Jerusalem - Hezekiah's Tunnel

Friday 17 April

Hezekiahs Tunnel, Yad Vashem.

Driving in Jerusalem is an interesting experience. Traffic lights don’t have red or green arrows as we do in Australia. They simply have a normal set of traffic lights, with an arrow sign above the lights pointing in the direction of the turn they are controlling. When you are approaching the intersection you see several traffic lights that are either red or green and you then need to discern the arrow sign above each set of lights to se if you can go or not, a little confusing when you are not used to it. Then there is the left hand drive! This is not so bad when there is a lot of traffic on the road but if the roads are empty, you do need to concentrate. Only once, late at night and feeling a little weary, can I recall driving on the wrong side of the road with the passengers of two other cars looking strangely at me across the median as we were all heading in the same direction. The other thing you need to get used too is the regular toot of the horn. It seems a mandatory thing whenever the traffic stops you give the horn a good blast.

Hezekiah’s Tunnel, and Warrens shaft. These give testimony to two Biblical events. The taking of Jerusalem by Joab, David’s Captain, and Hezekiah, a king that reigned several hundred years after David. Both Biblical accounts speak of these engineering feats, of approximately 2500 to 3000 years ago.

Fiona and Pris in the Jebusite tunnel leading to Warrens shaft.

Warrens shaft. The original access to the spring in the time of the Jebusites when King David took the city. This is the likely shaft that Joab climbed to breach the city.

Hezekiah’s tunnel is the conduit that his men cut through the rock during a reprieve when the Assyrians retreated to deal with issues on the other side of the empire. The Assyrian King threatened he would return one day and finish off the work he had begun. “This same Hezekiah also stopped the water course of Gihon and brought it straight down to the west side of the city of David” (2Chron 32:30) into the pool of Siloam. It is certainly an amazing experience to walk through a very narrow and sometimes very low tunnel with water about knee deep. It is approximately 500m long and cut through solid rock! When you are in the tunnel it seems to go on and on.

Pris about to take the plunge at the start of the tunnel, with torch at the ready.
It give you a good idea of how deep the water gets in some places

When Sennacherib the Assyrian king eventually returned, Hezekiah was well prepared and with God’s help the Assyrian army was unable to breach the walls. He retreated in disgrace with heavy losses.

Emerging from the tunnel at the traditional Pool of Siloam

We traveled to Yad Vashem the Holocaust Museam. The display is now housed in a new building, and it is an amazing piece of architecture. The building is a long rectangular prism that is predominantly underground with only the top point of the prism protruding out of the ground to let small shafts of light into the chambers throughout the building. The exhibit starts at one end, and you wind a tortuous path back and forth through the displays along the floor of the prism making your way to the other end. The displays take you through the story of the rise and fall of the Nazis in Europe and the horrible persecutions against the Jews that ensued. It finishes with the birth of the Jewish state. The exit end of the building dramatically bursts out of the side of the hill you have been walking through and the sides of the prism peel apart to reveal a magnificent view over beautiful forests in Jerusalem. A very significant statement is made in a very clever way.

The striking building that houses the Holocaust exhibit

Another depiction of the valley of dry bones. This time in Yad Vashem

The display highlights such an ironic and sad story. Ironic in the fact that Hitler’s objective was to destroy the Jewish people with the ‘final solution’ and rid the world of this perceived problem, yet this was the catalyst that brought about the rebirth of the Jewish sate. A sad story because it was yet another tragic bloodbath that the Jewish people had to go through. So much does it mirror the sufferings of their Messiah whom they rejected!

They ‘looked for some to have pity on them’, and to take them in when the Nazi party’s grip on Europe began to tighten, ‘but there was not any’ and all nations turned their back when they needed them most. Just like their Messiah. ‘The soldiers mocked them’ and beat them. Just like their Messiah. The Nazis ‘plucked off the hair’ as they systematically shaved all the prisoners in their camps. Just like their Messiah. ‘They parted their raiment among them’ as they stripped them naked and took all their clothes. They were murdered naked. ‘Everyone could tell all their bones’. Just like their Messiah. Their ‘strength was dried up like a potsherd’, just like their Messiah, as they all died weary and emaciated from the labor of the concentration camps. In ‘three days’ God raised their Messiah, and it was three years after the end of WWII that the Jewish state was resurrected from the graves of the holocaust and lived and breathed again.

On and on go the eerie echoes of the Jewish sufferings during WWII, and their Messiah. Astonishing parallels, that must be intended to have a future impact on the nation, as today their eyes are blind to these things, nor can they see their Messiah.