'And the word of Samuel came to all Israel. Now Israel went out against
the Philistines to battle, and pitched beside Eben-ezer: and the
Philistines pitched in Aphek. 2. And the Philistines put themselves in
array against Israel: and when they joined battle, Israel was smitten
before the Philistines: and they slew of the army in the field about
four thousand men. 3. And when the people were come into the camp, the
elders of Israel said, Wherefore hath the Lord smitten us today before
the Philistines? Let us fetch the ark of the covenant of the Lord out
of Shiloh unto us, that, when it cometh among us, it may save us out of
the hand of our enemies. 4. So the people sent to Shiloh, that they
might bring from thence the ark of the covenant of the Lord of hosts,
which dwelleth between the cherubims: and the two sons of Eli, Hophni
and Phinehas, were there with the ark of the covenant of God. 5. And
when the ark of the covenant of the Lord came into the camp, all Israel
shouted with a great shout, so that the earth rang again. 6. And when
the Philistines heard the noise of the shout, they said, What meaneth
the noise of this great shout in the camp of the Hebrews? And they
understood that the ark of the Lord was come into the camp. 7. And the
Philistines were afraid, for they said, God is come into the camp. And
they said, Woe unto us! for there hath not been such a thing
heretofore. 8. Woe unto us! who shall deliver us out of the hand of
these mighty gods? these are the gods that smote the Egyptians with all
the plagues in the wilderness. 9. Be strong, and quit yourselves like
men, O ye Philistines, that ye be not servants unto the Hebrews, as
they have been to you: quit yourselves like men, and fight. 10. And the
Philistines fought, and Israel was smitten, and they fled every man
into his tent: and there was a very great slaughter; for there fell of
Israel thirty thousand footmen. 11. And the ark of God was taken; and
the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, were slain. 12. And there ran
a man of Benjamin out of the army, and came to Shiloh the same day with
his clothes rent, and with earth upon his head. 13. And when he came,
lo, Eli sat upon a seat by the wayside watching: for his heart trembled
for the ark of God. And when the man came into the city, and told it,
all the city cried out. 14. And when Eli heard the noise of the crying,
he said, What meaneth the noise of this tumult? And the man came in
hastily, and told Eli. 15. Now Eli was ninety and eight years old; and
his eyes were dim, that he could not see. 16. And the man said unto
Eli, I am he that came out of the army, and I fled to-day out of the
army. And he said, What is there done, my son? 17. And the messenger
answered and said, Israel is fled before the Philistines, and there
hath been also a great slaughter among the people, and thy two sons
also, Hophni and Phinehas, are dead, and the ark of God Is taken. 18.
And it came to pass, when he made mention of the ark of God, that he
fell from off the seat backward by the side of the gate, and his neck
brake, and he died: for he was an old man, and heavy. And he had judged
Israel forty years.'--1 SAMUEL iv. 1-18.
The first words of verse 1 are closely connected with the end of
chapter iii., and complete the account of Samuel's inauguration. 'The
word of the Lord' came to Samuel, and 'the word of Samuel came to all
Israel.' The one clause tells of the prophet's inspiration, the other
of his message and its reception by the nation. This bond of union
between the clauses has been broken by the chapter division, apparently
for the sake of representing the revolt against the Philistines as due
to Samuel's instigation. But its being so is very doubtful. If God had
sent the army into the field, He would have prepared it, by penitent
return to Him, for victory, as no defeat follows on war which He
commands. Probably Samuel's mission made an unwholesome ferment in
minds which were quite untouched by its highest significance, and so
led to a precipitate rebellion, preceded by no religious reformation,
and therefore sure to fail. It was twenty years too soon (1 Sam. vii.
3). Samuel took no part in the struggle, and his name is never
mentioned till, at the end of that period, he emphatically condemns all
that had been done, and points the true path of deliverance, in 'return
to the Lord with all your heart.' So the great lesson of this story is
that when Israel fights Philistines, unbidden and unrepentant, it is
sure to be beaten,--a truth with manifold wide applications.
The first disastrous defeat took place on a field, which was afterwards
made memorable by a great victory, and by a name which lives still as a
watchword for hope and gratitude. Happy they who at last conquer where
they once failed, and in the retrospect can say, 'Hitherto the Lord
helped,' both by defeat and by the victory for which defeat prepared a
way! That opening struggle, bloody and grave as it was, was not
decisive; for the Israelites regained their fortified camp unmolested,
and held together, and kept their communications open, as appears from
what followed.
Verses 3 to 5 give us a glimpse into the camp of Israel, and verses 6
to 9 into that of the Philistines. These two companion pictures are
worth looking at. The two armies are very much alike, and we may say
that the purpose of the picture is to show how Israel was practically
heathen, taking just the same views of its relation to God which the
Philistines did. Note, too, the absence of central authority. 'The
elders' hold a kind of council. Where were Eli the judge and Samuel the
prophet? Neither had part in this war. The question of the elders was
right, inasmuch as it recognised that the Lord had smitten them, but
wrong inasmuch as it betrayed that they had not the faintest notion
that the reason was their own moral and religious apostasy. They had
not learned the A B C of their history, and of the conditions of
national prosperity. They stand precisely on the Pagan level, believing
in a national God, who ought to help his votaries, but from some
inexplicable caprice does not; or who, perhaps, is angry at the
omission of some ritual observance. What an answer they would have got
if Samuel had been there! There ought to have been no need for the
question, or, rather, there was need for it, and the answer ought to
have been clear to them; their sin was the all-sufficient reason for
their defeat. There are plenty of Christians, like these elders, who,
when they find themselves beaten by the world and the devil, puzzle
their brains to invent all sorts of reasons for God's smiting, except
the true one,--their own departure from Him.
The remedy suggested by the united wisdom of the leaders was as heathen
as the consultation which resulted in it. 'Let us send for the ark'
'Those who regarded not the God of the ark,' says Bishop Hall, 'think
themselves safe and happy in the ark of God.' They thought, with that
confusion between symbol and reality which runs through all heathen
worship, and makes the danger of 'images,' whether in heathenism or in
sensuous Christianity, that if they brought the ark, they brought God
with it. It was a kind of charm, which would help them, they hardly
knew how. Its very name might have taught them better. They call it
'the ark of the covenant of the Lord'; and a covenant has two parties
to it, and promises favour on conditions. If they had kept the
conditions, these four thousand corpses would not have been lying stiff
and stark outside the rude encampment. As they did not keep them,
bringing the chest which contained the transcript of them into their
midst was bringing a witness of their apostasy, not a helper of their
feebleness. Repentance would have brought God. Dragging the ark thither
only removed Him farther away. We need not be too hard upon these
people; for the natural disposition of us all is to trust to the
externals of worship, and to put a punctilious attention to these in
the place of a true cleaving of heart to the God who dwells near us,
and is in us and on our side, if we cling to Him with penitent love.
Even God-appointed symbols become snares. Baptism and the Lord's Supper
are treated by multitudes as these elders did the ark. The fewer and
simpler the outward observances of worship are, the less danger is
there of the poor sense-bound soul tarrying in them, instead of passing
by means of them into the higher, purer air beyond.
What right had these presumptuous elders to bring the ark from Shiloh?
Eli was its guardian; and he, as appears probable from his anxiety
about its fate, did not approve of its removal. But 'the people' took
the law into their own hands. There seems some hint that their action
was presumptuous profanation, in the solemn, full title given in verse
4: 'The ark of the covenant of the Lord of Hosts which dwelleth between
the cherubim,'--as if contrasting His awful majesty, His universal
dominion over the armies of heaven and the embattled powers of the
universe, and the dazzling light of that 'glory,' which shone in the
innermost chamber of the Tabernacle, with the unanointed hands that
presumed to press in thither and drag so sacred a thing into the light
of common day and the tumult of the camp. Nor is the profanation
lessened, but rather increased, by the priestly attendants, Eli's two
sons, themselves amongst the worst men in Israel. When Hophni and
Phinehas are its priests, the ark can bring no help. Heathenism
separates religion from morality altogether. In it there is no
connection between worship and purity, and the Old Testament religion
for the first time welded these two inseparably together. That
tumultuous procession from Shiloh, with these two profligates for the
priests of God, and the bearers thinking that they were sure of their
God's favour now, whatever their sin, shows how completely Israel had
forgotten its own law, and, whilst professedly worshipping Jehovah, had
really become a heathen people. The reception of the ark with that
fierce shout, which echoed among the hills and was heard in the
Philistines' encampment, shows the same thing. Not so should the ark
have been received, but with tears and confessions and silent awe. No
man in all that host had ever looked upon it before. No man ought to
have seen it _then_. Once a year, and not without blood sprinkled on
its cover, the high priest might look on it through the cloud of
incense which kept him from death, while all the people waited hushed
till he came forth, but now it is dragged into the camp, and welcomed
with a yell of mad delight, as a pledge of victory. What could display
more strikingly the practical heathenism of the people?
Verses 6 to 9 take us into the other camp, and show us the undisguised
heathens. The Philistines think just as the other side did, only, in
their polytheistic way, they do not use the name 'Jehovah,' but speak
first of 'God' and then of 'gods' as having arrived in the camp. The
nations dreaded each other's gods, though they worshipped their own;
and the Philistines believed quite as much that 'Jehovah' was the
Hebrew's God, as that 'Dagon' was theirs. There was to be a duel then
between the two superhuman powers. The vague reports which they had
heard of the Exodus, nearly five hundred years ago, filled the
Philistines with panic. They had but a confused notion of the facts of
that old story, and thought that Egypt had met the ten plagues 'in the
wilderness.' The blunder is very characteristic, and helps to show the
accuracy of our narrative. It would not have occurred to a
legend-maker. It sounds strange to us that the Philistines' belief that
the Hebrews' God had come to their help should issue in exhortations to
'fight like men.' But polytheism makes that quite a natural conclusion;
and there is something almost fine in the truculent boldness with which
they set their teeth for a fierce struggle. They reiterate to one
another the charge to 'quit themselves like men'; and while they do not
hide from themselves that the question whether they are to be still
masters is hanging on the coming struggle, a dash of contempt for the
'Hebrews' who had been their 'slaves' is perceptible.
According to verse 10, the Philistines appear to have begun the attack,
perhaps taking the enemy by surprise. The rout this time was complete.
The grim catalogue of disaster in verses 10 and 11 is strangely tragic
in its dreadful, monotonous plainness, each clause adding something to
the terrible story, and each linked to the preceding by a simple 'and.'
The Israelites seem to have been scattered. 'They fled, every man to
his tent.' The army, with little cohesion and no strong leaders, melted
away. The ark was captured, and its two unworthy attendants slain.
Bringing it had not brought God, then. It was but a chest of
shittimwood, with two slabs of lettered stone in it,--and what help was
in that? But its capture was the sign that the covenant with Israel was
for the time annulled. The whole framework of the nation was
disorganised. The keystone was struck out of their worship, and they
had fallen, by their own sin, to the level of the nations, and even
below these; for they had their gods, but Israel had turned away from
their God, and He had departed from them. Superstition fancied that the
presence of the ark secured to impenitent men the favour of God; but it
was no superstition which saw in its absence from Shiloh His averted
face.
Is there in poetry or drama a more vivid and pathetic passage than the
closing verses of this narrative, which tell of the panting messenger
and the old blind Eli?
'Eben-ezer' cannot have been very far from Shiloh, for the fugitive had
seen the end of the fight, and reached the city before night. He came
with the signs of mourning, and, as it would appear from verse 13,
passed the old man at the gate without pausing, and burst into the city
with his heavy tidings. One can almost hear the shrill shrieks of wrath
and despair which first told Eli that something was wrong. Blind and
unwieldy and heavy-hearted, he sat by the gate to which the news would
first come; but yet he is the last to hear,--perhaps because all shrank
from telling him, perhaps because in the confusion no one remembered
him. Only after he had asked the meaning of the tumult, of which his
foreboding heart and conscience told him the meaning before it was
spoken, is the messenger brought to the man to whom he should have gone
first. How touchingly the story pauses, even at this crisis, to paint
the poor old man! A stronger word is used to describe his blindness
than in 1 Samuel iii. 2, as the Revised Version shows. His fixed
eyeballs were sightless now; and there he sat, dreading and longing to
hear. The fugitive's account of himself is shameless in its avowal of
his cowardice, and prepares Eli for the worst. But note how he speaks
gently and with a certain dignity, crushing down his anxiety,--'How
went the matter, my son?' Then, with no merciful circumlocution or
veiling, out comes the whole dismal story once again.
Eli spoke no more. His sons' death had been the sign given him years
before that the threatenings against his house should be fulfilled; but
even that blow he can bear. But the capture of the ark is more than a
personal sorrow, and his start of horror overbalances him, and he falls
from his seat (which probably had no back to it), and dies, silent, of
a broken neck and a broken heart. His forty years of judgeship ended
thus. He was in many respects good and lovable, gentle, courteous,
devout. His kindly treatment of Hannah, his fatherly training of
Samuel, his submission to the divine message through the child, his
'trembling for the ark,' his death at the news of its being taken, all
indicate a character of real sweetness and true godliness. But all was
marred by a fatal lack of strong, stern resolve to tolerate no evil
which he ought to suppress. Good, weak men, especially when they let
foolish tenderness hinder righteous severity, bring terrible evils on
themselves, their families, and their nation. It was Eli who, at
bottom, was the cause of the defeat and the disasters which slew his
sons and broke his own heart. Nothing is more cruel than the weak
indulgence which, when men are bringing a curse on themselves by their
sin, 'restrains them not.'