Pool of Siloam

Pool of Siloam is the pool at the south end of the City of David in Jerusalem, fed by water from the Gihon Spring, and named Shiloah in Hebrew (Isaiah 8:6). Shiloah is read as "sent" or "conducted," and the Pool of Shelah of Nehemiah 3:15 bears a name of the same meaning. Which excavated structure these passages of Scripture mean is still debated.

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In Scripture

In the days of Ahaz, king of Judah from 732 to 716 BC, when Rezin king of Aram and Pekah son of Remaliah marched against Jerusalem (Isaiah 7:1), Isaiah charged that "this people has rejected the gently flowing waters of Shiloah and rejoiced in Rezin and the son of Remaliah" (Isaiah 8:6). Against them the Lord would bring "the mighty floodwaters of the Euphrates," the king of Assyria (Isaiah 8:7). Hezekiah, king of Judah from 716 to 687 BC, is remembered for "how he constructed the pool and the tunnel to bring water into the city" (2 Kings 20:20). When Sennacherib came against Jerusalem in 701 BC, Hezekiah had the springs outside the city stopped up so the kings of Assyria would not "find plenty of water" (2 Chronicles 32:2-4). He "blocked the upper outlet of the Spring of Gihon and channeled it down to the west side of the City of David" (2 Chronicles 32:30). Isaiah also tells Jerusalem's people that, seeing "many breaches in the walls of the City of David," they "collected water from the lower pool," tore down houses "to strengthen the wall," and "built a reservoir between the walls for the waters of the ancient pool," but did not look to the One who made it (Isaiah 22:9-11).

Shallun son of Col-hozeh, "ruler of the district of Mizpah," repaired the Fountain Gate and "the wall of the Pool of Shelah near the king's garden, as far as the stairs that descend from the City of David" (Nehemiah 3:15). Nehemiah had earlier come to "the Fountain Gate and the King's Pool," where his animal could not get through (Nehemiah 2:14).

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Setting

The pool's general location was where the central, or Tyropoeon, valley meets the Kidron Valley, at the southern tip of the City of David hill. Since Hezekiah's tunnel was cut, the Gihon's water has flowed through it to the pool. The Siloam Inscription was found near the tunnel's lower end, close to the pool.

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The Siloam Dam

At the Tyropoeon Valley's southern outlet, a monumental gravity dam blocked the valley's flow into the Kidron, holding back an artificial reservoir; it measures at least 62 feet (19 m) long and 36 feet (11 m) high. Nahshon Szanton, an archaeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority, co-directed the rescue excavation there. A 2025 paper in PNAS, whose first author is Johanna Regev of the Weizmann Institute of Science, dated uncharred straw from the dam to 800 BC by radiocarbon, within a range of 805 to 795 BC. Regev's paper credits the dam to Judah's rulers under King Jehoash, that is Joash (835-796 BC), or his successor Amaziah (796-767 BC), as an answer to unpredictable weather and water shortage.

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Which Pool?

Older reference works read the names in different ways: the Pool of Shelah and the King's Pool as probably or possibly this pool, Isaiah's lower pool as possibly Birket al-Hamra, and, in one view, Shelah as a separate reservoir fed by the Gihon. Szanton, in a 2024 excavation report he co-wrote, identifies the Silwan Pool, at the tunnel's outlet, with the "Siloam Pool," a view he set out in 2023. Regev's paper speaks of the water behind the dam as "the Siloam Pool reservoir." A stepped pool found in 2004 at the south end of the City of David is later: the first stage of its staircase dates to the middle of the first century BC.

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Later History

In the fifth century AD the empress Eudocia had a church and a hospital built above the pool. The name lives on in Silwan, the village across the Kidron Valley to the east. Today the Gihon's water still flows through the tunnel into a small pool at its outlet, among column drums from the Byzantine church's porticoes.