The pool was discovered by a repair team excavating a damaged sewer line last fall under the supervision of Eli Shukron of the Israel Antiquities Authority. As soon as Shukron saw two steps uncovered, he stopped the work and called in Reich, who was excavating at the Gihon Spring.
When they saw the steps, Shukron said, "we were 100% sure it was the Siloam Pool."
With winter approaching, the two men had to hurry their excavation so the sewer could be repaired before the rainy season.
As they began digging they uncovered three groups of five stairs each separated by narrow landings. The pool was about 225 feet long, and they unearthed steps on three sides.
They do not yet know how wide and how deep the pool was because they have not finished the excavation. The fourth side lies under a lush garden -- filled with figs, pomegranates, cabbages and other fruits -- behind a Greek Orthodox Church, and the team has not yet received permission to cut a trench through the garden.
"We need to know how big it is," Charlesworth said. "This may be the most significant and largest \o7miqveh \f7[ritual bath] ever found."
The excavators have been able to date the pool fairly precisely because of two fortunate occurrences that implanted unique artifacts in the pool area.
When ancient workmen were plastering the steps before facing them with stones, they either accidentally or deliberately buried four coins in the plaster. All four are coins of Alexander Jannaeus, a Jewish king who ruled Jerusalem from 103 to 76 BC. That provides the earliest date at which the pool could have been constructed.
Similarly, in the soil in one corner of the pool, they found about a dozen coins dating from the period of the First Jewish Revolt against Rome, which lasted from AD 66 to 70. That indicates the pool had begun to be filled in by that time.
Because the pool sits at one of the lowest spots in Jerusalem, rains flowing down the valley deposited mud into it each winter. It was no longer being cleaned out, so the pool quickly filled with dirt and disappeared, Shanks said.
The story of Jesus and the blind man, as told in John, is well known. Jesus was fleeing the Temple to escape either the priests or an angry crowd when he encountered the man. His disciples asked Jesus who had sinned, the man or his parents, to cause him to be born blind.
Jesus said that neither had sinned, but that the man had been born blind so that God's work might be revealed in him. With that, he spat in the dust to make mud, which he rubbed in the man's eyes before telling him to wash it off in the Pool of Siloam. When the man did so, he was able to see.
