The Ark That Destroyed Every City That Held It

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They Sent to Shiloh for the Box

Four thousand men were dead on the field at Aphek and nobody could say why. The elders of Israel sat in the wrecked camp and decided that what they needed was the Ark of the Covenant, the gold chest out of the sanctuary at Shiloh, carried down to the front line where the fighting was.

Eli was ninety-eight years old and had been judge and priest for forty years. He let his two sons go with it, and gave them one instruction: if the Ark is taken and you are still breathing, do not come back into my sight.

When the chest came into the Israelite camp the shout went up so hard the ground moved. Across the field the Philistines heard it and knew what it was. God has come into their camp, they said. The same God who struck Egypt with everything he had. Who is going to save us now.

Then some of them started laughing at it. That God had ten plagues, they said, and he spent all ten on the Egyptians. He has nothing left to throw.

An Old Man Fell Off His Seat at the Gate

Israel lost thirty thousand men that day. Hophni and Phinehas died in the line. The Ark went out of the field on Philistine shoulders.

A young Benjaminite ran the whole way to Shiloh with his clothes torn. Eli was sitting on a high seat by the gate, blind, listening to the town start screaming, and he sent for the runner. He took the news about his sons the way a man takes news he has already been told in a vision. Then the runner said the Ark of God had been captured.

Eli went backward off the seat and broke his neck in the gateway.

His son's wife was in labor when they came to tell her. She lived long enough to deliver a boy at seven months and to name him Ichabod, which is a word for disgrace, and then she died too.

Dagon on His Face, Twice

They carried the Ark to Ashdod and set it in the temple of Dagon, beside the idol, the way a man hangs a captured standard on his wall.

In the morning the priests came in to worship and found their god lying flat on his face on the floor in front of the chest. Not tipped sideways. Prostrate, in the posture a worshipper takes. They lifted him back onto his base and left, badly shaken.

The next morning he was down again, and this time both hands had snapped off on the threshold, and so had the head. What stood on the pedestal was a stump. No priest of Ashdod ever stepped on that threshold again.

Then the sickness came into the city, and it worked fast. Men brought up their own insides and were dead before the body had finished dying properly. Mice came up out of the earth in a flood and went through the standing crops and left nothing, and they did not stop at the fields. They came at the men in the latrines and tore the entrails out of them where they crouched. The Philistines took to squatting over brass vessels to shield themselves, and the brass split open at the touch of a mouse.

The Argument Among the Five Lords

Ashdod sent the Ark to Ashkelon, and Ashkelon caught what Ashdod had. Ashkelon passed it on. It went around all five cities in turn, and every city that held it was destroyed the same way, until men in the next town would not let the cart through the gate.

The lords of Gath and Ekron and Ashkelon and Gaza and Ashdod met to decide what to do with it, and the meeting split three ways.

Send it home, said the first group. Its God has taken its side.

The second group told them not to be fools. A box cannot do this. If God cared that much about it, he would never have let it fall into human hands in the first place. Bodies sicken and fields fail at certain turns of time; wait it out.

The third group were old men with a reputation for judgment, and their plan won. Do not keep it and do not simply hand it back. Make five images of gold for the swellings and five golden mice for the crops, one set for each city, and put them in a bag on the cart as a payment. Build a new cart. Yoke two milk cows that have never worn a yoke, and shut their calves up at home. Then take the cart to the place where the roads divide and let go of it. If the cows turn toward the Hebrews, we have our answer. If they wander off any other way, the box is only a box.

The Cows Sang on the Road

The cows put their heads down and walked the road to Israel with their udders full and their calves bawling behind them, and they did not turn to the right or the left, and the lords of the Philistines walked after the cart the whole way to see where it would go.

They were also singing. They turned their faces toward the Ark and sang, and the sages could not agree which song it was. Rabbi Meir said they sang what Israel sang at the sea, I will sing to the Lord, for he is highly exalted. Rabbi Yohanan said it was sing to the Lord a new song. Others heard give thanks to the Lord, call upon his name, or the Lord reigns, let the peoples tremble, or the Lord reigns, let the earth rejoice.

Elijah is remembered calling out over the cart, rise, rise, acacia wood, sway in your glory, worked over with gold, praised in the innermost room, glorified with two cherubim.

And God had a word for Israel while the cows walked. If one of you lost a hen, he said, you would go up and down every alley in the town until you found it. My Ark has been going from city to city in the country of the Philistines, and none of you came looking.

Rabbi Shmuel bar Nachman looked at the two cows and thought about Moses, who had to work to teach the Levites how to sing. These animals opened their mouths and did it untaught.

Seventy Dead in the Wheat

It was harvest, and the men of Beth-shemesh were cutting wheat in the valley when they looked up and saw a cart coming down the road with nobody driving it.

They dropped the sickles and ran. The cows stopped in the field of a man named Joshua, beside a great stone, with a good clear plain in front of them and no reason to stop there. The villagers lifted the Ark down and set it on the rock with the bag of gold beside it, and split the cart for firewood and offered the two cows on it, and the Philistine lords watched from the edge of the field and went home.

Then seventy men of the village came in close to look at it, and none of them were priests, and they died where they stood.

Every house in Beth-shemesh had a body in it that night. In the morning the survivors sent word up the road that the Ark had come back, and asked somebody else to take it, because they had learned what they were.

Men from Kiriath-jearim came down and carried it to the house of Abinadab the Levite, on the hill, and it stayed on that hill for twenty years.