Punishment: The Ark Taken
365
Tragic News Kills Eli
When the army went out to battle, Eli had tarried at Shiloh. With
troubled forebodings he awaited the result of the conflict, “for his heart
trembled for the ark of God.” Outside the gate of the tabernacle he
sat by the highway day after day, anxiously expecting the arrival of a
messenger from the battlefield.
At length a Benjamite, “with his clothes rent, and with earth upon
his head,” rushed to the town and repeated to eager throngs the tidings
of defeat. The sound of wailing and lamentation reached the watcher
beside the tabernacle. The messenger was brought to him, and the man
said, “Israel is fled before the Philistines, and there hath been also a
great slaughter among the people, and thy two sons also, Hophni and
Phinehas, are dead.” Eli could endure all this, terrible as it was, for he
had expected it. But when the messenger added, “and the ark of God is
taken,” a look of unutterable anguish passed over his countenance. The
thought that his sin had dishonored God and caused Him to withdraw
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His presence from Israel was more than he could bear. He fell, “and
his neck brake, and he died.”
The wife of Phinehas feared the Lord. The death of her father-in-
law and her husband, and above all, the terrible tidings that the ark
of God was taken, caused her death. She felt that the last hope of
Israel was gone; and she named the child born in this hour of adversity,
Ichabod, or “inglorious,” with her dying breath mournfully repeating
the words, “The glory is departed from Israel: for the ark of God is
taken.”
But the Lord had not wholly cast aside His people, and He em-
ployed the ark to punish the Philistines. The divine presence, invisible,
would still attend it to bring terror and destruction to the transgressors
of His holy law. The wicked may triumph for a time as they see Israel
suffering chastisement, but the time will come when they too must
meet the sentence of a holy, sin-hating God.
Heathen Gods Cannot Stand Before the Ark of God
The Philistines removed the ark in triumph to Ashdod and placed it
in the house of their god Dagon. They imagined that the power which