Study Desk

Now Eli was very old, and he heard about everything his sons were doing to all Israel and how they were sleeping with the women who served at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting.

"Why are you doing these things?" Eli said to his sons. "I hear about your wicked deeds from all these people.

And at that time Eli, whose eyesight had grown so dim that he could not see, was lying in his room.

"Go and lie down," he said to Samuel, "and if He calls you, say, 'Speak, LORD, for Your servant is listening.'" So Samuel went and lay down in his place.

On that day I will carry out against Eli everything I have spoken about his family, from beginning to end.

I told him that I will judge his house forever for the iniquity of which he knows, because his sons blasphemed God and he did not restrain them.

So Samuel told him everything and did not hide a thing from him. "He is the LORD," replied Eli. "Let Him do what is good in His eyes."

And the LORD continued to appear at Shiloh, because there He revealed Himself to Samuel by His word.

So the Philistines fought, and Israel was defeated, and each man fled to his tent. The slaughter was very great-thirty thousand foot soldiers of Israel fell.

That same day a Benjamite ran from the battle line all the way to Shiloh, with his clothes torn and dirt on his head.

When he arrived, there was Eli sitting on his chair beside the road, watching, because his heart trembled for the ark of God. When the man entered the city to give a report, the whole city cried out.

Now Eli was ninety-eight years old, and his gaze was fixed because he could not see.

As soon as the ark of God was mentioned, Eli fell backward from his chair by the city gate, and being old and heavy, he broke his neck and died. Eli had judged Israel forty years.

carried it into the temple of Dagon, and set it beside his statue.

When the people of Ashdod got up early the next morning, there was Dagon, fallen on his face before the ark of the LORD. So they took Dagon and returned him to his place.

But when they got up early the next morning, there was Dagon, fallen on his face before the ark of the LORD, with his head and his hands broken off and lying on the threshold. Only the torso remained.

And when the men of Ashdod saw what was happening, they said, "The ark of the God of Israel must not stay here with us, because His hand is heavy upon us and upon our god Dagon."

They replied, "If you return the ark of the God of Israel, do not send it away empty, but by all means return it to Him with a guilt offering. Then you will be healed, and you will understand why His hand has not been lifted from you."

Make images of your tumors and of the rats that are ravaging the land. Give glory to the God of Israel, and perhaps He will lift His hand from you and your gods and your land.

but keep watching it. If it goes up the road to its homeland, toward Beth-shemesh, it is the LORD who has brought on us this great disaster. But if it does not, then we will know that it was not His hand that punished us and that it happened by chance."