Bible Commentaries

The Ark of God Sent Back. - 1 Samuel 6:1-3. The ark of Jehovah was in the land(lit. the fields, as in 1:2) of the Philistines for seven months, and hadbrought destruction to all the towns to which it had been taken. At lengththe Philistines resolved to send it back to the Israelites, and thereforecalled their priests and diviners (see at Numbers 23:23) to ask them, “Whatshall we do with regard to the ark of God; tell us, with what shall we sendit to its place?” “Its place” is the land of Israel, and בּמּה does notmean “in what manner” (quomodo: Vulgate, Thenius), but with what,wherewith (as in Micah 6:6). There is no force in the objection brought byThenius, that if the question had implied with what presents, the priestswould not have answered, “Do not send it without a present;” for thepriests did not confine themselves to this answer, in which they gave ageneral assent, but proceeded at once to define the present more minutely. They replied, “If they send away the ark of the God of Israel(משׁלּחים is to be taken as the third person in an indefiniteaddress, as in 1 Samuel 2:24, and not to be construed with אתּם supplied), do not send it away empty (i.e., without an expiatory offering),but return Him (i.e., the God of Israel) a trespass-offering.” אשׁם, lit. guilt, then the gift presented as compensation for a fault, thetrespass-offering (see at Lev. 5:14-6:7). The gifts appointed by thePhilistines as an asham were to serve as a compensation and satisfaction tobe rendered to the God of Israel for the robbery committed upon Him bythe removal of the ark of the covenant, and were therefore called (asham),although in their nature they were only expiatory offerings. For the samereason the verb השׁיב, to return or repay, is used to denote thepresentation of these gifts, being the technical expression for the paymentof compensation for a fault in Numbers 5:7, and in Leviticus 6:4 for compensationfor anything belonging to another, that had been unjustly appropriated. “Are ye healed then, it will show you why His hand is not removed fromyou,” sc., so long as ye keep back the ark. The words תּרפאוּ אז are to be understood asconditional, even without אם, which the rules of the language allow(see Ewald, §357, b.); this is required by the context. For, according to 1 Samuel 6:9, the Philistine priests still thought it a possible thing that any misfortunewhich had befallen the Philistines might be only an accidentalcircumstance. With this view, they could not look upon a cure as certain toresult from the sending back of the ark, but only as possible; consequentlythey could only speak conditionally, and with this the words “we shallknow” agree.

The trespass-offering was to correspond to the number of the princes ofthe Philistines. מספּר is an accusative employed to determineeither measure or number (see Ewald, §204, a.), lit., “the number of theirprinces:” the compensations were to be the same in number as the princes. “Five golden boils, and five golden mice,” i.e., according to 1 Samuel 6:5, imagesresembling their boils, and the field-mice which overran the land; the samegifts, therefore, for them all, “for one plague is to all and to your princes,”i.e., the same plague has fallen upon all the people and their princes. Thechange of person in the two words, לכלּם, “all of them,” i.e., thewhole nation of the Philistines, and לסרניכם, “your princes,”appears very strange to us with our modes of thought and speech, but it isby no means unusual in Hebrew. The selection of this peculiar kind ofexpiatory present was quite in accordance with a custom, which was notonly widely spread among the heathen but was even adopted in theChristian church, viz., that after recovery from an illness, or rescue fromany danger or calamity, a representation of the member healed or thedanger passed through was placed as an offering in the temple of the deity,to whom the person had prayed for deliverance;

(Note: Thus, after a shipwreck, any who escaped presented a tablet toIsis, or Neptune, with the representation of a shipwreck upon it;gladiators offered their weapons, and emancipated slaves their fetters. In some of the nations of antiquity even representations of theprivate parts, in which a cure had been obtained from the deity, werehung up in the temples in honour of the gods (see Schol. ad Aristoph. Acharn. 243, and other proofs in Winer's Real-wörterbuch, ii. p. 255). Theodoret says, concerning the Christians of the fourthcentury (Therapeutik. Disp. viii.): Ὅτι δὲ τυγχάνουσιν ὧνπερ αἰτοῦσιν οἱ πιστῶς ἐπαγγέλλοντες ἀναφανδὸν μαρτυρεὶ τὰ τούτων ἀναθήματα, τὴν ἰατρείαν δηλοῦντα, οἱ μὲν γὰρ ὀφθαλμῶν, οἱ δὲ ποδῶν ἄλλοι δὲ χειρῶν προσφέρουσιν ἐκτυπώματα καὶ οἱ μὲν ἐκ χρυσοῦ, οἱ δὲ ἐξ ὕλης ἀργύρου πεποιημένα. Δέχεται γὰρ ὁ τούτων Δεσπότης καὶ τὰ σμικρά τε καὶ εὔωνα, τῇ τοῦ προσφέροντος δυνάμει τὸ δῶρον μετρῶν. Δηλοῖ δὲ ταῦτα προκείμενα τῶν παθημάτων τὴν λύσιν, ἧς ἀνετέθη μνημεῖα παρὰ τῶν ἀρτίων γεγενημένων . And at Rome they still hang up a picture of the danger, from whichdeliverance had been obtained after a vow, in the church of the saintinvoked in the danger.)

and it also perfectly agrees with a custom which has prevailed in India,according to Tavernier (Ros. A. u. N. Morgenland iii. p. 77), from timeimmemorial down to the present day, viz., that when a pilgrim takes ajourney to a pagoda to be cured of a disease, he offers to the idol a presenteither in gold, silver, or copper, according to his ability, of the shape of thediseased or injured member, and then sings a hymn. Such a present passedas a practical acknowledgement that the god had inflicted the suffering orevil. If offered after recovery or deliverance, it was a public expression ofthanksgiving. In the case before us, however, in which it was offeredbefore deliverance, the presentation of the images of the things with whichthey had been chastised was probably a kind of fine or compensation forthe fault that had been committed against the Deity, to mitigate His wrathand obtain a deliverance from the evils with which they had been smitten. This is contained in the words, “Give glory unto the God of Israel!peradventure He will lighten His (punishing) hand from off you, and fromoff your gods, and from off your land.” The expression is a pregnant onefor “make His heavy hand light and withdraw it,” i.e., take away thepunishment. In the allusion to the representations of the field-mice, thewords “that devastate the land” are added, because in the description givenof the plagues in 1 Samuel 5:1-12 the devastation of the land by mice is not expresslymentioned. The introduction of this clause after עכבּריכם,when contrasted with the omission of any such explanation afterעפליכם, is a proof that the plague of mice had not been describedbefore, and therefore that the references made to these in the Septuagint at1 Samuel 5:3, 1 Samuel 5:6, and 1 Samuel 6:1, are nothing more than explanatory glosses. It is awell-known fact that field-mice, with their enormous rate of increase andtheir great voracity, do extraordinary damage to the fields. In southernlands they sometimes destroy entire harvests in a very short space of time(Aristot. Animal. vi. 37; Plin. h. n. x. c. 65; Strabo, iii. p. 165; Aelian, etc.,in Bochart, Hieroz. ii. p. 429, ed. Ros.).

“Wherefore,” continued the priests, “will ye harden your heart, as theEgyptians and Pharaoh hardened their hearts? (Exodus 7:13.) Was it not thecase, that when He (Jehovah) had let out His power upon them (בּ התעלּל, as in Exodus 10:2), they (the Egyptians) let them (theIsraelites) go, and they departed?” There is nothing strange in thisreference, on the part of the Philistian priests, to the hardening of theEgyptians, and its results, since the report of those occurrences had spreadamong all the neighbouring nations (see at 1 Samuel 4:8). And the warning isnot at variance with the fact that, according to 1 Samuel 6:9, the priests stillentertained some doubt whether the plagues really did come from Jehovahat all: for their doubts did not preclude the possibility of its being so; andeven the possibility might be sufficient to make it seem advisable to doeverything that could be done to mitigate the wrath of the God of theIsraelites, of whom, under existing circumstances, the heathen stood notonly no less, but even more, in dread, than of the wrath of their own gods.

Accordingly they arranged the sending back in such a manner as tomanifest the reverence which ought to be shown to the God of Israel was apowerful deity (1 Samuel 6:7-9). The Philistines were to take a new cart and makeit ready (עשׂה), and to yoke two milch cows to the cart uponwhich no yoke had ever come, and to take away their young ones (calves)from them into the house, i.e., into the stall, and then to put the ark uponthe cart, along with the golden things to be presented as a trespass-offering, which were to be in a small chest by the side of the ark, and tosend it (i.e., the ark) away, that it might go, viz., without the cows beingeither driven or guided. From the result of these arrangements, they wereto learn whether the plague had been sent by the God of Israel, or hadarisen accidentally. “If it (the ark) goeth up by the way to its bordertowards Bethshemesh, He (Jehovah) hath done us this great evil; but ifnot, we perceive that His hand hath not touched us. It came to us by chance,” i.e., the evil came upon us merely by accident. Inעליהם, בּניהם, and מאחריהם (1 Samuel 6:7),the masculine is used in the place of the more definite feminine, as beingthe more general form. This is frequently the case, and occurs again in 1 Samuel 6:10 and 1 Samuel 6:12. ארגּז, which only occurs again in 1 Samuel 6:8, 1 Samuel 6:11, and 1 Samuel 6:15,signifies, according to the context and the ancient versions, a chest or littlecase. The suffix to אתו refers to the ark, which is also the subjectto יעלה (1 Samuel 6:9). גּבוּלו, the territory of the ark, is theland of Israel, where it had its home. מקרה is used adverbially: bychance, or accidentally. The new cart and the young cows, which hadnever worn a yoke, corresponded to the holiness of the ark of God. Toplace it upon an old cart, which had already been used for all kinds ofearthly purposes, would have been an offence against the holy thing; and itwould have been just the same to yoke to the cart animals that had alreadybeen used for drawing, and had had their strength impaired by the yoke(see Deuteronomy 21:3). The reason for selecting cows, however, instead of male oxen, was nodoubt to be found in the further object which they hoped to attain. It wascertainly to be expected, that if suckling cows, whose calves had been keptback from them, followed their own instincts, without any drivers, theywould not go away, but would come back to their young ones in the stall. And if the very opposite should take place, this would be a sure sign thatthey were driven and guided by a divine power, and in fact by the Godwhose ark they were to draw into His own land. From this they would beable to draw the conclusion, that the plagues which had fallen upon thePhilistines were also sent by this God. There was no special sagacity inthis advice of the priests; it was nothing more than a cleverly devisedattempt to put the power of the God of the Israelites to the text, thoughthey thereby unconsciously and against their will furnished the occasionfor the living God to display His divine glory before those who did notknow Him.

The God of Israel actually did what the idolatrous priests hardlyconsidered possible. When the Philistines, in accordance with the advicegiven them by their priests, had placed the ark of the covenant and theexpiatory gifts upon the cart to which the two cows were harnessed, “thecows went straight forward on the way to Bethshemesh; they went alonga road going and lowing (i.e., lowing the whole time), and turned not to theright or to the left; and the princes of the Philistines went behind them tothe territory of Bethshemesh.” בּדּרך ישּׁרנה, lit.,“they were straight in the way,” i.e., they went straight along the road. The form ישּׁרנה for יישׁרנה is the imperf. Kal, thirdpers. plur. fem., with the preformative י instead of ת, as in Genesis 30:38 (seeGes. §47, Anm. 3; Ewald, §191, b.). Bethshemesh, the present Ain-shems,was a priests' city on the border of Judah and Dan (see at Joshua 15:10).

The inhabitants of Bethshemesh were busy with the wheat-harvest in thevalley (in front of the town), when they unexpectedly saw the ark of thecovenant coming, and rejoiced to see it. The cart had arrived at the field ofJoshua, a Bethshemeshite, and there it stood still before a large stone. Andthey (the inhabitants of Bethshemesh) chopped up the wood of the cart,and offered the cows to the Lord as a burnt-offering. In the meantime theLevites had taken off the ark, with the chest of golden presents, and placedit upon the large stone; and the people of Bethshemesh offered burnt-offerings and slain-offerings that day to the Lord. The princes of thePhilistines stood looking at this, and then returned the same day to Ekron. That the Bethshemeshites, and not the Philistines, are the subject toויבקּעוּ, is evident from the correct interpretation of theclauses; viz., from the fact that in 1 Samuel 6:14 the words from והעגלה to גּדולה אבן are circumstantial clausesintroduced into the main clause, and that ויבקּעוּ is attached toלראות ויּשׂמחוּ, and carries on the principal clause.

1 Samuel 6:15 contains a supplementary remark, therefore הורידוּ isto be translated as a pluperfect. After sacrificing the cart, with the cows,as a burnt-offering to the Lord, the inhabitants of Bethshemesh gave afurther practical expression to their joy at the return of the ark, by offeringburnt-offerings and slain-offerings in praise of God. In the burnt-offeringsthey consecrated themselves afresh, with all their members, to the serviceof the Lord; and in the slain-offerings, which culminated in the sacrificialmeals, they sealed anew their living fellowship with the Lord. The offeringof these sacrifices at Bethshemesh was no offence against thecommandment, to sacrifice to the Lord at the place of His sanctuary alone. The ark of the covenant was the throne of the gracious presence of God,before which the sacrifices were really offered at the tabernacle. The Lordhad sanctified the ark afresh as the throne of His presence, by the miraclewhich He had wrought in bringing it back again. - In 1 Samuel 6:17 and 1 Samuel 6:18 thedifferent atoning presents, which the Philistines sent to Jehovah ascompensation, are enumerated once more: viz., five golden boils, one foreach of their five principal towns (see at Joshua 13:3), and “golden mice,according to the number of all the Philistian towns of the five princes,from the fortified city to the village of the inhabitants of the level land”(perazi; see at Deuteronomy 3:5). The priests had only proposed that five golden mice should be sent ascompensation, as well as five boils (1 Samuel 6:4). But the Philistines offered asmany images of mice as there were towns and villages in their five states,no doubt because the plague of mice had spread over the whole land,whereas the plague of boils had only fallen upon the inhabitants of thosetowns to which the ark of the covenant had come. In this way theapparent discrepancy between 1 Samuel 6:4 and 1 Samuel 6:18 is very simply removed. Thewords which follow, viz., וגו עליה הגּיחוּ עשׁר, “upon which they had set down the ark,” show unmistakeably,when compared with 1 Samuel 6:14 and 1 Samuel 6:15, that we are to understand byהגּדולה אבל the great stone upon which the ark wasplaced when it was taken off the cart. The conjecture of Kimchi, that thisstone was called Abel (luctus), on account of the mourning which tookplace there (see 1 Samuel 6:19), is extremely unnatural. Consequently there is no other course left than to regard אבל as anerror in writing for אבן, according to the reading, or at all eventsthe rendering, adopted by the lxx and Targum. But ועד (evenunto) is quite unsuitable here, as no further local definition is required afterthe foregoing הפּרי כּפר ועד, and it isimpossible to suppose that the Philistines offered a golden mouse as atrespass-offering for the great stone upon which the ark was placed. Wemust therefore alter ועד into ועד: “And the greatstone is witness (for ועד in this sense, see Genesis 31:52) to thisday in the field of Joshua the Bethshemeshite,” sc., of the fact justdescribed.

Disposal of the Ark of God. - 1 Samuel 6:19. As the ark had brought evil upon thePhilistines, so the inhabitants of Bethshemesh were also to be taught thatthey could not stand in their unholiness before the holy God: “And He(God) smote among the men of Bethshemesh, because they had looked atthe ark of Jehovah, and smote among the people seventy men, fiftythousand men.” In this statement of numbers we are not only struck bythe fact that the 70 stands before the 50,000, which is very unusual, buteven more by the omission of the copula ו before the second number,which is altogether unparalleled. When, in addition to this, we notice that50,000 men could not possibly live either in or round Bethshemesh, andthat we cannot conceive of any extraordinary gathering having taken placeout of the whole land, or even from the immediate neighbourhood; and alsothat the words אישׁ אלף חמשּׁים are wanting inseveral Hebrew MSS, and that Josephus, in his account of the occurrence,only speaks of seventy as having been killed (Ant. vi. 1, 4); we cannotcome to any other conclusion than that the number 50,000 is neithercorrect nor genuine, but a gloss which has crept into the text through someoversight, though it is of great antiquity, since the number stood in the textemployed by the Septuagint and Chaldee translators, who attempted toexplain them in two different ways, but both extremely forced. Apart from this number, however, the verse does not contain anythingeither in form or substance that could furnish occasion for well-foundedobjections to its integrity. The repetition of ויּך simply resumesthe thought that had been broken off by the parenthetical clause יי בּארון ראוּ כּי; and בּעם is only ageneral expression for שׁ בּאנשׁי ב. The stroke whichfell upon the people of Bethshemesh is sufficiently accounted for in thewords, “because they had looked,” etc. There is no necessity tounderstand these words, however, as many Rabbins do, as signifying“they looked into the ark,” i.e., opened it and looked in; for if this had beenthe meaning, the opening would certainly not have been passed overwithout notice. ראה with ב means to look upon or at a thing withlust or malicious pleasure; and here it no doubt signifies a foolish staring,which was incompatible with the holiness of the ark of God, and waspunished with death, according to the warning expressed in Numbers 4:20. This severe judgment so alarmed the people of Bethshemesh, that theyexclaimed, “Who is able to stand before Jehovah, this holy God!”Consequently the Bethshemeshites discerned correctly enough that thecause of the fatal stroke, which had fallen upon them, was the unholinessof their own nature, and not any special crime which had been committedby the persons slain. They felt that they were none of them any betterthan those who had fallen, and that sinners could not approach the holyGod. Inspired with this feeling, they added, “and to whom shall He goaway from us?” The subject to יעלה is not the ark, but Jehovahwho had chosen the ark as the dwelling-place of His name. In order toavert still further judgments, they sought to remove the ark from theirtown. They therefore sent messengers to Kirjath-jearim to announce to theinhabitants the fact that the ark had been sent back by the Philistines, andto entreat them to fetch it away.