Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi
We have a couple of chapters now dealing with the ongoing hostilities between the Philistines and the Hebrews, with the captured Ark playing a large part. The Philistines had captured the Ark and taken it to Ashdod and placed it in the temple of their pagan god, Dagon. While Israel was mourning the loss of Eli and his sons, and doubtless others, along with the tragic loss of the symbol of God's dwelling with them, the Philistines were learning that the God of the Israelites wasn't to be trifled with.
1) The day after the Ark was placed in the pagan temple, the statue of Dagon was found fallen facedown in front of the Ark (1 Sam 5:3). The Philistines thought, gee, that's odd, and set the statue back in its place.
2) The second day after the Ark was placed in the pagan temple, the statue of Dagon had fallen facedown in front of the Ark again...only this time his head and hands were broken off and lying on the doorway. (1 Sam 5:4)
3) The people of Ashdod and the surrounding area were suddenly afflicted by...something. The NIV 84 says that God 'brought devastation upon them and afflicted them with tumors.' (1 Sam 5:6; some manuscripts add that a plague of rats had also appeared; noted in the margin of the NIV 84)...other translations indicate these tumors were hemorrhoids. So the people of Ashdod begged the rulers to move the Ark away so it was moved to Gath.
4) Same thing happened to the people of Gath...young and old were afflicted with tumors and the city was thrown into a panic (1 Sam 5:9). So the Ark was sent to Ekron.
5) When the Ark was brought into Ekron, the people there began lamenting, and a death plague hit the city. The folks there, in a panic, requested that the Ark be sent back to Israel; anyone who didn't die was afflicted with the same tumors that had hit Asdod and Gath.
So...7 months after the Ark was captured, the leaders of the Philistines went to to their priests and asked them to figure out how they could return the Ark to Israel (1 Sam 6:1-2)
Their recommendation was to be sure to send the Ark back with a 'guilt offering' of 'Five gold tumors and five gold rats' (1 Sam 6:5). Then they make an interesting statement:
"Why do you harden your hearts as the Egyptians and Pharaoh did? When he treated them harshly, did they not send the Israelites out so they could go on their way?" - 1 Sam 6:6
Consulting the timeline of Biblical Events in my Inductive Study Bible, it had been somewhere around 400 years since the Exodus at this point. But the Philistines remembered. And their own pagan priests warned them against hardening their heart against the God of the Hebrews, like the Egyptians had done. They came up with a test: Take a couple of cows who had nursing calves, pen the calves up so their mothers can't get to them. Then hitch the mama cows to a wagon, put the Ark and the gold offering on the wagon, and let the mama cows go where they will. Nature would have them head over to their calves in the pen...if they headed down the road to Israel, then everyone would know this was the Hebrews' God at work and they should let it go. (1 Sam 6: 7 -9).
The cows, lowing and mooing all the way, nonetheless headed straight down the road to Israel. The Philistine rulers followed them all the way to the border, watched them keep going, Then, no doubt greatly relieved, they turned around and went home, convinced that everything would be ok now that the Ark was no longer in their territory. God returned the Ark 7 months after it had been captured.
But there is another little tidbit here about God protecting the Ark. We read in 1 Sam 6:19 that 70 men were killed ...Israelites...because 'they had looked into the Ark of God.'
The Philistines had learned from the Egyptians not to try to prove themselves greater than the God of the Hebrews; apparently the Hebrews themselves needed a reminder not to treat the Ark of God like something common. The people of the area sent word to the next city over, Kiriath Jearim, and asked them to take the Ark because...they were not comfortable with it amongst them. So it went to the house of Abinidab, where it stayed until King David undertook to move it to Jerusalem twenty years later.
But that's another story.
Meantime, the Israelites saw the hand of God in all of this and repented of their idolatry...
And Samuel said to the whole house of Israel, "If you are returning to the LORD with all your hearts, then rid yourselves of the foreign gods and the Ashtoreths and commit yourselves to the LORD and serve him only, and he will deliver you out of the hand of the Philistines." - 1 Sam 7:3
So, if I am reading things right (and the reference to the 20 years that the Ark was at Abinidab's is, I think, kind of a parenthetic thing, because Samuel died before the Ark was moved again.), Samuel's speech was right after the Ark was installed at Abinidab's. So we are somewhere between 7 months and maybe a year or so after the Ark was captured, and the Israelites were still reeling from their losses in that battle. So Samuel interceded, God intervened, and we read in 2 Sam 7:13 - "So the Philistines were subdued and did not invate Israelite territory again. Throughout Samuel's lifetime, the hand of the LORD was against the Philistines."
Because the Israelites gave up their idols and served God with all their hearts.
(Both references are Strong's 3824)
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