description has now reached, and extended southward to the wall of the high town, and so constituted an inner line of defence. Nothing is said of repairing it: perhaps it had not been thrown down; or, as an inner wall, Nehemiah neglects it for the present, as he does also the north wall of the Upper City. At any rate the description carries us beyond it. At the north-west angle of the second wall there was a Corner Gate (2 Kings xiv. 13; 2 Chron. xxv. 23), which is called also the Gate that Looketh. A gate here would command a view of the city walls as far as the Fish Gate on the one hand and the Valley Gate on the other. But this gate also is passed over in the present description.
We have next the Tower of the Furnaces, probably west of the "Pool of Hezekiah." The word may mean hearths furnaces, ovens, or altars; but we cannot say to what it related.
And then we come to the Valley Gate, which we have already seen must have been near the present Jaffa Gate, and probably was exactly where the present David Street passes the end of the wall discovered, by the Greek Bazaar, in 1885. Unless a gate existed there, the street would lose half its use. Yet there is Herr Schick's alternative, that the name was given to a gate south-west of the Citadel, and opening on to the Valley of Hinnom.
In verse 13, from the Valley Gate it is "1000 cubits on the wall to the Dung Gate." This forbids any identification with the present dung gate, in the Tyropœan, and fixes within a little the position of Bethso.
In verse 15, Shallun, who repairs the Fountain Gate, repairs also "the wall of the Pool of Shelah by the king's garden." Allow that Shelah is Siloam, yet this need not be a wall running down to Siloam—if we were to take that line we should go wrong all the rest of the way—it is
