=10. The third great campaign= began with the greatest battle of the conquest, at the waters of Merom, Josh. 11:5. Here a great plain exists eight or nine miles in extent north and south, having the waters of the lake with a part of the upper stream of the Jordan on the east border. In this battle the Israelites came off victors, and then followed a series of reprisals, which with previous wars consumed about five years. During all these years the women and children, with the herds and flocks, remained at Gilgal on the plains of the Jordan near Jericho. =11. The next great move= was to SHILOH. This place was upon the highland 2,230 feet above the sea, nineteen miles north of Jerusalem and about the same distance from the camping-ground at Gilgal. We suppose that the Gilgal of this time was about three miles southeast of ancient Jericho and at the pool now called that of Jiljulieh. Some remains of Shiloh, now called Seilun, yet appear, partly on a low hill surrounded by higher hills. Jerome says that in his time, A. D. 340‒420, it was in ruins. The top of the hill has been levelled for several hundred feet, where are found some ancient foundations and hewn stones, and here, as is supposed, was the site of the Tabernacle. A little over a half-mile to the northeast is a spring called the spring of Seilun, and a pool where the seizure of the young women described in Judg. 21:19‒23 might very easily have taken place. =12. Shiloh remained= the religious capital and the city where the Ark and the Tabernacle rested for about 300 years, until the Ark was removed to the battlefield, 1 Sam. 4:3, and captured by the Philistines, after which it was never returned to Shiloh. The Tabernacle and the brazen altar were also removed and set up at Gibeon before the Temple at Jerusalem was built, 1 Chron. 16:39; 21:29, 30. Gibeon was five and a half miles northwest of Jerusalem and 2,535 feet above the sea. For the history of the capture of the Ark, its restoration to Israel, and its remaining at Kirjath-jearim many years before its placement in the Temple at Jerusalem, read 1 Sam. 4 and 6 with 7:1, and 2 Sam. 6, also 1 Kin. 8:1‒8. The tradition that the Ark was hidden by the prophet Jeremiah in a cavern in Mt. Pisgah has arisen from a statement in the second book of Maccabees, 2 Mac. 2:4, written about B. C. 144. But before this time there was a tradition among the Jews, which was recorded in the Babylonian Talmud,[74] that the Ark was hidden in a chamber of the Temple buildings, and out of this seems to have grown the other and later tradition. The Ark was probably burned at the destruction of the Temple under Nebuchadnezzar, B. C. 588, 2 Chron. 36:19.