In the deep silence of that early morning, before the sun had risen, when the sacred light was still burning, came, through the mouth of the innocent child, the doom of the house of Ithamar. The battle of Aphek. The first blow in the impending tragedy came from the now constant enemy of Israel. The Philistines revived their broken strength. The conflict took place at a spot near the western entrance of the pass of Beth-horon, known by the name of Aphek, but in later times-from the memory of a victory which effaced the recollection of this dark day -Eben-ezer.' 1 A reverse roused the alarm of the Israelite chiefs. In that age, as in the medieval period of the Christian Church, to which we have so often compared it, the ready expedient was to turn the sacred relics of religion into an engine of war. The Philistines themselves were in the habit of bringing the images of their gods to the field of battle.2 To these must be opposed the symbol of the Divine Presence in Israel, the Ark of the Covenant. Such an application of the Ark was not without example before or after; but it is evidently described as against the higher spirit of the religion which it was intended to support. Hophni and Phinehas were with it as representatives of the Priestly order. To the profligate vices. of their youth they joined the sin of superstition also. Their appearance with the Ark roused, as with a spasmodic effort, the sinking spirit of the army. The well-known cheer of the Israelites-terrible to their enemies at all times-ran through the camp so that 'the earth rang again,'3 and the Philistines were roused to the last pitch of desperate courage in resisting, as they thought, this new and Divine enemy. On that day the fate of the house of Eli was to be determined. It was also, as the Philistines expressed it, to decide whether the Philistines were to be the slaves of the Hebrews, or the Hebrews of the Philistines. On the success of this wager of battle, the Priestly rulers of the nation had staked the most sacred pledge of their religion. The whole city and sanctuary of Shiloh waited for the result in breathless expectation. Two 'See Lecture XVIII. 2 2 Sam. v. 21. 1 Sam. iv. 5. above all others, Eli and the wife of Phinehas, were wrapt in dreadful expectation-he blind and feeble with age-she near The tidings to the delivery of her second child. In the evening of the defeat. of the same day there rushed through the vale of Shiloh a youth from the camp, one of the active tribe of Benjamin,—his clothes torn asunder, and his hair sprinkled with dust, as the two Oriental signs of grief and dismay.1 A loud wail, like that which, on the announcement of any great calamity, runs through all Eastern towns, rang through the streets of the expectant city. The aged High Priest was sitting in his usual place beside the gateway of the sanctuary. He caught the cry; he asked the tidings. He heard the defeat of the army; he heard the death of his two sons; he heard the capture of the Ark of God. It was this last tidings, 'when of the Ark of God,' that broke He fell from his seat, and died The death of Eli. in the fall. 'mention was made The news spread and reached the house of Phinehas. pangs of labour overtook the widow of the fallen Priest. The birth of even the birth of a living son could rouse her. I-chabod. The Not 'Their 'Priests,' 2 as the Psalmist long afterwards expressed it, 'had fallen, and their widows made no lamentation.' With her, as with her father-in-law, her whole soul was absorbed in one thought, and with her last breath she gave to the child a name which should be a memorial of that awful hour,—‘I-cha'bod,' 'The glory is departed; for the Ark of God is taken.' The cap 'The Ark of God was taken.' These words expressed the whole significance of the calamity. It was known, till the era of the next great, and still greater overthrow of the tivity of the nation at the Babylonian exile, as 'the Captivity.' 'The day of the captivity' was the epoch which closed the irregular worship of the sanctuary at Dan.3 'He delivered 'His strength into captivity, and His glory'4 (that 'glory of the Divine Presence which was commemorated in the name of Ark. 1 1 Sam. iv. 12. 21 Sam. iv. 19, 20; Ps. lxxviii. 64. Ps. lxxviii. 61. The word, however, is different. 3 Judg. xviii. 30. 1 I-chabod) 'into the enemy's hand.' The Septuagint title of the 96th Psalm, 'when the house of God was built after the cap'tivity,' and the allusion in the 68th Psalm, 'Thou hast led 'captivity captive,' most probably refer to the period of these disasters. The grief of Israel may be measured by the triumph, not unmingled with awe, of the Philistines. It was to them as if they had captured Jehovah Himself; and a custom long continued in the sanctuary of Dagon, in their chief city of Ashdod, to commemorate the tradition of the terror which this new Presence had excited. The priests and the worshippers of Dagon would never step on the threshold, where the human face and human hands of the Fish-god had been found broken off from the body of the statue as it lay prostrate before the superior Deity. 2 The elaborate description, too, of the joy of the return marks the deep sense of the loss. In the border-land of the The Return two territories, in the vast cornfields 3 under the hills of the Ark. of Dan, the villagers of Beth-shemesh at their harvest see the procession winding through the plain, the Philistine Princes moving behind, the cart conveying the sacred relic drawn by the two cows, lowing as they advance towards the group of expectant Israelites, who 'lifted up their eyes and saw 'the Ark, and rejoiced to see it.' The great stone on which the cart and the cows were sacrificed was long pointed out as a monument of the event. But even the restoration of the Ark was clouded with calamities; and when from Beth-shemesh it mounted upwards through the hills to Kirjath-jearim, and was lodged there in a little sanctuary, with a self-consecrated Priest of its own, there was still a longing sense of vacancy: whilst it remained 'in the fields of the wood,' 5 there was ' no sleep to 'the eyes or slumber to the eyelids' of the devout Israelite. 'It came to pass, while the Ark was at Kirjath-jearim, that the 'time was long; for it was twenty years; and all the house of 'Israel lamented after the LORD.'1 Overthrow of Shiloh. It was the first pledge of returning hope; but the hope was still long deferred; and meanwhile the catastrophe was branded into the national mind by the overthrow of the sanctuary itself of Shiloh, in which the Ark had since the Conquest found its chief home. We catch a distant glimpse of massacre with fire and sword: of a city sacked and plundered by ruthless invaders. 'He gave His people over to the sword; 'and was wroth with His inheritance. The fire consumed 2 'their young men, their maidens were not given to marriage.' The details of the overthrow are not given; partly, perhaps, because the sanctuary gradually decayed when the glory of the Ark was departed; partly from the imperfect state of the narrative, which may itself have been caused by the silent horror of the event. Shiloh is casually mentioned twice or thrice 3 in the later history. But the reverence had ceased. The Tabernacle, under which the Ark had rested, was carried off, first to Nob, and then to Gibeon, with the original brazen altar of the wilderness. The place became desolate, and has remained so ever since. 'Thou shalt see thine enemy in My habitation.' The name became a proverb for destruction and desolation. 'I will do to this house as I have done to Shiloh.' 'Go now 'unto My place which was at Shiloh ; . . . and see what I 'did to it for the wickedness of My people Israel.' 'I will 'make this house like Shiloh . . a curse to all the nations of 'the earth.' 5 The very locality became so little known that it had to be specified carefully in the following centuries in order to be recognised. 'Shiloh, which is in the land of Canaan, 'which is on the north side of Beth-el, on the east side of the 'highway that goeth up from Beth-el to Shechem, and on the 'south of Lebonah.' It is only this exact description, thus 1 Sam. vii. 2. '6 2 Ps. lxxviii. 62, 63. May not this be taken literally of the Philistines burning their Israelite prisoners alive? That this was a Philistine custom appears from Judg. xv. 6. Ahijah the Shilonite (1 Kings xi. 29). required by the very extremity of its destruction, which enabled a traveller from America,1 within our own memory, to rediscover its site to which the sacred name still clung with a touching tenacity forgotten for centuries, and known only to the savage peasants who prowl about its few broken ruins. So ended the period, defined as that during which 'the 'house of God was in Shiloh.' So ended the period of the supremacy of the tribe of Ephraim, whose fall is described, in the Psalm which unfolds their fortunes, as involved in the fall of Shiloh-'He forsook the tabernacle of Shiloh, the tent that 'he had pitched among men. He refused the tabernacle of 'Joseph and chose not the tribe of Ephraim.' So ended the first division of the history of the Chosen People, in the overthrow of the first sanctuary by the Philistines, as the second division was to terminate in the fall of the second sanctuary, the Temple of the Jewish monarchy, by the armies of Babylon; and the third by the still vaster destruction of the last Temple of Jerusalem by the armies of Titus. The revival of the nation from the ruins of the first sanctuary must be reserved for the rise of the Second Period of the Jewish Church, when 'the 'Lord was to awake as one out of sleep . . . and choose the 'tribe of Judah, the Mount Zion which He loved.' Only we may still include within this epoch the great name of Samuel, and the great office of Prophet which was to unite the old and the new together, under the shelter of which was to spring up the new institutions of the Monarchy-a new tribe, a new capital, a new Church, with new forms of communion with the Almighty, now for the first time named by the name of 'the 'LORD of Hosts.' 1 Seilun was first rediscovered by Dr. Robinson in 1838. Judg. xviii. 31. 3 Ps. lxxviii. 60, 67. |