1 Samuel 5: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

The Philistines carry the captured ark of God from Ebenezer to Ashdod and place it in the temple of their god Dagon. Twice the statue of Dagon is found fallen before the ark, the second time with its head and hands broken off on the threshold. The LORD's hand then strikes Ashdod with tumors, and when the ark is moved to Gath and then Ekron, those cities suffer the same way. The people of Ekron call the Philistine rulers together and say the ark must be sent back.

Claim by Claim

1. 5:1
   • The Philistines took the ark of God.
   • The Philistines brought the ark from Ebenezer to Ashdod.
2. 5:2
   • The Philistines took the ark of God.
   • They brought the ark into the house of Dagon.
   • They set the ark beside Dagon.
3. 5:3
   • The people of Ashdod rose early the next day.
   • Dagon had fallen on his face to the ground before the ark of the LORD.
   • They took Dagon.
   • They put Dagon back in his place.
4. 5:4
   • They rose early the next morning.
   • Dagon had again fallen on his face to the ground before the ark of the LORD.
   • The head of Dagon was cut off and lay on the threshold.
   • Both palms of Dagon's hands were cut off and lay on the threshold.
   • Only the trunk of Dagon was left to him.
5. 5:5
   • Because of this, the priests of Dagon do not tread on the threshold of Dagon's house in Ashdod.
   • Because of this, no one who enters Dagon's house in Ashdod treads on the threshold.
   • This practice continues to the day of the writing.
6. 5:6
   • The hand of the LORD was heavy upon the people of Ashdod.
   • The LORD devastated them.
   • The LORD struck them with tumors.
   • The LORD struck Ashdod and its surrounding territory.
7. 5:7
   • The men of Ashdod saw that this was so.
   • The men of Ashdod said the ark of the God of Israel must not stay with them.
   • The men of Ashdod said his hand was harsh upon them.
   • The men of Ashdod said his hand was harsh upon Dagon their god.
8. 5:8
   • They sent and gathered all the lords of the Philistines to them.
   • They asked what should be done with the ark of the God of Israel.
   • The lords answered that the ark of the God of Israel should be moved around to Gath.
   • They moved the ark of the God of Israel to Gath.
9. 5:9
   • After they had moved the ark, the hand of the LORD was against the city with a very great panic.
   • The LORD struck the men of the city, from small to great.
   • Tumors broke out on them.
10. 5:10
    • They sent the ark of God to Ekron.
    • As the ark of God came to Ekron, the Ekronites cried out.
    • The Ekronites said the ark of the God of Israel had been brought around to them.
    • The Ekronites said the ark had been brought to kill them and their people.
11. 5:11
    • They sent and gathered all the lords of the Philistines.
    • They said to send away the ark of the God of Israel.
    • They said the ark should return to its own place.
    • They said this so that the ark would not kill them and their people.
    • There was a deadly panic throughout the whole city.
    • The hand of God was very heavy there.
12. 5:12
    • The men who did not die were struck with tumors.
    • The outcry of the city went up to heaven.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

5:1

The ark of God was a gilded wooden chest, carried on poles, that held the stone tablets of the covenant; it was the most sacred object of Israel's worship and was treated as the place where God's presence met his people. The Philistines were a people of the coastal plain southwest of Israel, organized around five cities, and Israel's main rivals at this period. Ebenezer was the site of the battle, described in the previous chapter, where the Philistines defeated Israel and seized the ark; Ashdod was one of their five chief cities, about thirty miles away on the coast.

5:2

Dagon was a long-established god of the region, associated with grain and, in some texts, with storm and fertility; he was worshiped across Syria and Mesopotamia long before the Philistines adopted him. Placing a defeated enemy's sacred object in the temple of your own god was standard practice in the ancient Near East: it displayed the captured item as a trophy and credited the victory to the god of the winning side. "House of Dagon" in the King James means his temple, not a dwelling.

5:3

"Fallen upon his face" describes the posture of a person bowing flat to the ground before a superior, the position a defeated king would take before a conqueror. The statue's collapse into that pose is the point of the scene.

5:4

The King James "palms of his hands" translates a word for the hands as a whole. "Only the stump of Dagon was left to him" renders a Hebrew phrase that is genuinely obscure, literally something like "only Dagon was left to him." Translators have taken it as the torso or trunk of the statue; an old and much-repeated suggestion that it means a fish's tail rests on later tradition rather than on this text. The threshold was the stone sill under the doorway, and doorways carried weight in ancient thought as boundaries between sacred and ordinary space.

5:5

"Unto this day" is the narrator speaking of his own time, long after the events: he is explaining the origin of a custom his readers could still observe. Avoiding the threshold of a temple is attested elsewhere in the ancient world as a way of not disturbing what guarded or inhabited the doorway.

5:6

"The hand of the LORD" is a standard Hebrew idiom for divine power actively at work, usually in judgment; it is not a description of a body part. "Emerods" is an old English form of "hemorrhoids," the King James translators' guess at a Hebrew word that means swellings or tumors. What disease is meant is disputed; the golden mice sent back with the ark in the next chapter have led many to suspect an outbreak of bubonic plague, whose swellings appear in the groin. "The coasts thereof" in the King James means the territory or borders around the city, not a shoreline.

5:7

In KJV English "sore" means severe or crushing, not tender or wounded. Note what the men of Ashdod say: they include their own god among the casualties.

5:8

"The lords of the Philistines" translates a title, seren, used only of these five rulers, one for each of the Philistine cities of Ashdod, Gaza, Ashkelon, Gath and Ekron. They acted together as a council, which is why a decision about the ark required all five.

5:9

"Both small and great" is an idiom meaning everyone, young and old, ordinary and important alike. The Hebrew word behind KJV "destruction" means panic or confusion, the chaos that runs through a population that thinks it is being wiped out. "Their secret parts" is the KJV's polite phrase for the groin.

5:10

Ekron was the northernmost of the five Philistine cities. By now the ark has been shunted through three of them, and its reputation arrives before it does.

5:11

"His own place" means the ark's own home in Israelite territory. KJV uses "his" because English of 1611 had no settled word "its", and used "his" as the possessive for things as well as people.

5:12

"The cry of the city went up to heaven" was a common way of saying the crying was so loud and desperate that it could not be ignored.