Shiloh
Subtitle: A Biblical City in Tradition and History (Journal for the Study of the Old Testament)
Series: Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Series
Publisher: Sheffield Academic Press
Published: December 1989
Place of publication: Sheffield, England
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 256
ISBN-13: 9781850751618
Subjects: Bible - Study - Old Testament; General; History - General History
Genres: Historiography, History of Religions
First sentence: Although biblical Shiloh was hardly the central focus of Old Testament criticism in the nineteenth century, scholars of that era almost always discussed Shiloh in connection with the problems of the nature of early Israelite worship and the centralization of the cult.
Description: This work comprises and exhaustive recasting of the scholarly literature on the ancient cultic site of Shiloh, in the Central Hill Country of Ancient Israel, and a re-evaluation of Shiloh's role in Israelite history and religion. The scholarly review begins in 1805 and is finalized in 1987; as such it provides a thorough overview of the application of historical-critical thinking to this topic. That is the subject of the first half of the book. The second half is devoted to an analysis of the texts pertaining to Shiloh in the Hebrew Scriptures, and to reconstruction the history of the site based on text and archaeology. The book is heavily influenced by the Göttingen school of biblical criticism, but given that fact presents some surprising conclusions.