1 Samuel 6: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

The ark of the LORD has been in Philistine territory for seven months, and the Philistines call for their priests and diviners to ask how to send it back. They are told to return it with a guilt offering of five gold tumors and five gold rats, and to test whether Israel's God caused their suffering by hitching two milk cows to a new cart and letting them go. The cows walk straight to Beth-shemesh, where the people welcome the ark and offer sacrifices, but men there are struck down for looking into the ark. The chapter ends with Beth-shemesh asking the people of Kiriath-jearim to come and take the ark away.

Claim by Claim

1. 6:1
   • The ark of the LORD was in the territory of the Philistines.
   • It remained there seven months.
2. 6:2
   • The Philistines summoned their priests and their diviners.
   • They asked what they should do with the ark of the LORD.
   • They asked to be told by what means they should send it back to its place.
3. 6:3
   • The priests and diviners answered.
   • They said that if the Philistines send away the ark of the God of Israel, they must not send it away empty.
   • They said the Philistines must by all means return to him a guilt offering.
   • They said that then the Philistines would be healed.
   • They said it would then be made known to them why his hand had not turned away from them.
4. 6:4
   • The Philistines asked what guilt offering they should return to him.
   • The answer was five gold tumors.
   • The answer was also five gold mice.
   • The number matched the number of the lords of the Philistines.
   • The reason given was that one and the same plague was on them all and on their lords.
5. 6:5
   • They were told to make images of their tumors.
   • They were told to make images of their mice.
   • The mice were ruining the land.
   • They were told to give glory to the God of Israel.
   • It was said that perhaps he would lighten his hand from off them, from off their gods, and from off their land.
6. 6:6
   • They were asked why they should harden their hearts.
   • It was said that the Egyptians and Pharaoh hardened their hearts.
   • It was said that he dealt harshly with the Egyptians.
   • It was asked whether the Egyptians did not then let the people go.
   • It was said the people departed.
7. 6:7
   • They were told to make one new cart.
   • They were told to take two nursing cows.
   • The cows were to be ones on which no yoke had ever come.
   • They were told to tie the cows to the cart.
   • They were told to take the cows' calves away from them back to the house.
8. 6:8
   • They were told to take the ark of the LORD and set it on the cart.
   • They were told to put the gold objects they were returning to him as a guilt offering in a box beside the ark.
   • They were told to send the ark away and let it go.
9. 6:9
   • They were told to watch.
   • They were told that if the ark goes up the road toward its own territory, to Beth-shemesh, then he had done them this great harm.
   • They were told that if it does not, then they would know that it was not his hand that struck them.
   • They were told that in that case what happened to them was chance.
10. 6:10
    • The men did so.
    • They took two nursing cows.
    • They tied the cows to the cart.
    • They shut up the calves at home.
11. 6:11
    • They set the ark of the LORD on the cart.
    • They also set on the cart the box with the gold mice and the images of their tumors.
12. 6:12
    • The cows went straight along the road toward Beth-shemesh.
    • They kept to the one highway.
    • They lowed as they went.
    • They did not turn aside to the right or to the left.
    • The lords of the Philistines went after them as far as the border of Beth-shemesh.
13. 6:13
    • The people of Beth-shemesh were reaping the wheat harvest in the valley.
    • They lifted up their eyes.
    • They saw the ark.
    • They rejoiced to see it.
14. 6:14
    • The cart came into the field of Joshua of Beth-shemesh.
    • The cart stopped there.
    • A great stone was there.
    • They split up the wood of the cart.
    • They offered the cows as a burnt offering to the LORD.
15. 6:15
    • The Levites took down the ark of the LORD.
    • They took down the box that was with it.
    • The gold objects were in that box.
    • They set them on the great stone.
    • The men of Beth-shemesh offered burnt offerings that day to the LORD.
    • They sacrificed sacrifices that day to the LORD.
16. 6:16
    • The five lords of the Philistines saw it.
    • They returned to Ekron that same day.
17. 6:17
    • These are the gold tumors the Philistines returned as a guilt offering to the LORD.
    • One was for Ashdod.
    • One was for Gaza.
    • One was for Ashkelon.
    • One was for Gath.
    • One was for Ekron.
18. 6:18
    • The gold mice matched the number of all the cities of the Philistines belonging to the five lords.
    • This included fortified cities.
    • This included unwalled country villages.
    • The count extended as far as the great stone of Abel, on which they set down the ark of the LORD.
    • That stone remains to this day in the field of Joshua of Beth-shemesh.
19. 6:19
    • He struck the men of Beth-shemesh.
    • The reason was that they had looked into the ark of the LORD.
    • It is not stated plainly whether they looked inside the ark or merely looked at it.
    • He struck seventy men of the people.
    • The number as given reads fifty thousand and seventy men.
    • The people mourned.
    • The reason was that the LORD had struck the people with a great slaughter.
20. 6:20
    • The men of Beth-shemesh spoke.
    • They asked who is able to stand before the LORD, this holy God.
    • They asked to whom he should go up from them.
21. 6:21
    • They sent messengers to the inhabitants of Kirjath-jearim.
    • The message said the Philistines had brought back the ark of the LORD.
    • The message told them to come down.
    • The message told them to take the ark up to themselves.

Words Worth Explaining

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

6:1

The ark was a gold-covered wooden chest, the most sacred object Israel possessed, normally kept out of sight in the inner room of the sanctuary. The Philistines had captured it in battle seven months earlier (chapters 4-5) and had suffered outbreaks of disease in each city they moved it to. The Philistines were a people settled in five cities on the coastal plain southwest of Israel, and Israel's main military rivals at this period.

6:2

Diviners were religious specialists who read omens to work out what a god wanted or intended, the flight of birds, the markings on the liver of a sacrificed animal, the casting of lots. It was a recognized profession across the ancient Near East, and their advice here is offered as expert procedure, not guesswork.

6:3

The KJV "trespass offering" translates Hebrew *asham*, which is closer to compensation than to a gift: a payment made to settle a debt incurred by an offense, restitution with a penalty added. Sending the ark back "empty" would return the property without paying for the wrong. "His hand" is a standard idiom for a god's active power, and most often, as here, his power to strike.

6:4

"Emerods" is an old English word for haemorrhoids or swellings; the Hebrew word means tumors or swellings on the body. Taken together with the rats, many readers have understood the plague as something like bubonic plague, though the text does not name a disease. The "lords" of the Philistines are *seranim*, a title used in the Bible only of these five rulers, one for each Philistine city; it is not the ordinary Hebrew word for lord and may be a Philistine term.

6:5

Making a model in precious metal of the affliction itself, and presenting it to the god held responsible, was a widely attested practice in the ancient world, the image both admits what the god has done and asks him to take it back. "Give glory to" a god is an idiom for publicly acknowledging his power and conceding that he was the one who acted.

6:6

A reference to the exodus story, in which Pharaoh repeatedly refused to release the Israelites from Egypt until a series of disasters forced him to. The Philistine priests are pictured as knowing Israel's national story and drawing a practical lesson from it: the ones who held out paid for it.

6:7

The instructions are designed as a controlled test. Cows still nursing calves, with the calves shut up away from them, will pull hard toward home; cows that have never worn a yoke pull erratically and do not know a route. If such animals walk a straight road into Israelite territory, the result cannot be put down to training or instinct. A cart never used before and animals never worked before were also the usual requirement for anything put to sacred use.

6:8

"Coffer" is simply the KJV word for a box or chest.

6:9

"Coast" in 1611 English meant border or territory, not seashore; the sense is the ark's own home ground. Beth-shemesh was an Israelite town in the Sorek valley, the nearest Israelite settlement along the road running inland from Philistine Ekron.

6:12

The lowing matters to the story: the cows were bellowing for the calves shut up behind them while still walking steadily away from them, against their own instinct.

6:13

The wheat harvest fell in late spring, roughly May or June, and was one of the busiest weeks of the farming year. That is why the whole town is out in the fields at once and everyone sees the cart arrive.

6:14

A burnt offering was an animal killed and burned whole on the fire, with no part kept back to be eaten, the most complete form of offering. Breaking up the cart for firewood follows the same logic: an object that had carried the ark was not put back to ordinary use.

6:15

The Levites were members of the tribe of Levi, who were assigned responsibility for carrying and handling the ark and the sacred equipment. Beth-shemesh was one of the towns allotted to them, which is why some were on hand.

6:16

Ekron was one of the five main Philistine cities.

6:17

The five cities named here were the Philistine heartland on the coastal plain, each with its own ruler: Ashdod, Gaza and Ashkelon on the coast, Gath and Ekron further inland toward Israelite territory.

6:18

The Hebrew of this verse is difficult and translators divide over it. The word rendered "stone" can also be read as *abel*, "meadow," and it is unclear whether the phrase is still counting villages or is marking out a place name. "To this day" is the narrator writing from a much later point, pointing to a landmark his own readers could still go and look at.

6:19

The number is a long-standing textual problem. The Hebrew reads, awkwardly, "seventy men, fifty thousand men"; several Hebrew manuscripts and early translations have only seventy, and fifty thousand would far exceed the population of a small farming town. The KJV adds the two figures together; most modern translations print seventy. The Hebrew verb translated "looked into" can also mean simply looked at or gazed upon, the ark was normally kept covered, and even those who carried it were not to see its contents.

6:20

"Stand before" is an idiom for surviving in someone's presence, and also for serving them. The question is practical as well as fearful: they are asking who can safely keep this thing, and where it should be sent next.

6:21

Kiriath-jearim lay roughly nine miles east of Beth-shemesh, up in the hill country on the way toward Jerusalem. "Come down... and take it up" is literal geography: the messengers' town is higher than the valley where the ark now sits.