Reflections on 1 Samuel 6

1 Samuel 06 (Contemporary English Version)

1. After the sacred chest had been in Philistia for seven months,
   
2. the Philistines called in their priests and fortunetellers, and asked, "What should we do with this sacred chest? Tell us how to send it back where it belongs!"
   
3. "Don't send it back without a gift," the priests and fortunetellers answered. "Send along something to Israel's God to make up for taking the chest in the first place. Then you will be healed, and you will find out why the LORD was causing you so much trouble."
   
4. "What should we send?" the Philistines asked. The priests and fortunetellers answered: There are five Philistine rulers, and they all have the same disease that you have.
   
5. So make five gold models of the sores and five gold models of the rats that are wiping out your crops. If you honor the God of Israel with this gift, maybe he will stop causing trouble for you and your gods and your crops.
   
6. Don't be like the Egyptians and their king. They were stubborn, but when Israel's God was finished with them, they had to let Israel go.
   
7. Get a new cart and two cows that have young calves and that have never pulled a cart. Hitch the cows to the cart, but take the calves back to their barn.
   
8. Then put the chest on the cart. Put the gold rats and sores into a bag and put it on the cart next to the chest. Then send it on its way.
   
9. Watch to see if the chest goes on up the road to the Israelite town of Beth-Shemesh. If it goes back to its own country, you will know that it was the LORD who made us suffer so badly. But if the chest doesn't go back to its own country, then the LORD had nothing to do with the disease that hit us--it was simply bad luck.
   
10. The Philistines followed their advice. They hitched up the two cows to the cart, but they kept their calves in a barn.
    
11. Then they put the chest on the cart, along with the bag that had the gold rats and sores in it.
    
12. The cows went straight up the road toward Beth-Shemesh, mooing as they went. The Philistine rulers followed them until they got close to Beth-Shemesh.
    
13. The people of Beth-Shemesh were harvesting their wheat in the valley. When they looked up and saw the chest, they were so happy that they stopped working and started celebrating.
    
14. The cows left the road and pulled the cart into a field that belonged to Joshua from Beth-Shemesh, and they stopped beside a huge rock. Some men from the tribe of Levi were there. So they took the chest off the cart and placed it on the rock, and then they did the same thing with the bag of gold rats and sores. A few other people chopped up the cart and made a fire. They killed the cows and burned them as sacrifices to the LORD. After that, they offered more sacrifices.
    
15. (SEE 6:14)
    
16. When the five rulers of the Philistines saw what had happened, they went back to Ekron that same day.
    
17. That is how the Philistines sent gifts to the LORD to make up for taking the sacred chest. They sent five gold sores, one each for their towns of Ashdod, Gaza, Ashkelon, Gath, and Ekron.
    
18. They also sent one gold rat for each walled town and for every village that the five Philistine rulers controlled. The huge stone where the Levites set the chest is still there in Joshua's field as a reminder of what happened.
    
19. Some of the men of Beth-Shemesh looked inside the sacred chest, and the LORD God killed seventy of them. This made the people of Beth-Shemesh very sad,
    
20. and they started saying, "No other God is like the LORD! Who can go near him and still live? We'll have to send the chest away from here. But where can we send it?"
    
21. They sent messengers to tell the people of Kiriath-Jearim, "The Philistines have sent back the sacred chest. Why don't you take it and keep it there with you?"
    

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    The Philistines had brought a curse on themselves by capturing the Israelite's ark of the Lord. Everywhere they took it people broke out with tumors. After seven months they were anxious to get rid of the ark and return it to Israel, but out of their superstitious mindset they assumed it must be done in a particular way, so they consulted their diviners.
    
    To this point the Philistines had moved the ark three times with no reported negative outcomes except for the outbreak of tumors wherever the ark resided. Presumably God didn't care how they returned the ark, only that they returned it. But the diviners came up with a plan that fit their pagan thinking and included a scheme to determine if the ill effects related to the ark were by chance or really due to the God of Israel. First, they prepared a guilt offering of five gold objects resembling the tumors and five resembling mice, corresponding to the number of Philistine rulers. The ark was to be returned riding on a new cart, that had never been used, along with these offerings. The cart was to be pulled by two milk cows that were still nursing calves and had never been yoked. These cows were to be the test of whether the tumors were caused by chance or not. Natural instinct for the cows would be to go to where their calves where penned up, but if they headed toward Israel it must surely be a sign that the tumors were caused by Israel's God.
    
    Sure enough, the cows headed straight for Israel with the Philistine rulers following on foot. They stood and observed as the cart arrived in the field at Beth-shemesh and was enthusiastically received by the people harvesting wheat there and also as the people chopped up the cart and offered the cows as a burnt offering to the Lord. The Philistines may have missed what happened next, though. Some of the men of Beth-shemesh looked inside the ark, which was strictly forbidden, and a number of them were struck down. Some Bible translations say 70 men were struck down and others that 50,070 were struck down. The number is uncertain.
    
    Israel was in much need of returning fully to the Lord and seeking Him with their whole hearts. Though their enthusiastic reception of the ark gave the appearance that they had returned to the Lord, the reality is more likely that they were simply enthused about the return of a symbol of their tradition. Often our loyalties are more to tradition than to God Himself and we, ourselves, often cannot tell the difference. That is, until God leads us to follow Him in a way that breaks with tradition. Then it becomes apparent where our hearts are. It was such a call to follow God and break with tradition that led to Christ's crucifixion.