CONDUIT (תְּעָלָה֒, H9498, channel, aqueduct). Tr. “watercourse” (Job 38:25, KJV), “channel” in RSV, poetically speaking of the seeming torrents of rain in a cloudburst. It is rendered “trench” in 1 Kings 18:32-38, the ditch which Elijah dug around his stone altar to retain the water he poured over his sacrifice.

Jerusalem, like other fortified cities founded close to springs in Bronze and Iron Age Pal., had a system of channels and tunnels to supply water to its citizens (see Gezer; Gibeon; Lachish; Megiddo). The Jebusites had dug further into the hill on which Jerusalem stood to permit water from the spring Gihon (q.v.) to flow back into a storage pool. They could lower buckets down a forty ft. shaft (2 Sam 5:8; see Gutter) to fetch water, and then return through a sloping rock-cut tunnel to their houses inside the city wall.

In more peaceful times Solomon and his successors constructed two conduits, the older an open rock-cut channel, the other built partly of masonry and covered with flagstones. They led the overflow of Gihon from its reservoir, now with higher walls to raise its water level, called the “upper pool,” about 1300 ft. down along the side of the Kidron valley to the lower or old pool (Isa 22:9, 11) or “King’s Pool” (Neh 2:14) in the king’s garden (2 Kings 25:4) at the S end of the city. Along this conduit, where Isaiah met King Ahaz (Isa 7:3) and where Sennacherib’s officials stood to taunt Hezekiah (2 Kings 18:17; Isa 36:2), ran a road through the Kidron valley past the Fuller’s Field, prob. near En-rogel. The aqueduct was called Shiloah, meaning the “sender” of water (8:6), and openings on its E side enabled it to irrigate the terraced gardens below it.

When Sennacherib invaded Judah and the siege of Jerusalem seemed imminent, Hezekiah stopped up all the fountains outside the city wall, by which seem to be meant the apertures in the Shiloah conduit, and the Brook Kidron that ran through the fields below the city (2 Chron 32:1-4). In place of the old system he ordered a winding tunnel or conduit (2 Kings 20:20) dug under the city hill to bring the water of Gihon to a new pool built at the end of the Tyropoeon Valley on the W side of the city of David (2 Chron 32:30; Ecclus 48:17; see Siloam).

Later on, a fifteen m. long aqueduct was constructed, before the times of Herod the Great and Pontius Pilate (for they repaired it), to bring water to the Temple from three great reservoirs S of Bethlehem. Sennacherib had built an aqueduct to supply water to Nineveh (q.v.) from a river above Jerwan, over thirty m. away. See also Water.

Bibliography J. Simons, Jerusalem in the OT (1952), 175-179; G. A. Barrois, “Siloam,” IDB (1962), IV, 352-355; M. Burrows, “Jerusalem,” IDB (1962), II, 849-851; R. W. Hamilton, “Water Works,” IDB (1962), IV, 811-816.