(Worthy Insights) – The 2025 field report released by the Associates for Biblical Research (ABR) on June 2 describes how the dig has shifted its focus to a breached gateway along Tel Shiloh’s city wall. Project director Scott Stripling and ABR president Scott Lanser write that the structure is “the continuing excavation work at the Shiloh Gate Complex, where the priest and judge Eli died,” explicitly linking the stones to the biblical passage in which a messenger announces that the Philistines have captured the Ark and Eli falls dead at the news.
According to the same update, the team is removing collapsed mud-brick debris to expose what they believe was a multi-chambered gate controlling entry to Shiloh’s cultic centre. If the hypothesis holds, the gateway would mirror gate plans previously uncovered at Megiddo and Hazor and offer a physical setting for the Ark narrative. Photogrammetric models and soil micromorphology samples collected this season will undergo laboratory analysis before the results are submitted for peer-review, the researchers add.
Shiloh served as Israel’s religious hub for about three centuries, making any gate from that horizon a critical waypoint for visitors bringing sacrifices to the tabernacle. Earlier ABR seasons identified dense animal-bone deposits and cultic vessels nearby, but the 2025 campaign marks the first time the gate itself has been the prime target. While the researchers stress that definitive proof is still pending, they argue that the gate’s location and construction date strengthen the case that it is “the very place” where the Ark episode unfolded. [ Source (Read More…) ]