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.
Stripling said the 2025 season had opened under “serious logistical headwinds,” after a May 4 Houthi missile strike on Ben‑Gurion Airport disrupted international flights and delayed dozens of volunteers.The campaign was briefly halted on June 24 when a pre‑dawn security alarm forced the team to evacuate the site; work resumed the following day after a green light from the IDF. Even so, by late June the dig had reached full staffing and erected a canvas conservation shelter over the gate to stabilize exposed mud‑brick courses ahead of the coming winter rains. The project has also launched a funding drive for an on‑site laboratory at Shiloh that would allow thin‑section petrography and residue analysis to be carried out in Israel rather than shipped overseas, a step Stripling argues will shorten the peer‑review cycle by months.
Written with the help of a news-analysis system.