Tabernacle Site
Shiloh
SHY-loh · Modern Tel Shiloh (Khirbet Seilun), West Bank · 32.0556° N, 35.2895° E
Shiloh served as Israel's central worship site and home of the Tabernacle for roughly 300 years before the Jerusalem Temple was built, housing the Ark of the Covenant (Joshua 18:1; 1 Samuel 1-4). It is where the priest Eli raised the boy Samuel and where Hannah prayed for a son, a pivotal site in Israel's transition from the judges to the united monarchy.
Archaeology
Four expeditions have dug Tel Shiloh. A. Schmidt took soundings in 1922; a Danish expedition under H. Kjaer worked three seasons in 1926, 1929 and 1932, ending when Kjaer died mid-season; S. Holm-Nielsen returned for final soundings in 1963 and the report appeared in 1969. I. Finkelstein excavated for Bar-Ilan University from 1981 to 1984 and published the final report in 1993; his sequence — eight strata from the Middle Bronze Age to the Byzantine period, a pillared Iron Age public building, more than twenty grain silos, and a destruction at the end of Iron I around 1050 BC — is still the framework everyone works in. Associates for Biblical Research have excavated the site since 2017 under S. Stripling. There is a live argument between the two most recent excavators, and it is better named than discovered elsewhere; both state their commitments openly and both deserve to be quoted rather than characterised. Finkelstein holds that the biblical united monarchy is a literary construct of much later Judahite writers, and said of this site that the story of the ark "can teach us mainly about the world of the authors who lived centuries after the destruction of Iron I Shiloh." Associates for Biblical Research describes itself as a Christian apologetics ministry dedicated to demonstrating the historical reliability of the Bible, and Stripling has said "we're taking the Bible as a serious historical document, but the evidence is what the evidence is." The recent seasons have produced real material — three altar horns, ceramic pomegranates, a faunal assemblage with almost no pig in the Israelite layers, storage rooms and a monumental building — and some of it is published in scholarly journals. Stripling connects it to the tabernacle, and is careful about what that can mean: "we were never expecting to find the mishkan; it was made of animal skins, it would have decomposed." The identification of a structure at Shiloh with the tabernacle has so far been argued in the excavation's own magazine and in press interviews rather than in a peer-reviewed journal, and this app treats that difference the way it treats every other: an announcement is not a finding. What is not in dispute is that Iron Age Shiloh was a substantial place that came to a violent end, which is what Jeremiah 7 remembers about it.
On a modern map
Further reading
Reflect
The tabernacle rested at Shiloh for centuries before the ark moved on — how do you handle it when a familiar season of God's presence changes?
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