In late August, while searching for ancient Jerusalem’s main road, Israeli archeologists have seemingly found the drainage channel that some Jews used to escape the Roman army in AD 70.
It is supposed that, under threat from Romans plundering Jerusalem 2,000 years ago, a number of the city’s Jewish residents crowded into an underground drainage channel to hide. Later, they fled the chaos of the city, walking through this tunnel, and emerged unnoticed just south of Jerusalem.
The ancient tunnel was recently discovered buried beneath rubble, a monument to one of the great dramatic scenes of the destruction of Herod’s Temple.
The channel was dug beneath what would become the main road of Jerusalem, said the directors of the archaeology dig, Ronny Reich of the University of Haifa and Eli Shukron of the Israel Antiquities Authority. Shukron said excavators looking for the road happened upon a small drainage channel that led them to the discovery of the massive tunnel.
The walls of the tunnel — made of great stone slabs three feet thick — reached a height of ten feet in some places. They are covered by other heavy stone slabs that were the road’s paving stones. Several manholes are visible, and portions of the original plastering remain, Shukron said.
Pottery shards, vessel fragments, and coins from the appropriate time period (the late first century) were also discovered inside the tunnel, attesting to its age, Reich said.
The discovery of the drainage channel was quite illuminating in itself, said Reich. It showed how the city’s rulers considered the welfare of their citizens in developing an infrastructure that drained the rainfall and prevented flooding.
But of course, what makes the channel especially significant is its role as an escape route for Jews desperate to flee the conquering Romans.
The Second Temple — as it is commonly called — was the center of Jewish worship during the second Jewish Commonwealth, which spanned the six centuries preceding the Roman conquest of Jerusalem. Its expansion was the most elaborate and the most famous construction project of Herod the Great, the Edomite ruler of the Holy Land at the time of the birth of Jesus.
In his Wars of the Jews, the Jewish historian Josephus wrote that, as the Romans destroyed the temple in AD 70, numerous people took shelter in a drainage channel and lived inside it until they fled Jerusalem. Many thousand people lived in Jerusalem at the time, but there seems to be no way of knowing how many used the channel to escape.
About 100 yards of the channel have been uncovered so far. Reich estimates its total length will reach more than half a mile, stretching from the Temple Mount compound south to the Pool of Siloam, and thence to the Kedron Valley itself.
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