Now, here is a modified reconstruction of the intention of John I: 1 to answer any objection that too much has been assumed. שילה בא ושלו לא קבלוהו This is the same wording as before, but with the spelling of shello made standard. The meaning intended can be simplified as follows. Shiloh came, and what was his didn’t receive him. The word shello (shin-lamed-vav) meaning “what was his” would certainly suggest the universally accepted analysis of the word Shiloh. No-one could miss it. We can leave out the possible connotations of the archaic spelling of shello as shin-lamed-he. The standard spelling is still suggestive, because this is the spelling (though not the pronunciation) of the name of the village Shilo at the foot of Mt. Gerizim where Eli had set up his false sanctuary and counterfeit Ark of the Covenant, the same counterfeit eventually nmoved to the Jerusalem temple. The place has more than one spelling, but shin-lamed-vav is one of them. One important bit of evidence for this reconstruction is that verse 11 says flatly that those that were his did not receive him, and then the next verse says some did receive him, or a lot received him. You would accordingly expect something in v. 11 like “but some of those that were his did not receive him”. The wording the second half of of v. 11 as it stands is unnatural in relation to v. 12, but if you take it as an allusion to the accepted analysis of the name Shilo at the start of v.11, it then becomes natural.
The wording reconstructed here still has the connotation of “He came to what was his”. The translator still had to choose which of the two intended meanings, the literal meaning and the connotation. If he had chosen the literal meaning “Shiloh came”, then the connotation could have been kept, though in a less obvious form. This means the balance of probability is that the translation is deliberately obscure. There might not have been any sinister purpose. The obscurity might go back to the original authors of the book, with the intention of keeping the full meaning in a Hebrew text held only by their community, with an Aramaic translation and a Greek translation, both with an incomplete wording at certain points, publicly available.
A sample of material from Stephan Huller's the Real Messiah. Buy it here
