Everything You Ever Knew About Jerusalem Is Wrong (Well, Almost)

To say that you should throw out all your books on the archaeology of Jerusalem would be going too far, especially since I wrote two of them.¹ But it is true that books on the archaeology of Jerusalem, including my own, now contain a lot of misinformation. More bluntly, they are wrong. The lesson: The archaeological story is never finished.

You have been told that King Hezekiah built a 1,750-foot tunnel under Jerusalem in the late eighth century B.C. to bring water into the city from the 022Gihon Spring, the city’s only natural water source, which was located outside the city wall.^a Wrong! The Gihon Spring was inside the wall. And water was already available inside the city. The one thing everyone agreed on turns out to be wrong. So why did Hezekiah build his famous tunnel?