1 Samuel 5

Will the real God please stand up? Objects of adoration and worship are varied, but amidst idolatry the One True God stands out against the background. Join Dr. Marty Baker as he walks us through the series, yet humorous account of 1 Samuel chapter 5.

Concerning whether Einstein possessed faith in God, James Randerson writes:

Einstein penned [a] letter on January 3, 1954, to the philosopher Eric Gutkind who had sent him a copy of his book Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt. The letter went on public sale a year later and has remained in private hands ever since.

In the letter, he states: "The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this."[1]

Einstein did respect those who believed and became agitated at evangelists who classified him as an atheist. However, statements like this reveal a high level of unbelief in the God disclosed in the Holy Scriptures and in the handiwork of the cosmos (Psalm 19).

What happens when a non-believer like Einstein fails to believe? Does God give up on them in short order? No, out of love for the lost, God works overtime to get their attention so they will use their free will to hopefully make the right informed decision about Him and, ultimately,  the person and work of His Son, Jesus.

We certainly see this theological truth showcased in 1 Samuel 5. In chapter 4, we learn how God not only verified Samuel as His new prophet by fulfilling His prophetic promise to him to the letter concerning the evil priestly line of Eli, but He also judged Israel with two terrible defeats on the battlefield with the Philistines. Why did they lose? They lost two bloody battles for several reasons.

One, they trivialized God’s holy Ark of the Covenant by using it as a secret weapon to hopefully dominate and destroy the Philistines. God never gave them the word to take His ark into battle, so they were out of line with this exercise.

Two, they failed to do anything about the priestly perversions they had to all know about from Eli’s two sons, Hophni and Phinehas.  They failed to hold the High Priest, Eli, accountable for polluting the priesthood by taking meat offered to God and by not dealing definitively with his sons' sexually predatory ways with female worshippers.

Three, they allowed Hophni and Phinehas to bring the holy ark to the battlefield.  They, of all priests, should have never gone near the ark, but they did, and when they did, they acted blasphemously and arrogantly.  For their actions, they would die, as the Lord had prophesied through an unknown prophet (1 Sam. 2:27-36) and Samuel (1 Sam. 3:11-14).

As I said in our study of 1 Samuel 4, to misjudge God is to be judged, and they all were.  Are you guilty of thinking God will bless you despite your sinful actions?  You should think again. God disciplines us in order to move us toward holiness.  In that discipline, things might occur that we never anticipated on God’s part.

Chapter 5 is one of those episodes of unpredicted divine activity.  God had dealt with Israel, but now He will turn and deal with their enemies, the Philistines.  What is His goal? To show them that He is superior to their false god so they can have the opportunity to move from false to true belief.  This is how God works in our wicked world.  Perhaps He is working overtime in your life to arrest your thinking about Him. I pray that by the end of this study, you will, unlike Einstein, trade your unbelief for belief in the living God who cares about your spiritual condition.

We follow the interesting and shocking movement of the various historical panels to appreciate how God sought to deconstruct the Philistines' erroneous religious thinking so they would be left with a decision concerning Him, the true God.

The Decision (1 Sam. 5:1-2)

Have you ever made a dumb move? Or should I say, when was the last time you made a lame decision that cost you? What the cocky Philistines did after they defeated Israel in a second battle could not have been more misguided:

¹ Now the Philistines took the ark of God and brought it from Ebenezer to Ashdod. ² Then the Philistines took the ark of God and brought it to the house of Dagon, and set it by Dagon. (1 Sam. 5)

At the beginning of the first verse, the waw disjunctive, or the wedding of the coordinating conjunction “and” to a non-verb, i.e., Philistine, underscores how shocking what follows will be.

‎    וּפְלִשְׁתִּים֙ לָֽקְח֔וּ אֵ֖ת אֲר֣וֹן הָאֱלֹהִ֑ים וַיְבִאֻ֛הוּ מֵאֶ֥בֶן הָעֵ֖זֶר אַשְׁדּֽוֹדָה׃ (1 Sam. 5:1)

What happened? Two bad decisions.

Bad decision number one. They, who were not Kohathite priests chosen by the living God to transport the Ark (Num. 3:29-31), moved it to their key spiritual center, Ashdod, on the beautiful Mediterranean coast.  What could possibly go wrong when the unholy attempts to draw near to the holy?

Bad decision number two. They hauled the Ark into the temple of their god, Dagon.  Imagine the insanity of this.  They placed God’s Ark right in front of a lifeless, worthless god of stone fashioned by man’s hands.  What could possibly go wrong with this decision? A lot.

Dagon was originally a Ugaritic god of fertility.  Ancient Ugaritic texts also describe him as the father of Baal, a key fertility god in the Canaanite pantheon.  One of my former Hebrew professors, Dr. Robert Chisolm, verifies this when he notes that the Ugaritic cognate word daganu means “grain,” thereby underlining a fertility motif.^[2] The word dag in Hebrew also means a fish; hence, some identify him with the god who was half-man and half-fish.  Regardless of which god this was, he was a false and lifeless stone god of man’s making.  Obviously, the Philistines added him to their pantheon after seizing control of the low-lying land south of what is now Tel Aviv.

In ancient times, when you defeated your enemy, you typically took the idols of his god(s) and placed them in your temple to demonstrate that your god was more powerful.  By doing this, you also supposedly garnered the power and support of your enemy’s god to help you with further hegemonic aims.

The true God of the Israelites had other plans.  He would not be trivialized by His people who sought to use His Ark as a secret weapon, nor would He permit these idol worshippers to wrongly think they had defeated Him when they seized His Ark.

The Defeat (1 Sam. 5:3-5)

I have said it before, but it bears repeating. If you think the Bible is boring, you have not read it.  The following historical account of how the living God dealt with a lifeless god is ominous and humorous at the same time.

³ When the Ashdodites arose early the next morning, behold, Dagon had fallen on his face to the ground before the ark of the LORD. So they took Dagon and set him in his place again.

Irony drips from this entire account.

Imagine the horror of the priest who walked into Dagon’s temple the next morning, only to see his powerful god face down in the dust before the Ark of God.  Had there been an earthquake? No.  Could a strong wind have blown over the stone statue of the mighty and powerful Dagon? No.  Could a group of Israelite special ops soldiers have infiltrated the temple and pushed Dagon over?  Hardly. They were licking their wounds back in Shiloh. So, ironically, the all-powerful Dagon, for some unknown reason, was face-down and seemingly subservient to the God of Israel associated with this interesting acacia box overlaid with glimmering gold.

What did the priests do?  Note the plural, “they.”  It took a bunch of them to stand their god back up. Dagon could not move on his own. He had to be moved. Is not idol worship illogical? Also, is this all not totally ironic? Israel’s God did not need anyone to stand Him up, but their god needed assistance to get on his feet. However, no one gave it too much thought, and I am sure they went on their busy day after they helped Dagon get functional again. They must have concluded, “Ah, this was just one big weird coincidence.” Sure it was.

God, however, was not through working on the unbelieving Philistines:

⁴ But when they arose early the next morning, behold, Dagon had fallen on his face to the ground before the ark of the LORD. And the head of Dagon and both the palms of his hands were cut off on the threshold; only the trunk of Dagon was left to him.

I wish I could have been inside the temple when numerous priests of Dagon entered his precincts the following day. Once again, Dagon did a helpless face plant in the dust before the Ark of God. This time, however, things were way worse. Dagon had literally lost his head, and his hands were cut off and apparently resting on the threshold of the doorway. To add insult to injury, the only thing left on Dagon’s pedestal was his fishlike trunk.

What did all of this denote? It denoted that Dagon was a dead, defeated god. Dr. Chisolm’s observation about this verse is most insightful:

5:4 His head and hands had been broken off. The decapitation of Dagon should probably be viewed as a military act, since conquerors sometimes decapitated their defeated enemies (1 Sam. 17:51; 31:9). The cutting off of the hands may also be interpreted in this light, since hands were sometimes cut off and counted following a battle. In a scene in an Ugaritic myth, the warrior goddess Anat ties the decapitated heads of her defeated foes into a necklace and attaches their disembodied hands to her belt (COS, 1:250).^[3]

When the Philistines failed to grasp God’s revelation in the first episode of the battle between Israel’s God and the Philistines' God in the temple, God turned up the heat. In a pagan mind, there could be nothing more horrific than a headless, handless god.  This meant he was lifeless and powerless. And, indeed, he was.

Verse 5 shows us just how committed the priests were to their powerless god:

⁵ Therefore neither the priests of Dagon nor all who enter Dagon's house tread on the threshold of Dagon in Ashdod to this day. (1 Sam. 5)

From this point forward, they agreed never to let their feet touch the threshold of Dagon’s temple because this is where his holy hands had rested. Sad, isn't it?  Even though the living God had given them ample evidence that their god was no god, and despite the fact they had to reattach his hands to his lifeless body, they still tenaciously held onto the belief that his hands were holy, as he was holy.  You might smile at their naivete, but how many non-believers do the same thing when God rocks their world with incontrovertible evidence that He alone is God? Consider this story:

In a popular interview posted on YouTube, scientist Leonard Mlodinow, who co-authored The Grand Design with Stephen Hawking, declared, "Science shows that God is not necessary to explain the universe." He also adds, "I find it very hard to see how people could believe in the Bible." But then Mlodinow gave this very surprising answer to another question on the same interview:

I tend not to believe things that there is no evidence for. But it is not always true. I do believe, for instance, in aliens. I believe that there is life on other planets, and I think there is no evidence for that. We don't understand the origin of life on Earth well enough to say how probable it is that on another star life would form. But in my heart for some reason I find myself believing that.

Christian apologist William Lane Craig commented on this quote:

That is really bizarre, isn't it? That he believes in aliens even though he says he has no evidence for it, but he just finds he believes in his heart that extraterrestrial life exists. But he doesn't apparently find it in his heart to think that God exists the way many people do. If he thinks he is rational in believing in aliens, why isn't it rational to believe in God?[4]

His reasons for unbelief in God are, well, jaw-dropping. As a scientist, he should heed the words of physicist Sir John Houghton:

The fact that we understand some of the mechanisms of the working of the universe or of living systems does not preclude the existence of a designer, any more than the possession of insight into the processes by which a watch has been put together, however automatic these processes may appear, implies there can be no watchmaker.[5]

Thinking minds have plenty of hard evidence from God that He is and He is not silent, as the late Francis Schaeffer used to say.

When the Philistines failed to drop their belief in Dagon and turn to belief in the God of the Israelites who had effortlessly destroyed their god, Yahweh, Israel’s true God, turned up the revelatory heat even more.  We see this in the section I have labeled . . .

The Discipline (1 Sam. 5:6-7)

Again, you cannot miss the divinely ordained irony of what happened next:

⁶ Now the hand of the LORD was heavy on the Ashdodites, and He ravaged them and smote them with tumors, both Ashdod and its territories” (1 Sam. 5)

While the hands of Dagon could not do anything, the hand of Israel’s God continued to do unbelievable things.  This time, He sent terrible tumors to the citizens of mighty Ashdod and Dagon, who could not help himself, could not help his people.  Is this not all so ironic? The Philistines struck God’s people with arrows and swords, but God immobilized them instantly with bodily tumors. What kind of tumors were these? Good question.  The short answer is that no one knows.  But let us conjecture.

To placate the wrath of Israel’s God in chapter six, we learn the Philistines created an offering consisting of five golden tumors and five golden rats (1 Sam. 6:4, 5, 11, 18).  According to the Mayo Clinic, rats can carry bubonic plague by transporting a germ called Yersinia pestis.  What is the result of this type of plague? The Mayo Clinic goes on to say:

Bubonic plague causes swelling of lymph nodes. These are small, bean-shaped filters in the body's immune system. A swollen lymph node is called a bubo. The word "bubonic" is describing this feature of the disease. If a person has bubonic plague, buboes appear in the armpits, groin or neck. Buboes are tender or painful. They vary in size from about less than half an inch (1 centimeter) to about 4 inches (10 centimeters). Other symptoms of bubonic plague may include: Sudden high fever and chills. Headache.Tiredness. Not feeling well in general. Weakness.Muscle aches.[6]

If rats all of a sudden infiltrated the city and caused this dreaded disease to spread quickly, you can see why the uncomfortable inhabitants drew this logical conclusion:

⁷ When the men of Ashdod saw that it was so, they said, "The ark of the God of Israel must not remain with us, for His hand is severe on us and on Dagon our god."

It did not take Detective Columbo (of TV sitcom fame in the 1970s) to figure out the plague's origin.  They all correctly deduced it was directly related to the presence of the Ark and, ultimately, Israel’s unseen God.

But did they turn to the living God? No.  They devised their version of salvation.  We see what they did in the closing verses I have appropriately titled . . .

The “Deliverance” (1 Sam. 5:8-12)

Instead of repenting and bowing before the true God, listen to what these unbelievers devised to fix their issues. Talk about another bad decision.

⁸ So they sent and gathered all the lords of the Philistines to 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 brought around to Gath." And they brought the ark of the God of Israel around.

Oh, now there is a great idea. Let us load up the Ark and ship it ten miles due west to Gath. I wonder who thought this up. Let us export our problem to another city, and then it will not be our problem anymore. It is a sad state of affairs when countrymen start shipping their problems to other cities in a quest to fix things where they live.  It never works.

⁹ And it came about that after they had brought it around, the hand of the LORD was against the city with very great confusion; and He smote the men of the city, both young and old, so that tumors broke out on them.

No sooner did the oxen arrive at Gath pulling a strange-looking gold-plated wooden box on a cart than everyone in town instantly had tumors busting out all over their skin.  Once more, the people drew a proper deduction: Israel’s God, associated with the Ark, was responsible.  So, what did the people do? They perpetuated the same lousy decision the leaders in Ashdod devised. Instead of turning in faith in the God of Israel, they shipped the problem over to their Philistine brethren five miles up the road in Ekron.

How did that go? Not well.

¹⁰ So they sent the ark of God to Ekron. And it happened as the ark of God came to Ekron that the Ekronites cried out, saying, "They have brought the ark of the God of Israel around to us, to kill us and our people." ¹¹ They sent therefore and gathered all the lords of the Philistines and said, "Send away the ark of the God of Israel, and let it return to its own place, that it may not kill us and our people." For there was a deadly confusion throughout the city; the hand of God was very heavy there. ¹² And the men who did not die were smitten with tumors and the cry of the city went up to heaven. (1 Sam. 5)

Word traveled quickly between all of these little cities.  It had time to travel because according to First Samuel 6:1, the Ark was in Philistine hands for SEVEN LONG MONTHS!

No sooner did the Ark arrive in Ekron than tumors broke out among the entire populace, and now, for the first time, we read that people died from the plague.  And like before, the citizens of Ekron quickly deduced that this plague was directly related to the presence of the Ark of Israel’s God.

But did they turn to God in light of this incontrovertible evidence of God’s presence among them? No.  They remained their unbelief, advising their helpless leaders to get that Ark out of Philistine territory pronto.  Sad, is it not? No matter what God did to show that He was, in fact, quite superior to their inferior god, Dagon, they wilfully chose not to believe. All of this reminds me of an observation I read by John Lennox in his book “God’s Undertaker,”

So there is no doubt that nature gives us an overwhelming impression of design. Richard Dawkins even defines biology to be the study of complicated things which give the impression of having been designed for a purpose. But that, say he and many other scientist, is all that is-- an impression of design, admittedly a strong impression of design, but nevertheless not real design. Francis Crick (who won the Nobel prize jointly with James Watson, for the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA) warns biologists not to mistake that impression for what it is, in his estimation, the underlying reality: ‘Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.’[7]

What Dawkins and Crick did was place the god called Scientism back on his shaky, untenable throne.  That is most unfortunate because just as God gave the Philistines incontrovertible evidence of His existence, so He has given it to us all. Why has He done this? So we will consider the evidence, leave our false worship behind, be what it may, and be saved by placing our faith in the incontrovertible evidence of the substitutionary death and glorious resurrection of Jesus, the long-awaited Christ.

So, what will you do? Will you get the Ark out of your life as soon as possible, or will you fall down in worship before the God of the Ark?  Until you do that, remember the message that rings loud and clear in this historical narrative: When God wants to attempt to wake you up spiritually to His superiority, He just might wear you down.  I pray that when He wears you down and shows you that your version of Dagon will not save you, you will waste no time placing your faith in Jesus.  He alone is the great God who can and will save you from your sin and grant you forgiveness and life (Acts 4:10-12).

Pat Summerall, the voice on CBS and FOX that spelled football for forty-five years, had a false god in his life.  His Dagon was called liquor.  Writing about Pat’s story in the Christian sports magazine Sports Spectrum, Art Stricklin gives us words we should learn from:

Pat was an only child whose parents divorced before he was born, leaving him feeling empty and alone. He became an alcoholic, living from drink to drink as his body broke down. During the 1994 Masters tournament—[Summerall also did voiceover work for high-profile golf tournaments]—he fessed up: "I'd been getting sick a lot, throwing up blood—and I got sick again at 4 a.m. I looked in the mirror, saw what a terrible sight I was, and said to myself, This isn't how I want to live."

Pat spent 33 days in the Betty Ford Center in Palm Springs, California. This helped alleviate his alcohol problems but didn't address his spiritual vacuum. Then he bumped into [Tom Landry, his old football coach from his days as a star kicker]. [Landry] explained about [Pat's] spiritual need and connected him with Dallas Cowboy's chaplain John Weber. Pat's life was transformed, and he was baptized at age 69.[8]

God is waiting to turn Philistines into His children.  It is now your turn.

[1] James Randerson, "Childish superstition: Einstein's letter makes view of religion relatively clear," www.guardian.co.uk (5-13-08)

^[2] Robert B. Chisholm Jr., 1 & 2 Samuel, ed. Mark L. Strauss, John H. Walton, and Rosalie de Rosset, Teach the Text Commentary Series (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2013), 33.

^[3] Robert B. Chisholm Jr., 1 & 2 Samuel, ed. Mark L. Strauss, John H. Walton, and Rosalie de Rosset, Teach the Text Commentary Series (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2013), 34.

[4] William Lane Craig, "Leonard Mlodinow and the Rise of Scientific Atheism," Reasonable Faith podcast (5-1-16).

[5] John Lennox, God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (Oxford: Lion Publishing, 2009), 91.

[6] “Plague,” https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/plague/symptoms-causes/syc-20351291, accessed on 10/24/2024.

[7] Lennox, God’s Undertaker, 79.

[8] Art Stricklin, Sports Spectrum, as paraphrased in the October 27, 2009, entry of Men of Integrity (September/October, 2009).