Monday, September 10, 2007

Ancient Escape Tunnel Found in Israel

Source: AP via AOL News

By AMY TEIBEL,

JERUSALEM (Sept. 9) - Under threat from Romans ransacking Jerusalem 2,000 years ago, many of the city's Jewish residents crowded into an underground drainage channel to hide and later flee the chaos through Jerusalem's southern end unnoticed.

The ancient tunnel was recently discovered buried beneath rubble, a monument to one of the great dramatic scenes of the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70 A.D.

The channel was dug beneath what would become the main road of Jerusalem, the archaeology dig's directors, Ronny Reich of the University of Haifa and Eli Shukron of the Israel Antiquities Authority, said Sunday. Shukron said excavators looking for the road happened upon a small drainage channel that led them to the discovery of the massive tunnel two weeks ago.
FULL STORY

3 comments:

Robert said...

A fascinating article, but what it doesn't mention is that the escape tunnel discovery strikingly confirms historian Norman Golb's theory, now supported by an entire series of major Israeli archaeologists, that the Dead Sea Scrolls are the remains of Jerusalem libraries, smuggled out of the city for hiding during the Roman siege of 70 A.D.

This also puts a spotlight on the outrageous conduct of the San Diego Natural History Museum in its current exhibit of the Scrolls. Pursuant to an agreement reached with Christian evangelists who believe the scrolls were written by a radical, proto-Christian sect, the museum has excluded Golb and the Israeli archaeologists from its lecture series and, in the exhibit itself, has failed to inform the public of the grounds supporting the Jerusalem theory.

For further information, see
http://museumethics.wordpress.com/
and the articles by Charles Gadda on the Nowpublic site, in particular the one entitled "Christian fundamentalism and the Dead Sea Scrolls in San Diego," the link is
http://www.nowpublic.com/christian-fundamentalism-and-dead-sea-scrolls-san-diego.
Follow Gadda's links for his other articles too, they expose a truly outrageous scandal.

Ioannis Georganas said...

Dear Robert,

Many thanks for your comment.

Robert said...

Incidentally, Golb now has an article about this on the Oriental Institute website, with a list of passages from Josephus. Apparently, the archaeologists were not even aware that similar tunnels were unearthed in Jerusalem during the 19th century (see the illustrations in Golb's article). The link is:

http://oi.uchicago.edu/pdf/jerusalem_tunnel_sept2007.pdf