man should slaughter his ox or his sheep there. This was the
first altar which Saul erected to Jehovah, adds the narrator,
certainly not as a reproach, nor even to signalise his conduct as
anything surprising or exceptional. The instance is all the more
instructive, because it shows how the prohibition to eat flesh
without rendering the blood back to God at a time when the people
did not live crowded together within a quite limited area
necessarily presupposed liberty to sacrifice anywhere--or to
slaughter anywhere; for originally the two words are absolutely
synonymous.

It need not be said that the sacrificial seats (even when the
improvised ones are left out of account) were not all alike in the
regard in which they were held, or in the frequency with which
they were resorted to. Besides purely local ones, there were
others to which pilgrimages were made from far and near. Towards
the close of the period of the judges, Shiloh appears to have
acquired an importance that perhaps extended even beyond the limits
of the tribe of Joseph. By a later age the temple there was even
regarded as the prototype of the temple of Solomon, that is, as the
one legitimate place of worship to which Jehovah had made a grant
of all the burnt-offerings of the children of Israel (Jer. vii.12;
1Samuel ii. 27-36). But, in point-of fact, if a prosperous man of
Ephraim or Benjamin made a pilgrimage to the joyful festival at
Shiloh at the turn of the year, the reason for his doing so was not
that he could have had no opportunity at his home in Ramah or
Gibeah for eating and drinking before the Lord. Any strict
centralisation is for that period inconceivable, alike in the
religious as in every other sphere. This is seen even in the
circumstance that the destruction of the temple of Shiloh, the