ABSTRACT
To be or not to be: that is the question! Was there a temple at Shiloh or was there not? The enigmatic temple has brought confusion to biblical scholars and archaeologists for many decades, because it is sometimes there, and it is sometimes not there. It is definitely present in Jeremiah 7, and in the Story of Eli and his sons in 1 Samuel. But it is not there when you dig in Shiloh, as excavations reaching 90 years back tell us. So the question is: How can it both be there and not there? The solution to this riddle is the texts of Jeremiah and 1 Samuel. If we take Jeremiah 7 as a reference to a once existing temple in the physical world, we wonder, because it is not there. However, if you think of Jeremiah 7 as a Deuteronomistic intertextual reference to the temple in 1 Samuel, embedded in another narrative, it makes perfect sense. Thus, this reference is provided as a warning to readers of what may happen – or rather had already happened when the text of Jeremiah 7 was composed – to a temple without a faithful congregation.
