528
Patriarchs and Prophets
position outside the gate of the tabernacle, he sat by the highway side
day after day, anxiously expecting the arrival of a messenger from the
battlefield.
At length a Benjamite from the army, “with his clothes rent, and
with earth upon his head,” came hurrying up the ascent leading to the
city. Passing heedlessly the aged man beside the way, he rushed on to
the town, and repeated to eager throngs the tidings of defeat and loss.
The sound of wailing and lamentation reached the watcher beside
the tabernacle. The messenger was brought to him. And the man said
unto Eli, “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 thus dishonored God and caused Him to
withdraw His presence from Israel was more than he could bear; his
strength was gone, he fell, “and his neck brake, and he died.”
The wife of Phinehas, notwithstanding the impiety of her husband,
was a woman who 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, nor would He
long suffer the exultation of the heathen. He had used the Philistines
as the instrument to punish Israel, and He employed the ark to punish
the Philistines. In time past the divine Presence had attended it, to be
the strength and glory of His obedient people. That invisible Presence
would still attend it, to bring terror and destruction to the transgressors
of His holy law. The Lord often employs His bitterest enemies to
punish the unfaithfulness of His professed people. 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-
[586]
hating God. Whenever iniquity is cherished, there, swift and unerring,
the divine judgments will follow.
The Philistines removed the ark in triumph to Ashdod, one of their
five principal cities, and placed it in the house of their god Dagon.