MORE INSIGHTS FROM BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY TODAY: OLD TESTAMENT

 It has been several years since I have written a post highlighting several articles in a given issue of BAR magazine (see “Recent Insights from Biblical Archaeology Today”). However, the Spring 2026 issue contains a number which should be of interest to those studying the biblical accounts. And so I would like to briefly review four of these below dealing with OT events, and another three relating to the New Testament in a subsequent posting.

Word plays in the Bible There are a number of puns present in the Bible which are generally lost in English translation. The magazine editors highlight just three of these after explaining that in some cases “a rare word is used for stylistic reasons, such as to produce alliteration.”

1. goper = cypress wood and koper = pitch appear together in Genesis 6:14 describing the construction of Noah's ark. By the way, this explains the strange designation “gopher wood” found in the KJV.

2. In I Samuel 19:20, Saul sends men to “capture” David, and they come upon a “company” of prophets. In Hebrew, those two words read, respectively, lahaqat and laqahat.

3. The advice in Proverbs 23:1-2 includes a warning not to get used to eating the deceptive delicacies of your ruler (ba'al) or you will just be putting a knife to your throat (belo'eka).

The Siloam Tunnel Inscription As related in both II Kings 20:20 and Isaiah 22:9ff, King Hezekiah strengthened Jerusalem's defenses by constructing a tunnel that would provide water for the city in case of a siege. A message inscribed on the wall of the tunnel seemingly commemorates the exact moment at which digging teams from both sides broke through, allowing water to flow into the city from a spring outside the walls.

But in an article by Ariel Cohen, he questions this scenario on several grounds, which I will enumerate and let you decide for yourself their worth. In the first place, everyone seems to agree that the inscription was made by one or more of the stone-cutters themselves who had actually worked on the tunnel's construction. However, the identity of the intended audience is not as easy to determine for the following reasons:

    1. It is obvious that the inscription is quite far from the spot where the two sides actually met.

    2. There is the question of why an inscription marking such an important event would be located where no one could read it.

    3. The inscription does not give the historical background as to why the tunnel was constructed in the first place, something always included in an important monument.

    4. The fissure (zdh) mentioned in the inscription corresponds to no geological feature found in the tunnel.

Thus, Cohen concludes that the only scenario meeting these conditions is that the dam keeping the water from flooding the tunnel prematurely broke loose and drowned those workers who were in the tunnel at the time. Thus, it was written from one (or more) surviving stone-cutter for the benefit of the spirits of his drowned companions who were still believed to be roaming aimlessly and confused within the tunnel. Also, according to Cohen, the strange word zdh appearing in the inscription may be equated with the Hebrew root zwd/zyd, which in Psalm 124:4-5 is used for water overwhelming people.

In my own mind, this whole scenario just doesn't hold water, so to speak, Instead, it appears much more likely that this is just one more, albeit a little more detailed, example of the myriad of inscriptions found literally all around the world in which ordinary, anonymous people just want to leave some little trace of their existence behind after their death. We see this from the hand prints on the walls of ancient caves to the “Kilroy Was Here” notices scribbled by Allied soldiers during WWII to lovers carving their initials on the sides of trees to today's ubiquitous urban graffiti.

Hezekiah's Unpaid Tax Bill? That is the intriguing title of a brief article by one of the editors of BAR. It concerns a very small fragment of clay containing an Assyrian inscription that appears to have been utilized as a sort of cover letter seal describing the contents of a now-missing document, and it was found very close to Jerusalem's Western Wall. The style of cuneiform letters in the inscription dates it to about the 8^th to 7^th centuries BC. That places it during the royal reign of either Hezekiah, Manasseh, or Josiah. The author of this article speculates that since it seems to refer to a delay in payment of a bill that perhaps it refers to the tax revolt carried out by King Hezekiah against King Sennacherib, as told in II Kings 18:7. This is an intriguing, if yet unproven, speculation.