new understanding of Joash as kind of like a miniature King Herod. A builder. The guy liked to build, and he did good for the city. And the article also suggests that there may have been an issue with a little, like a famine or some chaotic behavior of the climate, so that dam was really to catch flush floods, because Jerusalem witnessed in that specific time frame a flush flood. This is a result that can only come out of what's called interdisciplinary research, meaning it's not just classical archaeology of studying layers and pottery, but also bringing ancient climate experts and asking them, what do you think happened around the turn of the beginning of the 8th century? Okay, so we all of a sudden get these nuances in data that was never available before for archaeological research. I love it. Okay, so does that mean that King Hezekiah did not build the Pool of Siloam, or that he was maybe doing something in addition to what already existed? What can we learn from this from, you know, what the Bible tells us? He was, in my opinion, again, everything is my opinion, he was connecting the dots. You had the Gihon Spring on one hand, and you had now the dam on the other hand, which was, by the way, being supplied by Gihon water through the Canaanite Tunnel. People tend to forget, but there was the Canaanite Tunnel built already in the Middle Bronze Age, taking the Gihon Spring water to that southern end. Okay, that dam was to collect water of the Gihon Spring on regular days, and flush floods, if you have indeed these extreme sudden rains. But there was one problem with the Canaanite Tunnel. It wasn't secure enough. It had outlets, it could have been accessed from the Kidron Valley, and if the Assyrians were to show up, it would have been useless. I have to make a new channel, what's known as the Hezekiah Tunnel, or the Siloam Tunnel, and I have also to create a proper water reservoir to contain all of this water, not just the dam. Okay, so he had some of the infrastructure already there, and he, as I said, connected the dots and made it all a proper secure water system. Well, what I love about archaeology in and around the City of David is just how, you know, give it a couple years and wait for what they dig up next. When it comes to this tunnel, the Hezekiah's Tunnel, famously, how do we know that this was Hezekiah's Tunnel that's connecting these two things? Obviously, there was a major archaeological find with some writing on it. Can you tell us what that was? Well, first of all, the Bible itself tells us when it concludes Hezekiah's life that he also, and I quote, straightened the water of Jerusalem towards the west, which is a kind of a vague term, but it definitely fits the creation of a channel that would take the water to a new safe location. But in the late 19th century, kids playing inside that tunnel noticed at the end of it that there's an engraved inscription, and it was pulled out and nearly stolen, but Konrad Schick, a German engineer and an archaeologist, managed to make a copy of it, and later the Turks took it, and you can see it to this day in Turkey. They took it to Istanbul, where it's kept to this day, and the text is quite clear. It's a specific inscription that expresses the joy of the people who carved that tunnel and expressing how they completed the job and the water started flowing. Unfortunately, why do they not tell us who told them to do this tunnel, when, and why? But if we corroborate it with what the Bible tells us, it's quite clear that it's the King Hezekiah's project, plus the fact that the style of the letters is from the 18th century, the time of Hezekiah. So in archaeology, we rarely have a clear, perfect answer to any question, but the circumstantial evidence is quite clear. Almost all scholars agree that that was a project made by Hezekiah, and now we have a better understanding that he was using an infrastructure set up by King Joash nearly 200 years earlier. Wow, you know, it's just so cool, Danny. You have the coolest job in the whole world. We're not talking about stuff from 300 years ago, which by itself would be really fascinating, but we're talking about the validation of things from 3,000 years ago. It's just so cool. Danny the Digger Herman, you're one of one, my brother. God bless you, and thank you. Thank you. God bless you, Lito.