Ever since 1867, when the British explorer and engineer Charles Warren (later Sir Charles Warren), working for the London-based Palestine Exploration Fund, discovered the 52-foot vertical shaft that now bears his name, Warren’s Shaft has been a popular candidate for the Biblical tsinnor (2 Samuel 5-8)-often translated as watershaft-that Joab supposedly climbed up to enter the city, much to the surprise of its Canaanite-Jebusite residents.a After all, my 37-year-old companion, Eli Shukron, was at the bottom of the shaft, prepared to catch me if I fell.Īrchaeologists Shukron and Ronny Reich, who are excavating this area of Jerusalem, insist that the shaft was never used to draw water (despite a near-universal belief, until now, that it was) and that Joab did not penetrate the city through this shaft. At 69, should I really be trying to re-enact the hypothesized entry into Jerusalem of Joab, King David’s general, that enabled the Israelites to capture the city?īut I threw caution to the winds. I Climbed Warren’s Shaft (But Joab Never Did), Hershel Shanks, BAR 25:06, Nov-Dec 1999.ĭangling on a rope ladder in a subterranean shaft, 30 feet below the City of David, the oldest part of Jerusalem, and 45 feet above the bottom of the shaft, I wondered whether I was being foolhardy.
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