Shiloh

The Hebrew word in Genesis 49:10 is spelled the same as this town's name, and four readings of it are held. The Messianic reading takes it as a title of the coming one, and it is the reading of the Targums, of the Babylonian Talmud at Sanhedrin 98b, of Rashi in the eleventh century, of Justin Martyr and Irenaeus in the second, and of Wesley, of Jamieson, Fausset and Brown, and of Spurgeon, who preached a whole sermon under the title in 1874. The tribute reading repoints the consonants as shai lo, tribute to him, which fits the second half of the verse. The relative reading takes the word as until he comes to whom it belongs, which is how the Septuagint, the Syriac and the Latin fathers understood it. The place-name reading takes it as this town and ties it to the assembly of Joshua 18:1.

Where the readings part from Christ, this page says so at the point of contact. The Targums, the Talmud and Rashi read the verse as pointing to a Messiah still awaited rather than to Jesus of Nazareth, and that difference is stated plainly and without disparagement. The verse itself is about Judah's scepter, and this town sits in Ephraim.

Scripture does not give a number. Judges 18:31 marks the span as the whole time the house of God was in Shiloh, and 1 Samuel 4 ends it. Commentators have estimated differently from the same silence: Adam Clarke reckoned about 130 years and John Wesley put it above three hundred. Both figures are their own estimates, and the Bible does not date it.

Both descriptions are in the text. Joshua 18:1 calls it the Tent of Meeting, while 1 Samuel 1:9 has Eli sitting by the doorpost of the temple of the LORD and 1 Samuel 3:15 has Samuel opening the doors of the house of the LORD. Adam Clarke and John Wesley both concluded that some solid structure had been built around the curtains once the tent stopped moving. No sanctuary building of that period has been identified in the excavations, so their conclusion rests on the wording of the text rather than on anything dug up.

The text puts the answer before the battle. Eli's sons were wicked men who had no regard for the LORD and were treating the LORD's offering with contempt, and judgment on the house had already been announced. Israel then fetched the ark to the front as a device after they had already lost one battle. Psalm 78 gives God's own reason for the outcome: He abandoned the tabernacle of Shiloh and delivered His strength to captivity.

He was old enough to serve. Hannah brought him only after he was weaned, and by 1 Samuel 2:18 he is ministering before the LORD in a linen ephod. In the call scene he sleeps in the house where the ark was kept and opens the doors of the house in the morning, which is a servant's duty. The text calls him a boy and gives him a job.

The excavations found a heavy destruction by fire and an abandonment that Israel Finkelstein dated to about 1050 BC on pottery and radiocarbon, and he connected it to the aftermath of the Philistine victory in 1 Samuel 4. That the settlement burned in the middle of the eleventh century is not seriously disputed. Who burned it is an inference. No inscription names an attacker, and the Bible never narrates the destruction, though Jeremiah 7:12 and Psalm 78:60 both assume the reader knows something happened here.

Three proposals are held and none has been demonstrated. Israel Finkelstein found no cultic building of the period and holds that the summit has been stripped by erosion and later building, so nothing of the sanctuary survives. Asher Kaufman argued in Biblical Archaeology Review in 1988 that a levelled rock surface on the north of the tell was a prepared platform sized for the tabernacle. Scott Stripling and the Associates for Biblical Research propose the plateau north of the tell, on the strength of monumental Iron Age I architecture and a very large quantity of butchered animal bone.

The dying wife of Phinehas named her son Ichabod because the ark of God had been captured, and the name is explained in the next breath: the glory has departed from Israel. Adam Clarke notes that the ancient versions struggled with the word and that its force is caught by the question, Where is the glory? The ark never returned to Shiloh. Albert Barnes traces it from Philistia to Nob, then Gibeon, and finally to Mount Zion under David.

Because it took away the one thing the crowd counted on. They were chanting that this is the temple of the LORD, and Jeremiah told them to go and look at what God had done to His own first sanctuary. Albert Barnes puts the reaction exactly: they assumed it was absolutely impossible that Jerusalem ever could become like Shiloh. Priests and prophets seized him and demanded his death, and the officials spared him by citing Micah, who had said worse and lived.