1 Samuel 6 — Who Is Able to Stand Before This Holy LORD God?
After seven months the Philistines ask their priests and diviners how to send the ark of the LORD home. Send it not empty, they say: return a trespass offering — five golden emerods and five golden mice, according to the number of the lords — and do not harden your hearts as Pharaoh did. The test: a new cart, two milch kine that have never borne a yoke, their calves shut up at home. If the kine go up to Bethshemesh, it was the LORD's hand; if not, a chance. The kine take the straight way, lowing as they go, and turn not aside. The reapers of Bethshemesh lift up their eyes and rejoice; the cart stops by a great stone in the field of Joshua; the wood is split and the kine offered. But the men of Bethshemesh look into the ark and the LORD smites them. Who is able to stand before this holy LORD God? They send to Kirjathjearim: come, fetch it up to you.
“And the men of Bethshemesh said, Who is able to stand before this holy LORD God? and to whom shall he go up from us?”
— 1 Samuel 6:20
- v.1-9 Seven months; the diviners' counsel — a trespass offering and a test
- v.10-12 The kine take the straight way to Bethshemesh
- v.13-18 Joy at the harvest; the great stone; the golden images
- v.19-21 Bethshemesh smitten; the ark sent to Kirjathjearim
Philistine diviners preaching from the book of Exodus — the irony is thick. They have the lesson of Pharaoh exactly right: hardening against this God costs more each round. Outsiders sometimes read the Bible's warnings more clearly than those who own the book.
Hebrews will later turn the same verb on believers: harden not your hearts, as in the provocation. The counsel given to Ekron is still the counsel given to the church.
The test is designed to fail: untrained cows, never yoked, separated from calves they will low for, on a road they have never travelled, with no driver. Everything in nature should turn them home. The diviners are giving chance every advantage.
It was a chance that happened to us — the alternative the Philistines hoped for is the alternative the modern heart reaches for first. Verse 12 answers: the kine took the straight way... and turned not aside to the right hand or to the left. The LORD can drive cattle as easily as He topples gods.
Lowing as they went — the mothers cry for their calves at every step and still do not turn. Creatures under God's hand go against their deepest instinct and go straight. The lords of Philistia follow behind, witnesses against their own hope of chance.
The phrase turned not aside to the right hand or to the left is the Law's description of obedience (Deuteronomy 5:32). Two cows manage what Israel, with the ark in her midst, could not. The narrator lets the comparison speak.
Seven months of absence end in a wheat field. Bethshemesh was a priests' city (Joshua 21:16), the first Israelite town across the border — the ark comes home to Levites at harvest, and they rejoiced to see it. Joy is the right first response to the return of God's presence.
Verses 14-15 do the next thing rightly too: the cart is broken up for firewood, the kine offered as a burnt offering, and the Levites took down the ark. Wood that carried the ark is not reused; milch kine that bore it are not milked again. What has borne the holy is given back to the holy.
The joy turns to lament. The ark was never to be seen uncovered even by its Levite bearers (Numbers 4:20); the men of Bethshemesh looked into it — curiosity treating the mercy seat as a curiosity. Philistines who did not know better had been let off with plagues; priests' city men who did know better are not.
The number is a well-known difficulty. The Hebrew reads awkwardly, in effect seventy men, fifty thousand men; a small town could hardly hold fifty thousand; and some Hebrew manuscripts and the historian Josephus give seventy only. Many translations therefore read seventy, with or without a note. The KJV faithfully renders the common Hebrew text; the honest reader holds the figure loosely and the lesson firmly.
The phrase a great slaughter is the same used of Israel's defeat in 4:10 and 4:17. God's own people, rejoicing at His return, discover that His holiness has not softened in Philistia. He is not safer because He is home.
The right question, asked in the wrong spirit. Who is able to stand before this holy LORD God? is the question the whole book of Leviticus answers — with sacrifice, priesthood, covering, blood. Bethshemesh asks it only to get rid of Him: to whom shall he go up from us?
Ashdod said the ark... shall not abide with us (5:7); Bethshemesh says to whom shall he go up from us? Israel and Philistia end chapters 5 and 6 with the same sentence. Hearts can be as hard on the right side of the border as on the wrong.
The ark goes to Kirjathjearim, to the house of Abinadab, and stays there until David brings it up to Jerusalem (7:1-2; 2 Samuel 6). Shiloh is not mentioned again as its home; Jeremiah will point to Shiloh's ruin as a warning (Jeremiah 7:12).
The chapter closes with God's presence passed along like an unwanted responsibility. It is a sobering close to the ark narrative: Israel got her ark back and still did not know what to do with her God. Chapter 7 will begin with twenty years of lamenting after the LORD — and then a true return.
Two cows going straight up a road, lowing for their calves, are the chapter's quiet sermon on providence: if you have been calling your circumstances a chance that happened to us, watch the cart. Then take Bethshemesh seriously. Familiarity with holy things — a priests' city, a harvest-day welcome — is no protection against treating God as an object of curiosity. Rejoice when He returns to you; do not pry. And when the question who is able to stand? rises in your heart, do not answer it by sending Him away.
Who is able to stand before this holy LORD God? The men of Bethshemesh had no answer and sent the ark away. The gospel answers it: One has stood before Him on our behalf, the great High Priest who entered not an earthly ark but heaven itself with His own blood (Hebrews 9:24). The trespass offering the Philistines guessed at — gold shaped like their wounds — points, as the church has read it, to the true trespass offering, in which the Son was made sin for us and the plague was lifted from the land.
Pagan priests grasp something Israel's elders missed in chapter 4: the God of Israel is not to be handled lightly, and an offence against Him calls for a trespass offering. Their theology is crude and their gold is odd, but the instinct — do not approach Him empty — is sound.
Send it not empty recalls Israel's own exodus, when the Egyptians sent the people away laden (Exodus 12:35-36); verse 6 makes the comparison explicit — as the Egyptians and Pharaoh hardened their hearts. The story of the plagues had become a sermon in Philistia.