Understandably, Pilate accompanied his wife on future excursions about Jerusalem. As a typical woman, she preferred parks to civic buildings and monuments, but Jerusalem had few public gardens as such. The topography had provided two likely areas for vegetation in the upper arms of the y-shaped valley which flanked the mesa on which Jerusalem was set. But the western arm, the Valley of Hinnom or Gehenna, had been ruined by its use as city dump, and the fires constantly burning refuse there so resembled the Jewish picture of hell that the word Gehenna became, in fact, synonymous with hell.
In contrast, the eastern branch of the y, the Kidron Valley, remained a place of natural beauty, with some greenery splashing up the slopes of the Mount of Olives, which hovered over Jerusalem on the east. The grayish verdure of olive trees was particularly concentrated near the base of the hill at a grove called Oil-Press Garden, named for a gethsemane or oil press located there.
But the brook which was supposed to flow through the Kidron ravine was only a dry ditch at the time. An aide explained to Pilate that the stream had water only during winter months, when Judea caught its first rains. It was another piece of the parched picture of a dry and thirsty city.
Coming from a land where aqueducts gushed water at many gallons per second, Pilate could not comprehend how Jerusalem could exist without a better supply. Jews, of course, used far less water than Romans, who had an insatiable appetite for baths, fountains, and pools. In countless cisterns throughout the city, the people of Jerusalem hoarded the meager winter rainfall which drained from their roofs, and used water only sparingly throughout the year. Even Herod’s palace was supplied from a reservoir of rainwater, built into the top of one of its fortress towers.
Pilate called a meeting of the city engineers and architects who had come with him from Caesarea, and their Jewish counterparts for Jerusalem. By now it was no secret that the prefect wanted to improve the local water supply, and the men agreed that Jerusalem had a water problem, especially during the great festivals, when the area population at least quadrupled. The specialists debated the question. “Improve the Gihon,” one suggested. Pilate requested an explanation.
Nature had endowed Jerusalem with but one, solitary spring named Gihon, he was told, and even that gurgling rock lay just outside the city walls in the Kidron Valley. But seven centuries ago, the Hebrew King Hezekiah feared that invading Assyrians would seize the exposed spring just when Jerusalem needed its waters most. So he had his builders carve out a reservoir, the Pool of Siloam, just inside the city; and then, starting from both ends—the new reservoir and the existing spring—they hacked a tunnel under the city walls through 1,752 feet of solid rock, which diverted Gihon’s water into the new and protected cistern. The grotto surrounding the exposed spring was then walled up and camouflaged. The Assyrians missed it. A feat of superb engineering had saved Jerusalem.
Since the Gihon was still flowing, Pilate and the engineers went down to the Pool of Siloam, where they found the water level disappointingly low. Wading into the shallow waters of the tunnel at the point where it emptied into the pool, they lit torches and began their underground journey inside the conduit. Soon they came to Hezekiah’s proud inscription, cut into the rock of the tunnel wall. It was translated for Pilate’s benefit:
The Tunnel. And this is the history of the tunnel. While the bronze picks [of the two teams of workmen] were still opposite each other, and while three cubits still remained [to be excavated], the voice of one calling to the other was heard, for there were hollows in the rock toward the south and the north. And on the day of the boring through, the stonecutters struck pick against pick, one opposite the other. And the waters flowed from the spring to the pool, 1,200 cubits in length. And 100 cubits was the thickness of rock above the heads of the stonecutters.
After some minutes of sloshing along, Pilate and his party came to an abrupt deviation of five feet, after which the tunnel continued again. One of the men held his torch close to the wall and said, “Notice the pick markings are now aiming down toward us, rather than away from us. This shows we’re at the juncture of the two teams of workmen mentioned in the inscription.”
Pilate was impressed. “Do you mean that Hezekiah’s tunnelers could calculate this accurately that long ago—why, about the time Rome was founded—so that the two teams were only five feet off?”
“Yes, indeed.”
The men splashed their way further through the conduit and up a slight grade. Their ruddy torches painted a grotesque panorama of shadows on the walls of the tunnel. Just before reaching the spring, one of the Jewish engineers pointed to a narrow shaft that rose directly upward from the roof of the tunnel. “Here’s the passageway dug by the Jebusites, the original inhabitants of Jerusalem, so they’d have access to the spring in case of siege. But King David learned about the shaft just when he was scheming how to penetrate Jerusalem’s defenses. This made it simple: his commandos stole into the Gihon grotto by night, climbed this shaft, and took the city.”
“The Trojan Horse of Jerusalem,” Pilate commented.
A few more steps brought them to the Gihon spring, a circular pool bordered by rocks from which cool and delicious water was gurgling.
“Is there any way to increase the flow?” Pilate inquired.
One of the men swung a pick into the water source, causing a fountain to squirt up to the ceiling of the grotto.
“Careful!” one of Pilate’s aides cautioned. “Too much water and we’ll be trapped and drown down here.”
“Watch that fountain.”
For several minutes it spurted well enough, but gradually the column of water dwindled in height until it was only a gentle swell on the surface of the pool.
“Hit it again,” someone suggested.
After several swipes of the pick, the answering water jet was smaller than the first spurt. In a short time, the spring looked the same as when they first arrived. The engineers inspected the grotto for supplementary water sources but found none. So ended any thought of increasing the flow of the Gihon.
In the next days, Pilate continued debating the problem with the engineers. Could waters of the Jordan be tapped for Jerusalem? Impossible, because the river flowed 3,500 feet below the level of the city. The Asphalt Lake [Dead Sea] was even lower, and its waters useless. Were any lakes or streams in the area higher than Jerusalem? No. Any large brooks? No.
“Gentlemen,” said Pilate impatiently, “I ask you to think: are there water sources of any kind within, say, a twenty-mile radius of Jerusalem?”
“Well, there are pools and cisterns, of course.”
“Living water: springs, rivers.”
“Yes,” one of the older Judeans recalled, “there are several springs near Bethlehem. They converge on an age-old pool out there—Solomon may have built it—but Herod added two more reservoirs to supply his nearby castle, the Herodium. That’s also where he’s buried.”
“Well, since Herod obviously has no further need of the water, why don’t we tap it for Jerusalem?”
“Wait,” an architect from Caesarea interjected. “Are these pools higher or lower than Jerusalem?”
“I really don’t know.”
The next day they visited the site, which lay some seven miles southwest of Jerusalem. Pilate and his party found five springs in the area, while a sixth, further in the hill country, had been tapped by Herod and connected to the pool system by an aqueduct. Though badly in need of repair, Herod’s watercourse would constitute an important segment of the aqueduct Pilate began envisioning.