Today, I am reading and commenting on  1 Samuel 4-7.

I had written an entire paragraph about the timeline of events here before I realized it would not take me anywhere interesting.  So, I deleted that and started over.  I am going to contrast the way the Israelites under the “leadership” of Eli’s sons appealed to God for aid in battle to the way the did so under Samuel’s leadership.  First, I want to point out that Eli’s sons did not actually lead the Israelites.  Instead, they  accompanied the ark of the covenant when the Israelites came and took it to battle.  Second, when the war went badly for the Israelites, they did not seek God’s guidance to learn what they had done wrong, as they had under Joshua when they suffered defeat at Ai.  No, they brought God, so they thought, to the frontlines,  believing that would force Him to give them victory.  Or to put it another way, they considered God to be just another item in their array of battle:

General looking at the battle map, “We will put that infantry unit there, this other infantry over there, and put our archers..there. Finally, put the ark of the covenant, with God inside it, in our center just behind our elite units.”

On the other hand, when Samuel led the Israelites he had them put aside all of their idols and destroy their objects for worshiping other gods.  Then he called them to assemble to worship God.  Yes, Samuel was also calling them to assemble for war, but he did not marshal them into position with a plan to take the battle to the Philistines.  Samuel called them together before God, and waited for God to act.  Under Samuel, the Israelites did not impose their will on their neighbors, but none of their neighbors were able to impose their will upon the Israelites.

Of course, part of Samuel’s success resulted from what happened after the Israelites brought the ark of covenant to war, and thought that thus they had brought God to their war.  The Philistines thought the same thing had happened, that a god had been brought to the battle, and they were frightened.  But, when they were victorious, the Philistines thought that it meant that their gods were more powerful than the Israelites’ god.  God decisively, and in “language” they thoroughly understood, showed them that He had chosen to allow them to seize the ark of the covenant.  When the Philistines won the battle, they thought that their god, Dagon, had defeated the god of the Israelites, despite being distant from Dagon’s temple and in the presence of the Israelites’ god’s presence in the ark.  But when they put the ark of the covenant inside the center of Dagon’s presence and power, Dagon “bowed” down to the god of Israel, because the god of Israel was not “god” with a lower case “g”, rather Israel’s God was the Creator of all that is and all that will be.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.