1 Sa. 5: Oh, Wait: It Is a TOO-mah...

1 Samuel 5:10 "So they sent the ark of God to Ekron. As the ark of God was entering Ekron, the people of Ekron cried out, 'They have brought the ark of the god of Israel around to us to kill us and our people.'"

The Philistines added the ark to their collection of gods...making it two now. Even though they placed the ark in Dagon's temple in Ashdod, I doubt they had any intention of worshiping the God of the Israelites.

They come back into the temple the next morning, and there is Dagon, lying face down on the floor next to the ark. A submissive pose. The Philistines probably looked at each other, shrugged, and put Dagon back up on the mantle. But O! What should happen that night? The Philistines return in the morning (They're in the temple everyday it would seem...that's devotion), and find Dagon back on the floor, his head and hands broken off his body and lying on the threshold. What's the message God is sending here? What is the importance of the head and the hands removed from the body? The head and hands are action. Mind. Doing something...something headless and handless is most certainly powerless.

Verse 5 is interesting to me. The above situation with the head and the hands caused the people not to step on the threshold in subsequent days. Theirs was a religion of superstition, not faith.

The Philistines passed the ark around to their major cities, and wherever the ark went, it brought the party with it. Just kidding. It brought tumors and rats and despair and much panic. The Philistines almost immediately recognized that it was the ark that had this power over them. A change of scenery did not effect the outcome. It was pain and tumors.

The Philistines figured they were safer with the ark of God in the hands of the hapless Israelites than holding it in their own camp. And they were probably right. The Israelites were for the most part unaware or unwilling to come to terms with the power God would give them. And this speaks to how God continued to judge the nations (here, the Philistines (Judges 14:4)) with or without the Israelites. What God had to do was not dependent on the Israelites really doing whatever they were supposed to be doing.