Archaeologists Discovered Something About the Pool of Siloam That Changes Everything

In 2004, at the very bottom of the hill in Jerusalem known as the City of David, a city work crew was digging with heavy machinery to repair a broken sewage pipe. It was ordinary municipal work, the kind of job that happens in every city in the world. Standing nearby was an archaeologist from the Israel Antiquities Authority, Eli Shukron. In Jerusalem, digging near ancient remains often has to be supervised by an archaeologist. and as the bucket scraped away the earth Shukron saw something, two stone steps worn smooth carefully cut running down into the dirt he called his colleague the archaeologist Ronnie Reich came and looked and he recognized them almost immediately within a few months the two of them would announce that they had found the pool of Siloam The pool from the ninth chapter of the Gospel of John, where Jesus sends a man born blind to wash his eyes. As Shukron put it at the time, they were 100% sure. It became one of the most celebrated biblical discoveries of those years. Pilgrims came to see the steps. Books and documentaries told the story. For many believers, it was a powerful moment. A place named in the gospel found exactly where the gospel said it would be. And then, about 20 years later, the archaeologists who were finally excavating the whole thing came back with a surprise. The pool everyone had been celebrating, they argued, probably wasn't the pool of Siloam at all. And if they're right, the real pool was somewhere else. It had been sitting at the end of an ancient tunnel the whole time, in a place pilgrims had visited for centuries. Recently, one of the excavations directors said as much. I first read about the 2004 discovery, the way most people did, in headlines about the pool of Jesus' miracle being found. I filed it away as one of those rare stories where archaeology and scripture line up perfectly, and I didn't think about it again for years. When I finally went back and read what the excavators have published since, I realized that the most interesting part of the story had happened after the headlines stopped. And it doesn't take anything away from the gospel's account. So let's start with what the gospel actually says, and why that little detail mattered so much in the first place. The ninth chapter of John tells of a man who had been blind from birth. Jesus spits on the ground, makes clay, and anoints the man's eyes. Then he tells him to go and wash in the pool of Siloam. And the gospel adds a note for its readers. Siloam, it says, means sent. The man goes, washes, and comes back seeing. There's a quiet detail in that name. Siloam, Shiloah in Hebrew, comes from a word meaning to send. And the water in this pool didn't rise there. It was sent, channeled from a spring further up the valley. Many readers have noticed the echo. A man sent to wash in a pool whose very name means sent by the one the gospel again and again describes as sent by the Father. John clearly wanted his readers to notice it too. It's a short scene, but it's full of specific details. A named pool in a particular part of the city with a meaning to its name. And for a long time, some scholars treated details like that in John's gospel with suspicion. John, they said, was a theological book more than a historical one. Perhaps the pool was a symbol. Perhaps the writer, decades later, didn't know Jerusalem at all. It's not that nobody knew where Siloam was supposed to be. For centuries, pilgrims had been visiting a small pool at the southern end of the city of David, beside the remains of a Byzantine church built in the 5th century. That spot had been venerated as Siloam since early Christian times. What was missing was any trace of a pool from the time of Jesus. Archaeologists had poked at this corner of the city before. In the 1890s, two explorers working for Britain's Palestine Exploration Fund, Frederick Bliss and Archibald Dickey, tunneled through the area and came across steps. In the 1960s, the British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon dug nearby, but nobody had exposed enough to see what was really there. So when Reich and Shukron uncovered a large stepped pool from the right period, people paid attention. One New Testament scholar, James Charlesworth of Princeton Theological Seminary, said that scholars had claimed John was using a religious conceit and that now the pool had been found exactly where John said it was. And the evidence looked strong. The excavators exposed long flights of stone steps, five steps at a time, separated by landings, running down into the pool on at least three sides. They estimated it was around 225 feet long. Embedded in the plaster of the steps, they found coins of Alexander Jannaeus, a Jewish king who ruled about a century before Jesus. That gave them the earliest date for the pool's construction. And in a corner, they found coins from the great Jewish revolt against Rome from the years 66 to 70 AD. After that, the pool seems to have gone out of use and slowly filled with mud. So this was a big public pool, built about a century before Jesus, and used right through his lifetime until Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in the year 70. Reich and Shukron interpreted it as a mikveh, a pool for ritual purification. Jews coming up to Jerusalem for the great pilgrim festivals needed to purify themselves before going up to the temple. And here was a vast pool at the bottom of the city, at the start of the road up the hill. The fourth side of the pool lay under a garden that belonged to the Greek Orthodox Church. It couldn't be excavated. And so, for almost 20 years, the Pool of Siloam was a pool with three sides showing and one side hidden. That fourth side is where the story turns, but to understand why, we need to go underground first. Because the water in this pool came from somewhere, and the route it took is one of the most extraordinary pieces of engineering mentioned in the Bible. On the eastern slope of the City of David is the Gihon Spring, the city's main source of fresh water. For a city on a hilltop, it was life itself, and it had one terrible weakness. It sat outside the safest part of the walls. The Second Book of Kings and the Second Book of Chronicles describe how King Hezekiah of Judah dealt with that. He stopped the upper outlet of the Gihon and brought the water down to the west side of the city of David through a tunnel. The context was a looming invasion. In 701 B.C., the Assyrian king Sennacherib marched on Judah. If an army surrounded Jerusalem, the city would need water the enemy couldn't reach. That tunnel still exists. You can walk through it today in water up to your knees in places with a flashlight. It winds for about a third of a mile, some 1,700 feet, through solid rock. And its slope is astonishingly gentle. Over that whole distance, the floor drops only a tiny fraction of a percent. Just enough for the water to flow. In 1880, a 16-year-old student named Jacob Elihu was wading through the tunnel when he slipped and fell into the water. When he got up, he noticed letters carved into the rock wall. It was an inscription, six lines in the ancient Hebrew script. Scholars now call it the Siloam inscription. It describes the final moment of the tunnel's construction. Two teams of workmen had started from opposite ends, cutting toward each other through the dark. With only three cubits left to go, they heard each other's voices through the rock. Then they broke through, axe against axe, and the water flowed from the spring to the pool for 1200 cubits. It's one of the most human documents to survive from the biblical world. Not a king boasting, workmen recording the day they met in the dark. The inscription didn't stay in the tunnel. In 1890 it was cut out of the wall and today it sits in a museum in Istanbul. The inscription doesn't name Hezekiah. For a long time, some scholars argued the tunnel might be much later. Then, in 2003, a team of geologists led by Amos Frumkin published a study in the journal Nature. They had radiocarbon dated plant material in the original plaster of the tunnel and used another method on stalactites that had grown inside it afterwards. Their answer was around 700 BC, right in the time of Hezekiah. They described it as the first time a structure mentioned in the Bible had been dated by radiometric methods. At the end of that tunnel, where the water comes out, there's a pool. The small pool by the Byzantine church. The One Pilgrims had been visiting for 15 centuries. That small pool is about to matter more than anyone expected in 2004. In December 2022, the Israel Antiquities Authority, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, and the City of David Foundation announced that the Pool of Siloam would finally be excavated in full, including the side that had been hidden under the church garden. I should say plainly that the excavations take place in Silwan. A neighborhood whose future is politically contested, and that some archaeologists and residents have criticized how the work is carried out. The digging began in 2023. People expected the fourth side of the pool to appear, with steps going down, like the other three. That isn't what the diggers found. As the excavation went on, the team, led by the archaeologists Nahshon Zanton, Itamar Berko, and Filip Vukosavovic, found that the famous staircase didn't do what a do what a pool steps usually do. One wing of the steps ran only a short distance before it stopped against a plastered vertical wall. The structure didn't seem to have steps on every side, the way a classic ritual pool would. Zanton had already been working through the problem. In 2023, he published a study in the Israel Antiquities Authority's own journal. And he made an argument that, for anyone who'd followed the 2004 story, was startling. The ancient Jewish historian Josephus, writing in the first century, describes this part of the city, and he mentions Siloam, and separately a pool he calls Solomon's Pool. Zanton argued that the great stepped pool found in 2004, which local Arabic tradition calls Birkat al-Hamra, the red pool, fits Josephus' Solomon's pool. In his reading, it was an open public pool, a place for swimming as much as anything. And the pool of Siloam itself, the ritual pool fed by the spring water from Hezekiah's tunnel, was the smaller pool at the tunnel's outlet. The one the Byzantines built their church beside. A pool he estimated at roughly 75 feet on a side, surrounded by colonnades. And there's a witness from the ancient world who seems to back him up. In the year 333, a Christian traveler from Bordeaux, in what is now France, made the long journey to Jerusalem and wrote down what he saw, like a guidebook. He describes the way up Mount Zion, and below it, in the valley beside the wall, a pool which is called Siloam. It has four porticos. And there is another large pool outside it. Now set his words beside the new excavation. A pool called Siloam, surrounded by colonnades. And next to it, a second, larger pool. 17 centuries ago, a pilgrim stood at this spot and described two pools, not one. Then, in September 2024, at the City of David's annual conference, the excavators went a step further. They suggested that the great step structure might not have been designed mainly for immersion at all, but as seating. Rows of steps for spectators, perhaps for public spectacles of the kind King Herod staged in honor of the Roman emperor. That idea is still new, and it's still being argued over. Even Zanton's earlier swimming pool reading has critics. The architect and archaeologist Leen Ritmeyer agrees the colonnaded pool was the place of ritual washing, but he sees the Great Stepped Pool as a reservoir. And in October 2026, one of the excavation's directors, Itamar Berko, was reported as saying that the reservoir being excavated may not be the exact pool referenced in the Gospel, though another pool from Jesus' era was found nearby, within the same complex. I'll admit my first reaction to all this was a kind of disappointment. The steps that made headlines in 2004 might not be Siloam after all. But then I looked at the map again, and the disappointment turned into something else. Because where is the pool that Zanton identifies as Siloam? At the outlet of Hezekiah's tunnel, fed by living water from the Gihon spring. At the southern end of the city of David, the end of the road up to the temple. Right where Christian tradition had placed the gospel's pool for 1,500 years. If Zanton is right, the tradition hadn't been wrong. The headline had. And notice what that does to the old doubt about John. Both of these pools sit in the same small corner of the city, a short walk apart. Whichever one turns out to be Siloam, the gospel's account is standing on the right ground. The writer of John knew of a real pool called Siloam, where people went to wash. And the ground puts one or two right here. On that point, archaeology and the text agree. What's changed is only which set of stones we should be pointing to. And the waterworks here go back further than Hezekiah. In August 2025, a team led by Johanna Regev and Elisabetta Barreto of the Weizmann Institute, working with the excavators, published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Deep in the Siloam area, they had uncovered a massive dam, a wall about 40 feet high and more than 26 feet thick, built across the valley to hold back water and create a reservoir. The excavators called it the largest dam yet discovered in Israel, and the earliest found in Jerusalem. What makes it remarkable is how precisely they dated it. By radiocarbon on organic material in the mortar, they placed its construction within about a decade of 800 BC. That's about a century before Hezekiah. It falls in the reign of King Joash or his son Amaziah, kings the Bible describes in the books of Kings and Chronicles. And this wasn't the first time the same lab had pushed a date around in this corner of Jerusalem. Reich and Shukron had uncovered a massive stone tower protecting the Gihon Spring and dated it to around 1700 BC, centuries before King David. In 2017, using radiocarbon, a team from the Weizmann Institute and the Antiquities Authority redated it to the late 9th century BC, the same horizon as the dam. Whatever was happening in Jerusalem around 800 BC, it involved a great deal of stone and a great deal of water. So before Hezekiah's tunnel, Jerusalem's kings were already damming this valley, storing water at the southern end of the city. The prophet Isaiah, a few generations later, mentions the waters of Shiloah that go softly, and speaks of the people gathering the waters of the lower pool. For a long time, those were just words on a page. Now there may be walls behind them. Not everyone agrees on how all these pieces fit together. Some scholars question whether the dam, the channels, and the towers around the spring were really one coordinated project. That debate will go on. But the ground keeps confirming one thing. This corner of Jerusalem was built and rebuilt around water for centuries before Jesus walked there. The last piece connects the pool to the temple itself. Running north from the Siloam area, up the valley toward the Temple Mount, archaeologists have uncovered a broad stepped street, about 26 feet wide and around a third of a mile long, paved with heavy limestone slabs. It's often called the Pilgrimage Road. In 2019, A study in the journal Tel Aviv reported that under its paving stones, the excavators found more than a hundred coins. The latest of them dated to around the year 31. That means the street was built no earlier than that, during the years when Pontius Pilate governed Judea. It's tempting to say that Jesus walked on those exact stones. The honest answer is that we can't. The street may only have been finished around the end of his life, or after it. What we can say is that this was the road pilgrims used to climb from the pools to the temple in the decades of the early church, and that it ran right past the place the gospel describes. So why would pilgrims gather at a pool at the bottom of the city at all? The answer is in the festivals. Three times a year, at Passover, at Shavuot, and at the autumn Feast of Tabernacles, Jews from all over the land and far beyond came up to Jerusalem. The city filled with pilgrims, many of them on foot after days of travel. And Jewish law required ritual purity before entering the temple. Spring water, living water, was the best water of all for purification. And at the autumn festival of Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles, there was a special ceremony. According to the Mishnah, a golden pitcher was filled with water from the Pool of Siloam and carried up to the temple, where it was poured out on the altar. The Mishnah adds that anyone who never saw the celebration of the water drawing never saw true joy in his life. The Gospel of John places Jesus in Jerusalem at that very festival, in the chapters just before the healing of the blind man. And on the last great day of the feast, it says, he stood and cried out that anyone who was thirsty should come to him and drink. Whatever you make of that moment, it was spoken in a city where, that week, everyone knew where the water came from. It came from Siloam. So let's go back to the beginning. In 2004, a work crew fixing a sewer pipe exposed two stone steps and the world was told the pool of Siloam had been found. That was half right. The steps were real, from the right century, at the right end of the city. But 20 years of digging suggest they belong to a great neighboring pool, the one Josephus called Solomon's. The pool of the gospel seems to have been the smaller one, at the mouth of Hezekiah's tunnel, the spot Christian pilgrims had been visiting all along. And in the same excavation, a dam from the time of Joash, nearly 3,000 years old. What's firm is this, there was a pool of Siloam at the southern end of the city of David, fed by Hezekiah's tunnel, used for purification by pilgrims in the time of Jesus. What's still argued over is exactly which stones mark it, and what the great stepped pool was really for, and what archaeology can't do, and has never claimed to do, is test what happened to one blind man who went to wash there. That part of the story belongs to faith, which leaves me with questions. What will the rest of the excavation reveal under the old church garden? Were the Great Steps really a place for crowds to sit? And if so, to watch what? How did the water system of Joash's day connect to Hezekiah's tunnel a century later? The Gospel of Luke mentions a tower in Siloam that fell and killed 18 people. Did it stand somewhere in this same small corner of the city? And how many other places in the Gospels are waiting, like this one, just a few feet under a modern street? I keep thinking about those two steps in 2004. A machine digging for a sewer pipe, an archaeologist watching from the side, and stone that had lain mostly hidden for nearly two thousand years. They weren't quite what everyone thought they were, but step by step, they pointed back toward the small pool that tradition had honored all along. If you've been to Jerusalem and walked through Hezekiah's tunnel, or stood at the pool at the end of it, tell me in the comments what it was like, and tell me which pool you think the gospel is describing. The great steps, or the small pool at the end of the tunnel?