which follow, although in Isa 37:6 and Isa 37:24 allusion is evidently made to the other two. Tartan had no doubt the chief command, since he is not only mentioned first here, but conducted the siege of Ashdod, according to Isa 20:1. The three names are probably only official names, or titles of the offices held by the persons mentioned. For רב־סריס means princeps eunuchorum, and רבשׁקה chief cup-bearer. תּרתּן is explained by Hitzig on Isa 20:1 as derived from the Persian târ-tan, “high person or vertex of the body,” and in Jer 39:3 as “body-guard;” but this is hardly correct, as the other two titles are Semitic. These generals took up their station with their army “at the conduit of the upper pool, which ran by the road of the fuller’s field,” i.e., the conduit which flowed from the upper pool - according to 2Ch 32:30, the basin of the upper Gihon (Birket el Mamilla) - into the lower pool (Birket es Sultân: see at 1Ki 1:33). According to Isa 7:3, this conduit was in existence as early as the time of Ahaz. The “end” of it is probably the locality in which the conduit began at the upper pool or Gihon, or where it first issued from it. This conduit which led from the upper Gihon into the lower, and which is called in 2Ch 32:30 “the outflow of the upper Gihon,” Hezekiah stopped up, and conducted the water downwards, i.e., the underground, towards the west into the city of David; that is to say, he conducted the water of the upper Gihon, which had previously flowed along the western side of the city outside the wall into the lower Gihon and so away down the valley of Ben-hinnom, into the city itself by means of a subterranean channel,[1] that he might retain this water for the use of the city in the event of a siege of Jerusalem, and keep it from the besiegers.
This water was probably collected in the cistern (הבּרכה) which Hezekiah made, i.e., order to be constructed (2Ki 20:20), or the reservoir “between the two walls for the waters of the old pool,” mentioned in Isa 22:11, i.e., most probably the reservoir still existing at some distance to the east of the Joppa gate on the western side of the road which leads to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the so-called “pool of Hezekiah,” which the natives call Birket el Hamman,
- ↑ We may get some idea of the works connected with this aqueduct from the description of the “sealed fountain” of the Solomon’s pool at Ain Saleh in Tobler, Topogr. v. Jerus. ii. pp. 857ff., Dritte Wanderung.
