BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

Was the Siloam Inscription a Message for the Dead?

Rethinking the Siloam Tunnel with Ariel Cohen

Replica cast of the Siloam inscription, found inside the Siloam Tunnel in Jerusalem. Credit יעל י, via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY 3.0.

Sometimes, archaeology provides evidence that makes the past feel palpable. Jerusalem’s Siloam Tunnel Inscription is a great example. Carved into the tunnel’s wall is a Hebrew text that reads almost like a dispatch from a job site, describing the sound of pickaxes, the narrowing gap between two crews digging a tunnel toward each other, and the moment they broke through. The traditional interpretation holds that the inscription is a commemorative text celebrating the tunnel’s completion, carved by the workers who dug it.

In the Spring 2026 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, Ariel Cohen, Professor of Linguistics at Ben-Gurion University, has a new and highly original interpretation of the Siloam inscription. He calls much into question with a simple flip of the audience: He asks whether the Siloam inscription was written for the living, as has always been assumed, or if it was written for the dead.

Cohen argues that the traditional interpretation involves several points of unresolved tension. For one, the inscription is not located where the two crews met. That spot is far from where the inscription was found, identifiable by a distinctive zigzag pattern of cuts. Second, although the Siloam inscription recalls the crews hearing each other from 5 feet away, acoustic studies of limestone suggest the workers would have been able to hear each other from a much farther distance. The inscription is placed at the wrong “moment” in the bedrock for a first encounter. Most puzzling of all is why a monument—categorically, meant to be seen—would be placed in a (dark!) tunnel where no one could see it. The Siloam inscription also does not present as ad-hoc graffito of an inexperienced scribe: It took time, skill, and effort to carve.

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Cohen is able to find a new pathway into the Siloam Tunnel through the inscription’s use of the word zdh. The text recalls that, as the groups were working toward one another, someone cried out because of a zdh in the rock. This term is often interpreted as a fissure, i.e., the thing that enabled the groups to be able to hear each other. But there is no linguistic evidence for this interpretation, and no such fissure has ever been found in the rock.

The word zdh does not occur in the Hebrew Bible, but its probable root (z-w-d/z-y-d) does. Cohen notes that, fascinatingly, in Psalm 124:4–5, the root invokes the imagery of overflowing water. He suggests in his BAR article that zdh in the inscription may refer to a sudden, deadly rush of water. Before digging could begin, the crews would have needed to block the flow from the Gihon Spring to keep it from flooding the Siloam Tunnel as they worked. If the barrier failed, the results could have been catastrophic. Maybe one such rush of water caused fatalities that the Siloam inscription commemorates.

An insider status is implied for the inscription’s audience. The writing assumes, as Cohen points out, that the reader already knows the backstory. Who commissioned the Siloam Tunnel, why, and how the work was organized did not need to be stated. The inscription is “end heavy” in the sense that it becomes more descriptive only about the conclusion of the project. Cohen provocatively asks whether the inscription’s audience was group of insiders who knew the project intimately but never saw it finished, for example workers killed in an accident during its construction.

What would have moved surviving crew members to carve an inscription for dead colleagues inside the Siloam Tunnel? In Iron Age Judah, secondary burial was standard practice: The deceased were first laid in a temporary tomb before being moved to a permanent resting place, which could take years. During that interval, the dead were understood to linger near the places they knew in life, unsettled and in need of comfort. An inscription in the tunnel where they had worked and died makes sense from this perspective. Cohen reads the text as a message of consolation, composed by laborers for friends who did not live to see what they had, together, built. The tunnel was finished, and water now flowed.

Whether or not Cohen’s interpretation ultimately persuades, it does what all of the best historical studies do: It invites the audience to rethink old certainties. Cohen turns the lights on in this historical moment, if only for a second, illuminating details that have been overlooked. The writing is not, as it were, “on the wall,” and interpretation lies wide open.

To learn more about the original function of the Siloam Inscription, read the article “Siloam Tunnel Inscription—For the Living or the Dead?” by Ariel Cohen in the Spring 2026 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

Subscribers: Read the full article “Siloam Tunnel Inscription—For the Living or the Dead?” by Ariel Cohen in the Spring 2026 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

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Lauren K. McCormick is an assistant editor at Biblical Archaeology Review and a specialist in ancient Near Eastern religions, visual culture, and the Bible. She holds degrees in religion from Syracuse University, Duke University, New York University, and Rutgers University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship on religion and the public conversation at Princeton University.

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