Shiloh

When Jacob blessed his children at the end of his life, he said this of Judah: “The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be” (Genesis 49:10).  The footnote on the word Shiloh says, “The Hebrew word shiloh may be a short form of asher-lo, which can be rendered ‘whose right it is.’”  It certainly appears from the context of the verse that the word is meant to represent the Savior.  In the JST we have this description from Jacob’s son Joseph about Moses: “The Lord God will raise up a righteous branch out of my loins; and unto thee, whom my father Jacob hath named Israel, a prophet; (not the Messiah who is called Shilo;)” (JST 50:24).  This confirms that Shiloh is indeed a name for Christ, but these two are the only references in the scriptures to the Messiah as Shiloh.  Wilford Woodruff liked to refer to the Savior as Shiloh, though, particularly in the context of the Jews.  For example, speaking of Jerusalem at the time of the Second Coming, he wrote, “The Gentiles… will go up against Jerusalem to battle and to take a spoil and a prey; and then, when they have taken one-half of Jerusalem captive and distressed the Jews for the last time on the earth, their Great Deliverer, Shiloh, will come…. Then, when they behold the wounds in his hands and in his feet, they will say, ‘Where did you get them?’ And he will reply, ‘I am Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, your Shiloh, him whom you crucified.’”  Shiloh, then, is another name for the Messiah and in particular represents He who has the right to rule in Israel. 

               Though the name Shiloh is not used in the scriptures elsewhere to refer to the Savior, it was a place of significance in Israel.  We first see it in the settling of the Israelites in the land of Canaan: “And the whole congregation of the children of Israel assembled together at Shiloh, and set up the tabernacle of the congregation there” (Joshua 18:1).  This was the place where the Israelites originally set up the tabernacle when they came into the land.  The Lord declared through Jeremiah, “Shiloh, where I set my name at first” (Jeremiah 7:12).  It is likely then that the city itself was named precisely because Shiloh was a name of their Messiah, and it was here that the presence of the Lord dwelt among them.  It was in Shiloh that the people went to worship: “And this man went up out of his city yearly to worship and to sacrifice unto the Lord of hosts in Shiloh” (1 Samuel 1:3).  The Bible Dictionary says that Shiloh was “a sacred city of the Holy Land, 9¼ miles north from Bethel and 11½ miles south from Shechem, in the tribe of Ephraim. The tabernacle was here during the greater part of the period of the Judges, and the place continued to be the religious center of the nation until after the loss of the Ark in the disastrous battle of Ebenezer.”  It was to Shiloh that Samuel was taken by Hannah as a young boy to be consecrated to the Lord, and “the Lord appeared again in Shiloh: for the Lord revealed himself to Samuel in Shiloh by the word of the Lord” (1 Samuel 3:21).  Eventually, though, the Israelites took the ark of the covenant out of Shiloh and the “ark of God was taken” by the Philistines (1 Samuel 4:4, 11).  It appears that ultimately Shiloh was destroyed, though such a destruction is not explicitly recorded in the Bible.  But in Jeremiah the Lord promised to the wicked people of that day, “Therefore will I do unto this house, which is called by my name, wherein ye trust, and unto the place which I gave to you and to your fathers, as I have done to Shiloh.”  The people were upset with Jeremiah because of what he had also said, “This house shall be like Shiloh, and this city shall be desolate without an inhabitant?” (Jeremiah 7:14, 26:9)  This strongly suggests that just as Jerusalem was destroyed in the time of Zedekiah because of its wickedness, so too had Shiloh been destroyed because of its iniquity.