Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Dora Smith" <villandra AT austin.rr.com>]

Someone posted this book excerpt to another list I'm on.

> > THE ISRAELITES IN HISTORY AND TRADITION
> > by Niels Peter Lemche (c) 1998
>
> Page 95
>
> Another example, this time not so direct, of this literary
> creation of a kind of intertextuality between prophetic and
> historical literature could be the case of the temple
> of Shiloh.  Jeremiah asks people to travel to Shiloh
> in order to see what is going to happen to the temle
> of Yahweh in Jerusalem (Jer 7:12).
>
> This temple in Shiloh is well known from the biblical
> historical narrative as the sanctuary where the prophet
> Samuel grew up (1 Sam 1-3)....
>
> For more than two generations, archaeologists have been
> looking for this temple without finding so much as a trace
> of it.  The reason for the search is, of course, that there
> must be a temple in Shiloh since the Bible says so.  The
> possibility exists, however, that there never was a temple
> at the historical site of Shiloh in Israelite times."
> [END OF CLIP]
>

I don't know what to think of Lemche or the thoroughness of his research.
It is news to me that anyone has been searching for a temple at Shiloh;  I
always understood the shrine at Shiloh to be only a shrine.

The actual passages as translated in the New Revised Standard Version DO
refer to a temple there, but one of the passages also calls it a tent of
meeting, and my Access Bible interprets this to mean the "temple" was a
mobile tent shrine.

What Hebrew word is used, how can it be interpreted, and what light can
anyone shed on whether the structure was a tent or a temple?

------------------------------

Jeremiah 4:12; Go now to my place that was in Shiloh, where I made my name
dwell at first, and see what I did to it for the wickedness of my people
Israel.  Notes explain that Shiloh was a shrine in the northern kingdom that
was destroyed by the Philistines.

Samuel 1-3:

Now this man used to go up ... from his town to worship and to sacrifice to
the Lord ofHosts at Shiloh, where the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Pinheas
were priests of the Lord.

So it went on year by year; as often as she went up to the house of the
Lord...

After they had eaten and drunk at Shiloh, Hannah rose and presented herself
before the Lord.  Now Eli the priest was sitting on the seat beside the
dorrpost of the temple of the Lord.  ...
Note on this says "Elkanah's annual pilgrimage to the temple of Yahweh or
house of the Lord (v. 7) in Shiloh..."

Now Eli was very old.  He heard all that his sons were doing to all Israel,
an dhow they lay with the women who served at the entrance to the tent of
meeting.  NOte on this says, "The tent of metting is another name for the
tabernacle, a moveable shrine.  Apparently the temple of the Lord at Shiloh
was actually a tent shrine."

3:3:  And Samuel was lying down n the temple of the Lord, where the ark of
God was.  Note on this says, "Samuel's bed was in the temple near the inner
sanctuary where the ark of God was kept.  "

Yours,
Dora Smith
Austin, Texas
villandra AT austin.rr.com