Archaeology Proves the Bible:
Ancient Escape Hatch Found In Israel
Under
threat from the Romans ransacking Jerusalem 2000 years ago, many of the city’s
Jewish residents crowded into an underground drainage channel to hide and later
flee the chaos through Jerusalem’s southern end unnoticed
The
ancient tunnel was recently discovered buried beneath rubble, a monument to one
of the great dramatic scenes of the destruction of the Second Temple in the
year 70 A D.
The
channel was dug beneath what would become the main road of Jerusalem, the
archaeology dig’s directors, Ronny Reich of the University of Haifa and Eli
Shukron of the Israel Antiquities Authority, said. Shukron said
excavators, looking for the road, happened upon a small drainage channel that
led them to the discovery of the massive tunnel recently.
“We were looking for the road and suddenly
we discovered it,” Shukron said. “And
the first thing we said was, ‘Wow!’”
The walls of the tunnel made of ashlar stones 3 feet deep reach a height
of 10 ft in some places and are covered by heavy stone slabs that were the
road’s paving stones, Shukron said. Several manholes are visible, and portions
of the original plastering remain,
Pottery
shards, vessel fragments, and coins from the end of the Second Temple period
were also discovered inside the channel, attesting to its age, Reich said. The discovery of the drainage channel was
momentous in itself, a sign of how the city’s rulers looked out for the welfare
of their citizens by developing an infrastructure that drained the rainfall and
prevented flooding.
The
discovery “shows planning on a grand scale, unlike other cities in the ancient
Near East,” said Joe Zias, an expert in the Second Temple period.
But what makes the channel doubly significant is its role as an escape
hatch for Jews desperate to flee the conquering Romans, the dig’s directors
said.
The
Second Temple was the center of Jewish worship during the second Jewish Commonwealth,
spanning the six centuries preceding the Roman conquest of Jerusalem. Its
expansion was the most famous construction project of Herod, the Jewish proxy
ruler of the Holy Land under imperial Roman occupation from 37 B.C.
As
the temple was being destroyed by the Romans in 70 A D, numerous people took
shelter in the drainage channel and lived inside it until they fled Jerusalem
through its southern end, the historian Josephus Flavius wrote in “The War of
the Jews” “It was a place where people
hid and fled to from the burning and destroyed Jerusalem. Tens of thousands of people lived in
Jerusalem at the time, but it is
not clear how many used the channel to escape,” Shukron
said.
About
100 yards of the channel have been uncovered so far. Reich estimates its total
length will reach more than a half mile, stretching north from the Shiloah Pool
at Jerusalem’s southern end to the disputed holy shrine known to Jews as the Temple
Mount. The shrine is the site of the two, biblical Jewish temples
Archeologists
think the tunnel leads to the Kidron River, which empties into the Dead Sea.
From
Good News Magazine by A.
Teible
"This
beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets could only proceed from the
counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being
. . ."—Sir Isaac Newton (17th-century
British mathematician and physicist)
"I
have known 95 of the world's great men in my time, and
of these, 87 were followers of the Bible. The Bible is stamped with a Specialty
of Origin, and an immeasurable distance separates it from all its
competitors."— W.E. Gladstone
(19th-century British prime minister)
"I believe that the Bible is the best
gift God has ever given to man. All the good from The Savior of the world is communicated
to us through this Book."—Abraham
Lincoln (U.S. president 1861-1865)
"The
intellectual beauty of the order discovered by science is consistent with the
physical world's having behind it the mind of the divine Creator."—John Polkinghorne (20th-century
British scientist and author)