--Rounding the southern end of Ophel, the southeast span of Moriah, you reach this famous pool. It is fifty-two feet long and eighteen feet wide, some piers, like flying buttresses, standing on its north side, while part of a column rises in the middle of it. These are the remains of an old church, built over it 1,300 years ago, or a monastery of the twelfth century. The miracle invested the pool with such peculiar sacredness that baths were erected under the ancient church, to let the sick have the benefit of the wondrous stream. You go down eight ancient stone steps to reach the water, which is used by the people for drinking, washing their not over clean linen, and for bathing. Everything around is dilapidated. At the north end a small tunnel opens in the rock, bringing the water from the spring of the Virgin, which lies 1,700 feet higher up the valley. This ancient engineering work is about two feet wide, and from two to sixteen feet in height, with a branch cut due west from it to a shallow basin within the line of the ancient walls, where a round shaft more than forty feet deep has been sunk to reach it. On the top of this a great chamber hewn in the rock, with a flight of steps leading down to it, made it possible for the citizens, by covering and hiding the spring outside, to cut off the supply of water from an enemy, while themselves, by means of this striking arrangement, enjoying it in safety without leaving their defences. A notable discovery connected with the cutting of the main tunnel was made in 1880 by a youth while wading up its mouth. Losing his footing, he noticed, as he was picking himself up, some letters cut in the rocky side, which proved to be an inscription left by the workmen when they had finished their great undertaking. From this it appears that they began at both ends, but as engineering was hardly at its best 3,000 years ago their course was very far from being exactly straight, windings of more than two hundred yards, like the course of a river, marking their work. There are several short branches showing where the excavators found themselves going in a wrong direction, and abruptly stopped, to resume work in a truer line, when at last they met they proved to be a little on one side of each other and had to connect their excavations by a short side cutting. Prof. Sayce thinks that this undertaking dates from about the eight century B.C., and Prof. Muhlan refers it to the time of Hezekiah, while others think it in part, at least, a relic of the early inhabitants of Jerusalem before David. The depth of the tunnel below the surface, at its lowest, is one hundred and fifty feet. The slope is very small, so that the water must always have flowed with a gentle leisure from the spring to the pool Isa_8:6). The remains of four other basins have been discovered, which were apparently once connected with the pool, and a little way from it down the valley, is an ancient “Lower Pool,” but now has its bottom overgrown with trees, the overflow from the higher pool having for centuries trickled past it instead of filling it. This is known as the Red Pool--from the colour of its soil--and is famous for an old mulberry tree saidto mark the spot where Isaiah was sawn asunder by Manasseh. The Virgin’s Well, from which the whole supply comes, lies at the bottom of two flights of broken stone steps--thirty in all--and has the glory of being the only spring rising in the Temple Mount. The taste of the water is very unpleasant, from its having filtered through the vast mass of foul rubbish on which the city stands, and which has been soaked by the sewage of many centuries. The sides of the tunnel are covered to a height of about three feet with thin red cement, very hard and full of pounded potsherds. The bed is covered with a black slimy deposit two or three inches thick, which makes the water still worse at Siloam than at the Virgin’s Well. Still from time to time water carriers come to fill their skins, and women with their great jars on their shoulders. Yet Siloam must have been far livelier than now in olden times, when a fine church rose over the spring and pilgrims bathed in the great tank beneath it. Already in the days of Christ, perhaps from the thought of the healing powers of the pool as issuing from Moriah, it must have been the custom to wash in it, else the blind man would hardly have been directed in so few words to do so. (C. Geikie, D. D.)
Which is by interpretation, Sent.--By a solemn and daily libation, the fount of Siloam had figured during the recent feast as the emblem of theocratic favours and the pledge of all Messianic blessings. This rite harmonized with the Old Testament, which had already contrasted this humble fountain with the brute force of the foes of the theocracy Isa_8:7). We have seen that Jesus applied to Himself the theocratic symbols of the feast; why should He not in the present instance also express by an act what He had hitherto declared in words. By adding to the real blindness, which He alone could cure, that artificial and symbolic blindness which the waters of Siloam were to remove, He declared in fact: What Siloam effects typically I accomplish in reality. Perhaps it is by the symbolic part given to Siloam that the explanation “Sent” of the Evangelist must be explained. In a philologic point of view, the correctness of John’s translation is not disputed, and the origin of the name has been explained by the circumstance that the water of the pool was “sent” from the distant spring of the Virgin, or because springs are regarded in the East as gifts of God. In any case, Israelite consciousness was struck by the fact that the spring flowed from the Temple hill, the residence of Jehovah, and had from the prophetic era attached to this water, a Messianic signification. It was undoubtedly this relation, with which the mind of the whole nation was penetrated, that John meant to bring forward in the parenthesis. Go to Siloam (the typically sent), to cleanse thyself from what causes thine artificial blindness; come by faith to He (the really Sent), who alone can cure thy blindness, both physical and moral. (F. Godet, D. D.)
The way of faith is simple
“Go wash in the pool.” Go to the pool, and wash the clay into it. Any boy can wash his eyes. The task was simplicity itself. So is the gospel as plain as a pikestaff. You have not to perform twenty genuflections or posturings, each one peculiar, nor have you to go to school to learn a dozen languages, each one more difficult than the other. No, the saving deed is one and simple. “Believe and live.” Trust, trust Christ; rely upon Him, rest in Him. Accept His work upon the cross as the atonement for your sin, His righteousness as your acceptance before God, His person as the delight of your soul. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
Faith and obedience
He obeyed Christ blindly. He looked not upon Siloam with Syrian eyes as Naaman did upon Jordan, but, passing by the unlikelihood of a cure by such means, he believeth and doth as he was bidden. His blind obedience made him see. Let God be obeyed readily without reasoning or wrangling, and success shall not be wanting. (J. Tramp.)
