The destruction of the temple at Shiloh must have been one of the first results of the victory. The Israelites had no longer an army, and the Philistine conquerors could march in safety through the passes of Mount Ephraim. A fort was built by them to command the pass at Michmash, and the old sanctuary of Israel was levelled to the ground. No record of its destruction, indeed, was known to the compiler of the books of Samuel; it would have been strange, if in that hour of distress and national disaster, when the storehouse of Hebrew literature was itself destroyed, a chronicler should have been found to describe the event. But the memory of it was never forgotten, and it is alluded to both by the prophet Jeremiah and by the Psalmist (Jer. vii. 12, xxvi. 6; Ps. lxxviii. 60).
Such of the priests of Shiloh as survived the catastrophe were scattered through Israel. In the time of Saul we find eighty-five of them at Nob, which is accordingly called ‘the city of the priests.’ Samuel himself fled to the home of his fathers at Ramah. There as a seer and prophet, as the representative of the fallen sanctuary of Israel, and as one of the few literary men of the age, he became the centre of all that was left of patriotism and national feeling in Israel. Gradually his influence grew. Ahitub, the grandson of Eli, was young like himself, and the destruction of Shiloh had deprived him of such authority as his service before the ark of the covenant would have conferred.
The ark itself was once more within the confines of Israel. It had been carried to Ashdod, and there placed in triumph in the temple of Dagon. But the triumph was short-lived. In the night, the image of Dagon twice fell from its pedestal and lay on its face before the ark of the mightier God. On the second occasion, it was broken in pieces by its fall; when the priests entered the sanctuary in the morning, they found the head and hands of their god rolled upon the threshold. ‘Therefore,’ we are told, ‘neither the priests of Dagon nor any that come into Dagon’s house tread on the threshold of Dagon in Ashdod unto this day.’[[395]]
Dagon has been supposed to have had the shape partly of a man, partly of a fish. But the supposition has arisen from a false etymology of the name, which connects it with the Hebrew dâg, ‘a fish.’ We now know from the cuneiform inscriptions that Dagon was really one of the primitive deities of Babylonia adored there in days when as yet the Semite had not become master of the land. Dagon was coupled with Anu, the god of the sky, and when the name and worship of Anu were carried to the West, the name and worship of Dagon were carried there too. Sargon ‘inscribed the laws’ of Harran ‘according to the wish of the gods Anu and Dagon,’ and a Phœnician seal in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford has upon it the name of Baal-Dagon as well as representations of an ear of corn, a winged solar disk, a gazelle, and several stars. The ear of corn symbolises the fact that among the Phœnicians Dagon, the brother of El and Beth-el, was the god of agriculture and the inventor of bread-corn and the plough.[[396]] But this was because in the language of Canaan dagan signified ‘corn.’ In passing to the West the god thus assumed new attributes, and became an agricultural deity who watched over the growing crops.[[397]]
The power of the God of Israel was not shown only in the humiliation of the Philistine god. The plague broke out in Ashdod, accompanied by its usual symptom, hæmorrhoidal swellings. The inhabitants of the city were not slow in recognising in it the wrathful hand of Yahveh, and the ark was accordingly sent to their neighbours in Gath. But here, too, the plague followed it, and Ekron, to which it was sent next, fared no better. For seven months the sacred palladium of Israel remained in the hands of its captors. Then ‘the priests and the diviners’ advised that it should be sent back to the people of Yahveh along with offerings to mitigate the anger of the offended God. Five mice and five hæmorrhoids of gold were made and placed in a coffer by the side of the ark. They represented the five Philistine cities, and the mice were symbols of the wrathful Yahveh, the God of hosts and of battle, who had wreaked his vengeance on the worshippers of the peaceful god of agriculture. The mice which devoured the corn were the natural foes of Dagon.
The ark and the coffer were placed on a cart, and two milch-kine were yoked to draw it. A doubt still lingered in the minds of the Philistines whether the God who had allowed his people to be conquered and his dwelling-place to be captured could really, after all, have been the author of the plague, and they watched, therefore, to see whether the kine took the road towards Israelitish territory or back to their own young. But all doubt vanished when the kine marched straight eastward towards Beth-shemesh, lowing as they went. The villagers were in the fields reaping when they saw the cart coming towards them, laden with its precious freight. The kine stood still at last by the side of a great stone—the stone of Abel ‘in the field of Joshua the Beth-shemite.’ Then the Levites came and took the ark and the offerings from the cart and laid them on the stone, which thus became a sanctuary and an altar. The wood of the cart was broken into firewood, and the kine were repaid for the gift they had brought by being sacrificed to the Lord.
But the plague followed the ark even upon Israelitish soil. The men of Beth-shemesh believed that it was because they had looked into the sacred shrine of Yahveh, to see, possibly, whether its original contents were still within it, and in their terror they begged the inhabitants of Kirjath-jearim to come and carry it away. To Kirjath-jearim accordingly it was removed and placed in the house of Abinadab, whose son Eleazar was consecrated to look after it. That it was not carried to Shiloh is a sign that the destruction of Shiloh had already taken place.
With the removal of the ark to Kirjath-jearim darkness falls on the history of Israel. There was little for the patriotic historian to record. The people were in servitude to the Philistines, the national sanctuary had been destroyed, the ark itself was hidden away in a private house. When the curtain is again lifted, it is to chronicle a local success over the Philistine foe. Samuel is at Mizpeh, ‘the watch-tower,’ which must have adjoined Ramah, if indeed it was not the name of one of its two quarters.[[398]] Here was the last refuge of the few Israelites who still refused to acknowledge the Philistine rule, and the surrounding mountains afforded a home and shelter to the bands of outlaws who still carried on a guerilla warfare with the foreigner. One of the incidents of this warfare was long remembered. While Samuel was sacrificing a lamb as a burnt-offering to Yahveh, the Philistines fell upon the assembled people. But a sudden thunderstorm dismayed the assailants, who fled down the valley towards Beth-car pursued by the inhabitants of Mizpeh. It was in memory of the victory that Eben-ezer, ‘the stone of help,’ was set up by the seer between Mizpeh and Shen.[[399]]
It would seem that no further attack was made upon Mizpeh and its neighbourhood during the lifetime of Samuel. At least such appears to be the conclusion we must draw from the generalising and optimistic language of the Hebrew historian.[[400]] For a time, indeed, the whole district was freed from the presence of the foreigner. The villages eastward of Ekron and Gath ceased to pay tribute to the conqueror, though their independence could not have lasted long.[[401]] Samuel’s ‘circuit’ did not extend beyond Mizpeh, Gilgal and Beth-el, and his sons judged cases in Beer-sheba.
Ahitub, the high-priest, was doubtless at Nob with the rest of the Levites of Shiloh, almost within sight of Mizpeh. What had been saved out of the wreck of the temple at Shiloh must have been there with him. We know that at Nob the sword of Goliath was subsequently laid up before Yahveh, and at Nob too was probably preserved the brazen serpent that had been set up by Moses in the wilderness.[[402]] According to the Chronicler,[[403]] however, the tabernacle and the brazen altar which had been made by Bezaleel were at Gibeon; how this came to be the case he does not say.[[404]] At any rate, if the brazen serpent were preserved, there is no reason why other things should not have been preserved as well. And the books of the Law would have been among the first objects to be carried with them by the fugitive priests. We are told that when the ark was brought into the temple of Solomon it still contained the tables of stone which had been placed in it by Moses (1 Kings viii. 9); if these had been removed from it when it was taken to the Israelitish camp, they too must have formed part of the temple furniture which was saved by the priests.