Tabernacle in the Wilderness 31 the wickedness of my people Israel. Therefore will I do unto the house which is called by my name, wherein ye trust [the temple at Jerusalem], and unto the place which I gave to you and to your fathers, as I have done to Shiloh.” Still another passage may be found in Jer. 26:6, and reads: “Then will I make this house like Shiloh, and will make this city [Jeru salem] a curse to all nations of the earth.”* All these passages, it should be observed, compare the Temple at Jerusalem with the Tabernacle at Shiloh; and they express the threat, that, unless the Israelites repented, God would destroy the Temple at Jerusalem, as he had long before destroyed, or removed, the Tabernacle at Shiloh. 5. TESTIMONY OF JUDGES AND JOSHUA Yet once more, in order to make our story of the Taber nacle complete, it is necessary for us to go back somewhat in history; and so we now quote from the books of Judges and Joshua. In Josh. 18:1 we read: “And the whole con gregation of the children of Israel assembled themselves together at Shiloh and set up the tent of meeting there.” Then, turning over to Judg. 18:31, we again read, about the idolatrous images set up in Dan, that these continued there “all the time that the house of God was at Shiloh.” From these two passages we learn not only how the “house of God” came to be located at Shiloh—because the children of Israel, probably under the leadership of Joshua, set it up there— but we learn also that the two descriptive terms, “tent of meeting” and “house of God,” signify the same thing; for it »These passages in Jeremiah are very important as evidence in favor of the Tabernacle’s real existence, since even the higher critics must admit that the chapters containing them were written a considerable time before the exile; and therefore these passages could not, except upon the violent theory of redaction, have been affected by writings appearing either during or after the exile. And as to Psalm 78 which even more explicit about the structure at Shiloh’s being the old Mosaic^Tabernacle, it is much easier to say, as the critics do, that this Psalm is post-exilic, than it is to prove such assertion.
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