INV. 010 · Archaeological site
Hezekiah's Tunnel
A rock-cut channel carrying water into the city. It bears witness to Judahite engineering during the period of Assyrian threat.
Editorial note: Image metadata was checked against the Wikimedia Commons record; the object's historical identification should also be verified in the institution's catalogue.
- Type
- Archaeological site
- Nature
- Modern site photographA recent photograph of a historical site.
- Date of the object
- c. 701 BCEThe system is traditionally associated with Jerusalem's preparations for the Assyrian campaign of 701 BCE.
- Provenance
- City of David, Jerusalem.
- Image
- Oren Rozen
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0 ↗
- Retrieved
- Commons API, 2026-10-15
Sourced historical context
Assyrian records corroborate the 701 BCE conquest of most Judah described in 2 Kings 18 and 19. Particularly detailed palace reliefs commissioned by Sennacherib portray the siege of the Judahite city Lachish. Sennacherib did not destroy Jerusalem, as the Assyrians had done with Samaria, perhaps because Hezekiah agreed to pay a fine, as 2 Kings 18:14 says. But the Bible says what saved the city was divine intervention: an angel struck down 185,000 Assyrian soldiers, and Sennacherib went home. None of this is in the Assyrian version, which describes a typical victory. Each author had reasons to give his own account: the biblical one stresses God's power; the Assyrian one, Sennacherib's.