Shiloh
שִׁלֹה
Where was biblical Shiloh? At Tel Shiloh (Khirbet Seilun), beside the town of Shilo, about 30 km north of Jerusalem. I mark it certain.
Joshua set up the Tabernacle on this hill, and for generations Israel came up here to worship. Here Hannah prayed for a son, and here she brought Samuel to serve Eli.
By Aaron Shaffier, licensed Israel tour guide and mapmaker · About the mapmaker
- Site today
- Tel Shiloh (Khirbet Seilun), beside the town of Shilo
- How sure
- Certain The name, the sources and the finds all agree.
- Other names
- Tel Shiloh, Khirbet Seilun, Seilun
- Location
- 32.0543° N, 35.2900° E (Google Maps)
How we know where it was
This was the Jerusalem before Jerusalem was Jerusalem. With no king yet, Shilo was as close to a capital as Israel had.
I use three kinds of evidence to identify a biblical site, and Shilo has all three. The Arabic name Khirbet Seilun preserves Shiloh. The geography matches the Bible's unusually precise address: north of Beit El, east of the road from Beit El to Shechem, south of Lebonah. And excavators found an Israelite town full of storage jars and cultic objects, destroyed by a fierce fire around 1050 BCE, when the Philistines captured the Ark. One kind of evidence makes a site possible. Two make it solid. Three make it close to a scientific fact. I'm 99.9% sure.
The harder question is where on the site the Tabernacle stood. One proposal puts it on the summit of the tel. But nothing has been found there, and building on the highest point is the pagan pattern. The Temple Mount is lower than the hills around it, an amphitheater where G-d is surrounded by His people.
North of the tel, a rock-cut platform about 50 cubits wide runs on an exact east-west axis. That is the width of the Tabernacle's courtyard, and its orientation. Cutting it would have taken hundreds or even thousands of workers. Some call it a threshing floor. If it is, it is by orders of magnitude the biggest threshing floor ever found in Israel, in hill country that grows grapes and olives, not wheat. I think the Tabernacle stood there.
Hannah is the first person in the Bible recorded praying silently. She felt G-d was right beside her. Eli thought she was drunk.
The Book of Judges sends the men of Benjamin to hide in the vineyards of Shilo while the daughters danced at the festival. The old rock-cut terraces still line the slopes, mostly planted with olives today.
Then the Ark went out to battle and never came back to Shilo. Jeremiah later told Jerusalem to go to Shilo and see what G-d did to the place where His name once dwelt.
Watch: Mystery of the Mishkan
Walking Tanach. Filmed on the tel, weighing four candidates for the Tabernacle site.
Visiting today
The Tel Shiloh visitor site shows the tel, the proposed Tabernacle area, Byzantine church mosaics and a lookout tower. I filmed Mystery of the Mishkan on the tel, and The Vineyard over the valley at grape harvest.
Read it in the Bible
Verse numbers follow the Hebrew Bible. In a handful of chapters English Bibles count one verse off.
See Shilo on the interactive map →
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Get the print + free ebookNearby places
- Tappuah 8 km northwest
- Baal Hazor 8 km south
- Ophrah 11 km south
- Timnath Serah 14 km northwest
- Bethel (Beit El) 15 km south
- Ai 16 km south