Pool of Siloam Discovery

In the summer of 2004 a crew repairing a damaged sewer line in the Wadi Hilweh area of Silwan, at the southern tip of the City of David ridge, exposed two ancient stone steps. Work stopped.

Ronny Reich of the University of Haifa and Eli Shukron of the Israel Antiquities Authority, already excavating nearby, identified the steps as the corner of a monumental pool. The discovery was announced publicly in August 2005.

It is trapezoidal rather than rectangular, its longest side running about 225 feet — over seventy metres. Steps descend on at least three sides in a distinctive rhythm: sets of five broad stairs separated by landings, an arrangement that lets a person enter the water at whatever level it happens to stand.

The stepped phase was laid over an earlier plastered pool and faced with stone slabs. The water arrives from the Gihon Spring through Hezekiah's Tunnel, as it still does today.

Coins settle it. Four coins of Alexander Jannaeus (103-76 BC) were embedded in the plaster of the earlier phase, giving the earliest possible date for that construction. About a dozen coins struck during the First Jewish Revolt, of years two through four (AD 67-69), came out of the soil accumulating in the pool — it silted up soon after the city fell in AD 70.

The pool was therefore open, full and in public use through the entire ministry of Jesus.

Pilgrims had been shown a different Siloam for fifteen centuries: a small pool about seventy metres north, built by the empress Eudocia in the fifth century beside a Byzantine church. That was a commemorative construction. The Second Temple pool lay under an orchard the whole time, unmarked and unvisited.

Reich and Shukron also traced the stepped street running from the pool up the Tyropoeon Valley toward the Temple Mount — the pilgrimage road. In 2019 Nahshon Szanton, Moran Hagbi, Joe Uziel and Donald Ariel published the coins sealed beneath its pavement in the journal Tel Aviv; the latest belong to the early 30s AD, during the governorship of Pontius Pilate.

Pilgrims coming up for the feasts washed at the pool and climbed that street to the Temple. The route is now walkable again.

Siloam is not the only pool John describes and gets right. John 5:2 places a healing at Bethesda, "having five porches" — a detail long read as symbolic invention, five porches for the five books of Moses.

Excavation near the Church of St. Anne uncovered a twin pool complex divided by a central partition, with colonnades on the four sides and a fifth along the dividing wall. Five porches, exactly as described. Two Jerusalem pools, two offhand topographical details, both confirmed by the spade.

Siloam was not new in Jesus' day. Isaiah 8:6 rebukes a people who "refused the waters of Shiloah that go softly" — the quiet gravity-fed flow from Gihon, set against the flood of Assyria. Nehemiah 3:15 has Shallun repairing "the wall of the pool of Siloah by the king's garden" during the rebuilding.

Luke 13:4 names the same district again, in the tower of Siloam that fell and killed eighteen. The pool sat at the busiest corner of the lower city, which is why it turns up in a prophet, a builder's roster, a disaster report and a healing.

The identification is broadly accepted. From 2022 the Israel Antiquities Authority and the City of David Foundation began a staged excavation intended to expose the whole pool and open it to visitors; the full plan, depth and northern extent are still being recovered.

Its precise function is discussed — public immersion pool, civic reservoir, or both. The stepped design is characteristic of ritual immersion, and the pool sits exactly where pilgrims entered the city.