Now, when King Hezekial got word that an Assyrian army was advancing on his city, he wisely ordained that a tunnel should be built to bring water to a reservoir inside the walls. Work on the tunnel commenced. One party dug in from the pool, while another dug out from inside the city walls. And almost thirty centuries ago water flowed through the tunnel for the first time, the Assyrians were thwarted, and Jerusalem, the city of peace, survived to live another day.
The tunnel is still there, carrying a stream of water through its dark shaft. Outside St. Stephen’s Gate an unmarked path winds down into a valley. Arno, Birhitte, and I descended it wordlessly, and at the bottom of the path, still within sight of the city walls, we saw an unremarkable concrete building. Inside it was the ancient spring.
There, too, a group of young Palestinian boys appeared from nowhere and began pulling at our sleeves. “You go? You go?” They held flashlights so that we knew we had reached the place. Hezekial’s Tunnel starts at the bottom of a decrepit set of concrete stairs, and the boys’ faces quickly reflected disappointment when we declared forcefully that we would go through it without guides.
Berhitte, though, took one look at the pitch-black entrance and chickened out. She couldn’t do it, she said. Too claustrophobic. Big Arno glanced at her sheepishly. I’d like to think he was feeling a little doubtful himself. “Berhitte,” he said, “I can’t leave you here by yourself. It’s not safe.” He was probably right. I’d already seen one young woman being followed ominously by a man with less than honourable intentions. The tunnel’s entrance wasn’t a safe place for a lone woman. Arno shrugged and said to me, “I can’t leave her alone.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll do it myself.”
“You are sure?”
For a moment I, too, was unsure. I hadn’t really planned on going solo, but there I was and there it was.
Berhitte and Arno said they’d meet me at the other end, and I ventured forward into the water, switching on my flashlight. The boys were still calling, their voices echoing in the darkness. Within a few steps the water was around my knees, gurgling and splashing as it has for three thousand years. The stone resembled unpolished marble, and the thin lance of my flashlight swept over rock that was a gentle pink like the hue of a seashell’s interior.
I could see how the tunnel was carved out by hand chisels. The marks were still visible in the rock, and again I wondered how anyone could possibly have managed the feat. The water was crystal-clear, and the only sound was my own breathing and the slosh of my two pale legs, diffracted and determinedly striding beneath the surface. Literally, I was tunnelling through history, plunging deep below the meaning-heavy city above.
At first the ceiling was a full metre over my head, and I could extend both arms and touch the walls on either side. Farther into the tunnel the walls began to squeeze in and the roof descended. Then, of course, the water was forced higher, and I had to crouch with only my head and shoulders and desperately precious flashlight free of the flowing stream.
Somewhere above Christ had been crucified. Somewhere above Muhammad had ascended to heaven on a silvery steed. The tunnel stretched on, seemingly winding and bending toward the very roots of the world.
In time I came to the point where the two parties of diggers had met all those years ago. There was once an inscription here in archaic Hebrew. It had read simply: BEHOLD … THE EXCAVATION.
I continued on, a heartbeat from panic, knowing there were hundreds of tonnes of rock overhead. Hurrying, I tipped my flashlight occasionally to see if something was in the water. I didn’t know what I expected to see lurking in the depths — perhaps something unknown and terrifying, something scuttling along the bottom in the murk.
There were also rumbles several times as if the earth was still settling around me. I hustled a bit more, jittery at the thought of being trapped in a cave-in. The thundering, I rationalized later, must have been the noise of trucks passing overhead — either that or more jets breaking the sound barrier.
Finally, the tunnel started to weave back and forth, and it seemed that the ceiling was growing higher. I turned another bend and heard a voice calling. It was indistinct, but I had little choice but to forge toward it. Then I realized my name was being shouted. It was Berhitte. She was quite worried. I’d been underground for maybe forty-five minutes. Her voice became louder until all at once I emerged at the Pool of Siloah and into the light.
A gang of boys was there, as well, but they were older than those at the entrance. They offered to take my picture as I arrived, but I didn’t trust them with my camera. These boys had a menacing air, laughed at my soaked T-shirt, and probably wondered why anyone would want to clamber through a three-thousand-year-old tunnel.
I shook them off, and Arno slapped my back and grinned. Together we three trudged back up to re-enter Jerusalem by the Dung Gate, which was given its unpleasant name because ancient villagers had once tossed their refuse there.
Today the Dung Gate leads into one of the most famous of all the sites of Jerusalem. In my wet clothes I was alarmingly out of place among the long white beards and black robes rocking gently in prayer. Directly in front was the legendary Wailing Wall.
A few hundred metres away, in the Arab quarter, one is greeted with “Salam aleikum,” but at the Wailing Wall only Hebrew is heard, and for Israelis the salutation is that most Jewish of words — shalom.
Salam, shalom — they are brother words from an ancient Semitic root. The name of the city, Jerusalem, literally means City of Peace. Now there’s a misnomer.
In 1947, when the United Nations mandated Israel into existence, a number of things happened with amazing speed. A war broke out, of course, but also the beginnings of a most remarkable language story occurred. Across Central and Eastern Europe a Jewish language, Yiddish, had already been in place for hundreds of years. For a while it was assumed Yiddish would become the official tongue of the new Israel. In those heady early days it was even proposed that Albert Einstein should become the first prime minister. Neither of these two things came to pass.
Yiddish is a Germanic language related to Old German with a smattering of Slavic thrown in. We know Yiddish for such words as putz, verklemmt, and schmooze, which evoke something of the world of those lost northern Jews, a hint of the colour, rhythm, and humour of their lives.
During the Holocaust, several million Yiddish speakers perished, and the language has never fully recovered. So in 1948, in one of the first sessions of the new Israeli parliament, a most extraordinary decision was made: the official language of the new state would be Hebrew. However, for almost two thousand years hardly a living soul had spoken that language in everyday situations. It’s true that Hebrew was well-known in its biblical context, but for people on the street it had about as much use as Latin. That meant it was a fossil language, a remnant of a long-ago time.
Nevertheless, the movement to revive Hebrew has been incredibly successful in Israel. In fact, even before the United Nations mandate, groups of people had been working on adapting Classical Hebrew to the twentieth century. They certainly had some problems describing technology. Bicycles, for example, are most definitely not mentioned in the Torah. And how about airplanes?
To deal with such modern inventions, Hebrew has adopted the word
Languages are pliable entities. They’re infinitely creative in their solutions to problems such as dealing with new ideas and new ways of thinking. Hebrew is a perfect example. Resurrected when it was all but extinct, it’s now spoken as a mother tongue by nearly six million people. Remarkable.
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