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1 Samuel 5:11 Darby English Bible (DARBY)

11 And they sent and gathered all the lords of the Philistines, and said, Send away the ark of the God of Israel, and let it go again to its own place, that it kill us not, and our people. For there was deadly alarm throughout the city: the hand of God was very heavy there;

Cross Reference

1 Samuel 5:6 DARBY

And the hand of Jehovah was heavy upon them of Ashdod, and he laid them waste, and smote them with hemorrhoids, -- Ashdod and its borders.

1 Samuel 5:8-9 DARBY

And they sent and gathered all the lords of the Philistines unto them, and said, What shall we do with the ark of the God of Israel? And they said, Let the ark of the God of Israel be carried about to Gath. And they carried the ark of the God of Israel about [thither]. And it came to pass that, after they had carried it about, the hand of Jehovah was against the city with very great panic; and he smote the men of the city, both small and great, and hemorrhoids broke out upon them.

Isaiah 13:7-9 DARBY

Therefore shall all hands be feeble, and every heart of man shall melt, and they shall be terrified: pangs and sorrows shall take hold of them, they shall writhe as a woman that travaileth; they shall be amazed one at another, their faces shall be as flames. Behold, the day of Jehovah cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the earth desolate; and he will destroy the sinners thereof out of it.

Jeremiah 48:42-44 DARBY

And Moab shall be destroyed from being a people, because he hath magnified himself against Jehovah. Fear, and the pit, and the snare shall be upon thee, O inhabitant of Moab, saith Jehovah. He that fleeth from the fear shall fall into the pit; and he that getteth up out of the pit shall be taken in the snare: for I will bring upon her, upon Moab, the year of their visitation, saith Jehovah.

Commentary on 1 Samuel 5 Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible


CHAPTER 5

1Sa 5:1, 2. The Philistines Bring the Ark into the House of Dagon.

1. Ashdod—or Azotus, one of the five Philistine satrapies, and a place of great strength. It was an inland town, thirty-four miles north of Gaza, now called Esdud.

2. the house of Dagon—Stately temples were erected in honor of this idol, which was the principal deity of the Philistines, but whose worship extended over all Syria, as well as Mesopotamia and Chaldea; its name being found among the Assyrian gods on the cuneiform inscriptions [Rawlinson]. It was represented under a monstrous combination of a human head, breast, and arms, joined to the belly and tail of a fish. The captured ark was placed in the temple of Dagon, right before this image of the idol.

1Sa 5:3-5. Dagon Falls Down.

3, 4. they of Ashdod arose early—They were filled with consternation when they found the object of their stupid veneration prostrate before the symbol of the divine presence. Though set up, it fell again, and lay in a state of complete mutilation; its head and arms, severed from the trunk, were lying in distant and separate places, as if violently cast off, and only the fishy part remained. The degradation of their idol, though concealed by the priests on the former occasion, was now more manifest and infamous. It lay in the attitude of a vanquished enemy and a suppliant, and this picture of humiliation significantly declared the superiority of the God of Israel.

5. Therefore neither the priests … nor any … tread on the threshold of Dagon—A superstitious ceremony crept in, and in the providence of God was continued, by which the Philistines contributed to publish this proof of the helplessness of their god.

unto this day—The usage continued in practice at the time when this history was written—probably in the later years of Samuel's life.

1Sa 5:6-12. The Philistines Are Smitten with Emerods.

6. the hand of the Lord was heavy upon them of Ashdod—The presumption of the Ashdodites was punished by a severe judgment that overtook them in the form of a pestilence.

smote them with emerods—bleeding piles, hemorrhoids (Ps 78:66), in a very aggravated form. As the heathens generally regarded diseases affecting the secret parts of the body as punishments from the gods for trespasses committed against themselves, the Ashdodites would be the more ready to look upon the prevailing epidemic as demonstrating the anger of God, already shown against their idol.

7. the ark of God shall not abide with us—It was removed successively to several of the large towns of the country, but the same pestilence broke out in every place and raged so fiercely and fatally that the authorities were forced to send the ark back into the land of Israel [1Sa 5:8-10].

11. they sent—that is, the magistrates of Ekron.

12. the cry of the city went up to heaven—The disease is attended with acute pain, and it is far from being a rare phenomenon in the Philistian plain [Van De Velde].