Having found Jesus with the doctors they at once returned with Him to Nazareth. It is said “and He went down with them and came to Nazareth and was subject unto them; but his mother kept all these sayings in her heart.” Leaving the city one would pass by the hill Scopus; by Nob, where the whole family of the high priest was sacrificed by Saul; by Ramah, where Samuel was born and buried; by Beeroth, where they would perhaps again camp for the night, and by Bethel, a picture which we have already seen, coming at length to Shiloh, where for three hundred years the Jewish Ark and Tabernacle remained. Here Abijah, the prophet, lived, and hither came the wife of Jeroboam to consult him. Nothing is left at Shiloh now but the scattered remains of shapeless ruins. We were at Shiloh on the morning of May 3rd, 1894. We are now looking toward the west. There are but two buildings remaining on this ancient site and these are half ruined. Evidently they were Christian churches. The building farthest north is called El Kûsr (the Castle). It is thirty-nine by thirty-six feet in area and twelve feet in height. The walls are four feet in thickness. Near it is a noble oak held in superstitious reverence by the natives, who hang votive gifts in the branches to propitiate “the inhabitants” of the tree. About fifty rods south of the El Kûsr is another building—the “Mosque of the Forty.” This peculiar building has a buttress on the north side ten feet thick at the base, sloping upward to the top. “Utterly destroyed is the place of the Ark of God, the home of Eli and Samuel.”—Tristram.
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