Passage dated to 700 B.C. lends weight to Scripture

Using carbon–14 dating techniques, Israeli and British scientists have determined that Siloam’s Tunnel, a long, circuitous underground passage constructed below Jerusalem’s ancient City of David was probably built about 700 B.C., when King Hezekiah ruled the land of Judea.
   
The radiometric dating lends weight to the biblical text (2 Kings 20:20; 2 Chron. 32:3, 4), as well as to a very old inscription, discovered in 1880, on one of the tunnel’s walls. Although this inscription appears to refer to Hezekiah, it does not do so by name.
This marks the first time that a structure mentioned in the Bible has been dated radiometrically, according to researchers Amos Frumkin, Aryeh Shimron and Jeff Rosenbaum, who published their findings in the Sept. 11 issue of Nature.
   
While most scholars have long credited the 1,750-foot-long tunnel to Hezekiah — and in fact call it Hezekiah’s Tunnel — based on the two biblical references, a minority insisted the passage was built centuries later.
   
Among other arguments, the dissenters said that an enterprise this large would not have been taken during a time of war.
   
According to the Bible, Hezekiah built the tunnel to protect arid Jerusalem’s precious water supply from the hands of the invading Assyrians. Toward this end the king redirected the water from the Gihon Spring toward the walled City of David — from one side of the city to the other. Modern scientists view the tunnel as a great work of water engineering.
   
Both the spring and the City of David are located in the Kidron Valley, outside the walls of the better–known Old City of Jerusalem, in an east Jerusalem neighborhood called Silwan.
   
Radiometric dating measures the decay of radioactive elements and enables researchers to estimate the age of the material being examined.
   
Here, the scientists dated the organic material within the plaster of the tunnel, and employed uranium–thorium for dating the stalactites that have been growing in the tunnel since the time it was built.
   
Jon Seligman, Jerusalem District Archeologist, said the tunnel’s radiometric readings were further evidence that the tunnel was indeed excavated during Hezekiah’s time.
   
“The Bible is a historic sourcebook for the period. In addition, we have the inscription, which is very clearly dated. Confirmation of known dating is always good,” Seligman said. (RNS)