1 Samuel 4:3

4:3 When the army ¹  came back to the camp, the elders of Israel said, “Why did the Lord let us be defeated today by ²  the Philistines? Let’s take with us the ark of the covenant of the Lord from Shiloh. When it is with us, it will save us ³  from the hand of our enemies.

1 Samuel 4:13

4:13 When he arrived in Shiloh, Eli was sitting in his chair watching by the side of ⁴  the road, for he was very worried ⁵  about the ark of God. As the man entered the city to give his report, ⁶  the whole city cried out.

1 Samuel 4:19

4:19 His daughter-in-law, the wife of Phineas, was pregnant and close to giving birth. When she heard that the ark of God was captured and that her father-in-law and her husband were dead, she doubled over and gave birth. But her labor pains were too much for her.

1 Samuel 5:4

5:4 But when they got up early the following day, Dagon was again lying on the ground before the ark of the Lord. The head of Dagon and his two hands were sheared off and were lying at the threshold. Only Dagon’s body was left intact. ⁷ 

1 Samuel 5:11

5:11 So they assembled ⁸  all the leaders of the Philistines and said, “Get the ark of the God of Israel out of here! Let it go back to its own place so that it won’t kill us ⁹  and our ¹⁰  people!” The terror ¹¹  of death was throughout the entire city; God was attacking them very severely there. ¹² 

1 Samuel 6:3

6:3 They replied, “If you are going to send the ark of ¹³  the God of Israel back, don’t send it away empty. Be sure to return it with a guilt offering. Then you will be healed, and you will understand why his hand is not removed from you.”

1 Samuel 6:15

6:15 The Levites took down the ark of the Lord and the chest that was with it, which contained the gold objects. They placed them near the big stone. At that time the people of Beth Shemesh offered burnt offerings and made sacrifices to the Lord.

1 Samuel 6:18-19

6:18 The gold mice corresponded in number to all the Philistine cities of the five leaders, from the fortified cities to hamlet villages, to greater Abel, ¹⁴  where they positioned the ark of the Lord until this very day in the field of Joshua who was from Beth Shemesh.

6:19 But the Lord ¹⁵  struck down some of the people of Beth Shemesh because they had looked into the ark of the Lord; he struck down 50,070 ¹⁶  of the men. The people grieved because the Lord had struck the people with a hard blow.

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¹ tn Or “people.”

² tn Heb “before.”

³ tn Heb “and it will come in our midst and it will save.” After the cohortative (see “let’s take”), the prefixed verbal forms with the prefixed conjunction indicate purpose or result. The translation understands the ark to be the subject of the third masculine singular verbs, although it is possible to understand the Lord as the subject. In the latter case, one should translate, “when he is with us, he will save us.”

⁴ tc Read with many medieval Hebrew mss, the Qere, and much versional evidence יַד (yad, “hand”) rather than MT יַךְ (yakh).

⁵ tn Heb “his heart was trembling.”

⁶ tn Heb “and the man came to report in the city.”

⁷ tc Heb “only Dagon was left.” We should probably read the word גֵּו (gev, “back”) before Dagon, understanding it to have the sense of the similar word גְּוִיָּה (gÿviyyah, “body”). This variant is supported by the following evidence: The LXX has ἡ ῥάχις (Jh rJacis, “the back” or “trunk”); the Syriac Peshitta has wegusmeh (“and the body of”); the Targum has gupyeh (“the body of”); the Vulgate has truncus (“the trunk of,” cf. NAB, NASB, NRSV, NLT). On the strength of this evidence the present translation employs the phrase “Dagon’s body.”

⁸ tn Heb “and they sent and gathered.”

⁹ tn Heb “me.”

¹⁰ tn Heb “my.”

¹¹ tn Or “panic.”

¹² tn Heb “the hand of God was very heavy there.”

¹³ tc The LXX and a Qumran ms add “the covenant of the Lord.”

¹⁴ tc A few Hebrew mss and the LXX read “villages; the large rock…[is witness] until this very day.”

¹⁵ tn Heb “he”; the referent (the Lord) has been specified in the translation for clarity.

¹⁶ tc The number 50,070 is surprisingly large, although it finds almost unanimous textual support in the MT and in the ancient versions. Only a few medieval Hebrew mss lack “50,000,” reading simply “70” instead. However, there does not seem to be sufficient external evidence to warrant reading 70 rather than 50,070, although that is done by a number of recent translations (e.g., NAB, NIV, NRSV, NLT). The present translation (reluctantly) follows the MT and the ancient versions here.