2 Kings 20:20 - Exposition

And the rest of the acts of Hezekiah, and all his might. Hezekiah's "might" was chiefly shown in the earlier portion of his reign, when he "smote the Philistines, even unto Gaza, and the borders thereof" ( 2 Kings 18:8 ). Against Assyria he was unsuccessful, and must have succumbed, but for the miraculous destruction of Sennacherib's host. And how he made a pool ; rather, the pool , or the reservoir . The writer of Kings either knows of one pool only in the neighborhood of Jerusalem, or regards one as so superior that it deserves to be called κατ ἐξοχήν , "the pool." Recent discoveries make it highly probable that the "pool" intended is that of Siloam, or, if not the present Siloam reservoir, a larger one, a little below it, now known as Birket el Hamra . That there was at least one other pool in Hezekiah's time is evident from Isaiah 22:9 , Isaiah 22:11 . And a conduit ; rather, the conduit. If "the pool" is Siloam, "the conduit" must almost certainly be that which was excavated under Ophel for the purpose of conveying the water from the Well of the Virgin in the Kedron valley to the Siloam reservoir on the western side of the spur. This conduit, which is curiously twisted, has a length of 1708 feet, with a height varying from two feet to four or five, and a width of about two feet. The roof is flat, the sides perpendicular, and the floor hollowed into a groove for the more rapid passage of the water. About nineteen feet from the southern extremity, where the channel opens upon the Siloam pool, a niche has been cut in the right-hand wall in the shape of a square tablet, and smoothed to receive an inscription of six lines, the greater part of which has been recovered. The letters are of the old Hebrew or Phoenician type, and by their forms indicate a date "between the eighth and the sixth centuries" (Sayce). The inscription, so far as it is legible, appears to have run as follows: "Behold the tunnel! Now, this is the history of the tunnel. As the excavators were lifting up the pick, each towards the other, and while there were yet three cubits to be broken through … the voice of the one called to his neighbor, for there was an excess (?) of the rock on the right. Then they rose up … they struck on the west of the excavators; the excavators struck, each to meet the other, pick to pick. And the waters flowed from their outlet to the pool for a distance of a thousand cubits; and three-fourths (?) of a cubit was the height of the rock over the head of the excavation here." We learn from it that the workmen began at either end, and tunnelled through the rock until they met in the middle—a result which their previous divergences from the straight line force us to attribute more to good fortune than to engineering science. And brought water into the city. The Well of the Virgin was without, the Pool of Siloam within, the city—the wall of the town being carried across the Tyropoeon valley from the extreme point of Ophel to the opposite hilt (see Nehemiah 3:15 ). Are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah? Hezekiah's fame rested very much upon these works, as we see by what is said of him by the son of Sirach (see the comment on verses 20, 21).