The most important water in the world?

As I write this I am in Israel, leading a group of friends around the Holy Land with my (now) good friend, Dahoud, our Egyptian Coptic Christian guide.


The other day, on a visit to the City of David, the site of the small Jebusite fortress that David captured around 1000 BC, we stopped by the Gihon Spring, the water source that fed the fortress and subsequently the city that David built. Presumably one day, some prehistoric farmer drank from the well, and thought it would be a good idea to build a settlement on the hill above it, as it both had accessible water and was easily defendable with three steep valleys around it.

It got me thinking about the significance of this small stream of water emerging from deep underground. It seems so small, so insignificant. Yet without this spring, there would have been no fortress, without the fortress, David would not have tried to capture it. Without David's raid, there would have been no Jerusalem. Without Jerusalem, no Solomon's temple. Without Solomon's temple, no Herod's temple. Without the Temple, Jesus would not have set his face for Jerusalem, hence no cross, no resurrection. Also, no Western Wall, no Dome of the Rock, no Crusades, no State of Israel, no Palestinian question, no Middle Eastern crisis... the list goes on and on.

And it all stems back to that tiny stream of water gushing out from the rock in an obscure valley in the Judean hills. Can there be a more significant and influential spring anywhere in the world? So watch carefully when you drink from a spring and think it might be a good place to build a city.


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Comments

  1. I hope you walked Hezekiah's tunnel! - Mark

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