Transcription
Heat up here. Shalom and welcome to another episode in our series called Picture This from Israel. We're actually descending down the water system here at Megiddo. So, first of all, hope you like my new hat. This is the first time I'm actually wearing it. There it is. I hope it'll keep the sun off my ears more than my other hat. So, yes, it's me underneath this bigger hat.
But what we're doing is we're walking down this water system that you see behind me. But I want you to picture this. See if you can imagine a resident of Megiddo sometime maybe uh 9th century maybe uh 8th century BC walking down the steps that I want to show you. In fact, I'll turn my camera around and show you here. Can you picture a person walking down these ancient steps? These were discovered here at this site of Megiddo. And these are original steps from about 2900 BC. Some would say 50 years later. But these are the steps where we can picture a person going down. In fact, let's go down our modern steps and consider what an amazing engineering feat this must have been.
Now, we get a hint of why this was done from the book of 2 Chronicles 32 because as we look back up to these original steps, 2 Chronicles 32 of course is about Hezekiah in Jerusalem. And what he did is he diverted the waters from the Guhon spring to a reservoir pool at the southern end. He built a tunnel, 1,700 ft long. And here at Megiddo, they blocked off and camouflaged, no doubt, the spring, which was outside the city wall, and they chiseled the horizontal tunnel that connected the spring with this vertical shaft. and take a look at how deep this is. So, all you needed to do is walk down the steps that we just saw and perhaps continue on or throw a bucket on a long with a long rope down to the bottom and that's where the water from the horizontal tunnel would have been collected. And there you could obtain your water in that way without endangering yourself outside the city walls. It's really a remarkable engineering feat.
So, what we're doing is we're heading down 180 steps or so. I'll take you down to the horizontal tunnel so that you can see uh that part of the system too. So, we just came from there and we're continuing down these steel steps. Here we go. Carefully hanging on the rail. Below us is still another 50 ft. You can see how this was chiseled. It's wider, of course, in Hezekiah's tunnel, but I think this is remarkable. So, picture someone obtaining water in this way. And now, here's the horizontal tunnel. Look at this thing. It's remarkable. This leads about 70 or 80 ft where the spring of the city was located.
So, I hope you enjoyed this episode as we tried to picture someone obtaining water using this remarkable water system. It was a amazing engineering feat that dates to about 2900 years old. Until next time, shalom.