Far from being shambolic, the construction of the tunnel was a masterpiece of engineering!
I was wrong about "shambles"; the actual quotation (http://www.bibleplaces.com/heztunnel.htm) I was referring to, which I have now found again, was:
R. A. S. Macalister said the tunnel was a "pathetically helpless piece of engineering."
Henry Sulley in 1929 first suggested that Hezekiah’s tunnel followed a natural crack in the rock.
Dan Gill argues that the two crews of diggers followed a natural karstic dissolution channel.
You have to remember, this was back in the days before laser guidance and all that. It wasn't like when they built the channel tunnel and the two teams digging from either end met in the middle within a precision of about half a metre!
It's true. I'm just surprised they even tried when they had got so little confidence the two ends would ever meet!
In actuality, most of the tunnel is straight as an arrow. Its only right in the middle that the tunnel curves left and right, which is exactly what you would expect.
That's simply not true. Have you ever been in the tunnel? It bends right from the word go. There's a map here (http://www.geocities.com/Athens/oracle/1631/hez1.html), and a (slightly simplified) cutaway plan here (http://www.snunit.k12.il/njeru/pba8.htm).
Also, you should know that most of Jerusalem is unexcavated. Anything which touches on biblical stuff is extremely contentious. For example, take a look at the excavations round the south side of the temple mount. I think that these were done in the 60's and 70's and haven't been touched since.
That's also not true; there's excavations going on by Robinson's Arch (about 200m from the Wall) at the southwestern corner of the Temple today; and lots of excavations going on in the City of David less than quarter of a mile to thee south of the Temple.
There's loads more potential digging to be done round the eastern and northern walls, not to mention on the mount itself, but all these places are too politically and religiously sensitive to allow digging.
True—though that didn't stop the Waqf illegally bringing in contractors to carry out construction of two underground mosques in the Temple Mount itself. Rather than working with archaeologists and excavating the site properly, they simply hauled away the waste, which probably contained material from the First Temple period as well as the Second, and dumped it. The Hebrew University later retrieved this waste, and is sifting it to see what it can find; and if I'd still been in Israel, I'd have attended a talk on this, and joined briefly in the sifting effort myself today.
no subject
I was wrong about "shambles"; the actual quotation (http://www.bibleplaces.com/heztunnel.htm) I was referring to, which I have now found again, was:You have to remember, this was back in the days before laser guidance and all that. It wasn't like when they built the channel tunnel and the two teams digging from either end met in the middle within a precision of about half a metre!
It's true. I'm just surprised they even tried when they had got so little confidence the two ends would ever meet!
In actuality, most of the tunnel is straight as an arrow. Its only right in the middle that the tunnel curves left and right, which is exactly what you would expect.
That's simply not true. Have you ever been in the tunnel? It bends right from the word go. There's a map here (http://www.geocities.com/Athens/oracle/1631/hez1.html), and a (slightly simplified) cutaway plan here (http://www.snunit.k12.il/njeru/pba8.htm).
Also, you should know that most of Jerusalem is unexcavated. Anything which touches on biblical stuff is extremely contentious. For example, take a look at the excavations round the south side of the temple mount. I think that these were done in the 60's and 70's and haven't been touched since.
That's also not true; there's excavations going on by Robinson's Arch (about 200m from the Wall) at the southwestern corner of the Temple today; and lots of excavations going on in the City of David less than quarter of a mile to thee south of the Temple.
There's loads more potential digging to be done round the eastern and northern walls, not to mention on the mount itself, but all these places are too politically and religiously sensitive to allow digging.
True—though that didn't stop the Waqf illegally bringing in contractors to carry out construction of two underground mosques in the Temple Mount itself. Rather than working with archaeologists and excavating the site properly, they simply hauled away the waste, which probably contained material from the First Temple period as well as the Second, and dumped it. The Hebrew University later retrieved this waste, and is sifting it to see what it can find; and if I'd still been in Israel, I'd have attended a talk on this, and joined briefly in the sifting effort myself today.