Favissa at Shiloh

Overview

The Favissa at Shiloh is a deposit of ash, animal bone, broken pottery and small precious objects on the northeastern terrace of Tel Shiloh, in the excavation zone known as Area D. A favissa is a pit or dump where the remains of worship, such as offerings, worn-out cult vessels and votive objects, were buried rather than discarded with ordinary refuse. Both excavators who have worked the deposit date its contents to the Late Bronze Age. Shiloh is where the Tabernacle was set up after the Israelites entered Canaan (Joshua 18:1).

Discovery

The deposit was found by Israel Finkelstein during Bar-Ilan University's excavations at Shiloh from 1981 to 1984. He recorded an oval dump of about 150 square metres, up to one and a half metres deep, holding a large quantity of Late Bronze Age pottery, some of it cultic, together with animal bones, a fragment of a female figurine, a cylinder seal impression and a gold pendant. He dated the pottery to Late Bronze I and IIA and identified the dump as a favissa, but proposed that it was not in its original place: in his view the remains of a Late Bronze Age cult place had been cleared out and thrown onto the slope, "sometime in Late Bronze Age II, but more likely in Iron Age I", with storage silos cut into the dump shortly afterwards.

The Associates for Biblical Research, under Scott Stripling, resumed excavation at Shiloh in 2017 and from 2022 removed the balks Finkelstein had left standing in Area D. The team reports more than 10,000 animal bones and eight gold and silver objects, among them cut-out star pendants whose closest parallels are Late Bronze Age jewelry from Tell el-Ajjul and the Fosse Temple at Lachish.

Dating

The two excavations agree that the contents are Late Bronze Age and differ on the details. Re-analysing the pottery, Stripling's team places the start of the deposit in the Late Bronze IB to IIA horizon, around 1400 BC, and in a 2026 study dates it to the Late Bronze II horizon, about 1400 to 1200 BC, on the basis of stratigraphy, pottery and radiocarbon evidence; the radiocarbon results had not been published in full at the time of writing. The team treats the favissa as a deposit made where it lies rather than debris moved from elsewhere, and dates the silos cut into it to Iron Age IIA, not Iron Age I.

Interpretation

Finkelstein attributed the offerings to Canaanite worship at Shiloh before the Israelites arrived, which in his reconstruction was around 1200 BC. Stripling attributes them to Israelite worship, dating the Israelite arrival at Shiloh to about 1400 BC, consistent with the early date for the conquest. He points to the animal bones: pig makes up less than one percent of the bone in the Israelite strata, he reports, against about four percent in the layer beneath, and the team describes the assemblage as overwhelmingly from species permitted for sacrifice. The team also argues that the deposit reflects the Levitical instruction to carry the ashes of offerings outside the camp "to a clean place" (Leviticus 4:12; 6:11). The faunal figures come from interviews and preliminary publications, not yet from a final excavation report.

Biblical Significance

Shiloh was Israel's central sanctuary in the period of the Judges, the place of Eli's priesthood and of Samuel's childhood (1 Samuel 1-4), and Jeremiah later pointed to its ruin as a warning to Jerusalem (Jeremiah 7:12). On Stripling's dating and interpretation, the favissa preserves debris from that sanctuary's sacrifices in its earliest generations.