City of David Guide: Pools of Siloam, Southern Steps and Ancient Jerusalem
- The Anonymous Hungry Hippopotamus
- Nov 19, 2023
- 4 min read
Updated: Jul 11
I woke on my final morning in Israel with a strange mix of gratitude and grief — thankful for everything the trip had already given me, and genuinely sad that it was ending, determined to make the last few hours count as much as the first ones had.
City of David
We began at the City of David, named for the king who conquered it, though the site's history reaches back further still, to his own forefather Abraham. Archaeologists place the meeting between Abraham and Melchizedek, king of Salem, here — an encounter recorded in Genesis 14, generations before David was ever born. David himself took the city roughly three thousand years ago, fourteen generations after Abraham, and ruled it for forty years, uniting Israel's tribes and leading them through battle after battle.
Before any of that, he was a shepherd boy famous for one specific act of defiance: killing the giant Goliath with nothing but a sling and a stone (1 Samuel 17). A sculpture of a harp stands near the site today, honoring the king who was, by his own reputation, as devoted a musician as he was a warrior.
This same ground later held the reign of David's son Solomon, who built the First Temple here.
The temple was later destroyed and eventually replaced by the Second Temple, the one Herod would go on to expand into the structure whose remnants still stand at the Western Wall today. Centuries after that, Jesus himself spent time in this same city during his ministry.
The archaeology here reflects all of it at once.
The active digs are still uncovering the foundations of David's own palace, and cisterns built to hold water drawn from the Gihon Spring, the city's original lifeline.
In the eighth century BCE, King Hezekiah diverted that spring through a winding underground tunnel and into the city itself — a defensive engineering feat built to secure Jerusalem's water supply against siege.
Visitors can usually wade through Hezekiah's Tunnel itself, waist-deep in dark water, though it was closed the day we visited.
We took the adjacent Canaanite Tunnel instead — dry, lit, and just as narrow, tight enough that I spent most of it moving sideways and crouched over, which turned out to be a fairly direct confrontation with a claustrophobia I hadn't previously known I had.
Pools of Siloam
From the tunnels, we reached the Pools of Siloam — the rock-cut pools where Jesus healed a man born blind, sending him to wash here and restoring his sight in the process (John 9:1-11).
The site was mid-excavation when we visited, and the dig had already turned up something remarkable: a stretch of the original first-century road, paved in stone slabs 25 feet wide, the exact route pilgrims once walked from these pools, where they would ritually wash, to the Second Temple, where they would go on to worship.
Visual reconstructions along the path recreate the markets and shops that would have lined that same walk two thousand years ago — a glimpse of what an ordinary morning here would have actually looked like, rather than just the ruins it left behind.
Southern Steps
We continued on, passing Al-Aqsa and the Western Wall — ground we'd covered the day before — until we reached the Southern Steps, the primary access point into the Temple from the City of David.
Three times a year, during the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the Feast of Weeks, and the Feast of Booths, worshippers would climb these exact stairs to enter. They're also known as the Rabbis' Stairs, or the Teaching Stairs, for the instruction that regularly took place on them.
It was on these steps that a twelve-year-old Jesus, visiting Jerusalem for Passover, stayed behind without his parents' knowledge to sit with the teachers, listening and asking questions, while his family had already begun the journey home without him (Luke 2:41-52). "Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers" (Luke 2:47) — a strange and quietly remarkable scene to picture: a child, sitting on these same stones, holding his own among men who'd spent their lives studying the law he'd come to fulfill.
Yad Vashem
Our last stop was Yad Vashem, Israel's national Holocaust memorial and museum. Photography isn't permitted inside, so there are no images from this stop to share — only what I can tell you in words. The museum unfolds across nine galleries of exhibits, but the one that has stayed with me most is the Hall of Names: a room built entirely as a memorial to every Jewish life lost in the Holocaust, centered on a 33-foot cone bearing 600 photographs — a small, deliberately incomplete fraction of the millions the room exists to remember. You can see images of the museum's exhibits here.
That was, in every sense, how our final day of touring Israel came to a close.
I watched the sun set over Jerusalem one final time on the drive to Ben Gurion International Airport, my mind full of gratitude for the people and experiences this trip had given me — memories I expect to carry, and be blessed by, for the rest of my life.
It is still surreal that this gorgeous country I visited only months ago — its people, its cultures, its faith, its history, its food and architecture, all remarkably layered into so small a footprint — is now being ravaged by war. I continue to pray for the peace of Israel, and for the safety of everyone in the region.
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