was fully awake.

Literally, "his eyes stood" (1 Samuel 4:15). Through a mistake, probably in reading the numeral letters ( [

for x ), the Arabic and Syrian versions represent Eli as seventy-eight instead of ninety-eight years old.

We regard the first clause of 1 Samuel 4:1 as entirely unconnected with the account of Israel's expedition

against the Philistines. Keil, following other interpreters, connects the two clauses, and assumes, as it

appears to me, erroneously, that the war was undertaken in obedience to Samuel's word. But in that case he

would have been the direct cause of Israel's disaster and defeat.

For reasons too numerous here to detail, I still hold by the old identification of Mizpeh, notwithstanding

the high authority of Dean Stanley, and Drs. Grove and H. Bonar.

So literally in 1 Samuel 4:2: "They slew in the battle -array in the field about four thousand men."

In vers. 7 and 8 the Philistines speak of God in the plural number, regarding Him from their polytheistic

point of view.

The LXX. give it as twenty years, probably misreading the numeral letter ( m for r ).

As I understand the narrative, her only words, as quoted in the text, were Ichabod, as the name of the

child, and the explanation which she gave of it in ver. 22. All the rest is added by the narrator of the sad

See the description and representation in Layard's Nineveh and Babylon, pp. 343, 350. Dagon was the

male god of fertility.

Dagon means the "fish-form," from dag, a fish.

Comp. the quotations in Bochart, Hieroz. 1., pp. 1017-10l9.

Judging from the derivation of the word, and from its employment (in Deuteronomy 28:27) in connection

with other skin diseases, we regard it as a kind of pestilential boils of a very malignant character.

From the text it appears that the Ekronites, immediately on the arrival of the ark, entreated its removal; but

that before the necessary steps could be taken, they were visited with plagues similar to those in Ashdod

and Gath, but more intense and widespread even than before. Thus the strokes fell quicker and heavier as

the Philistines resisted the hand of God.

The last clause of 1 Samuel 6:3 should be rendered: "If ye shall then be healed, it will be known to you,

why His hand is not removed from you," viz., not until you had returned the ark and brought a trespass

This custom, it is well known, has since passed into the Roman Catholic Church.

In 1 Samuel 6:4, we read of "five" golden mice as part of the trespass-offering, the priests computing the

number according to that of the five Philistine capitals. But from ver. 18 we infer that, in point of fact, their

number was not limited to five, but that these votive offerings were brought not only for the five cities, but

also for all "fenced cities" and "country villages," the plague of the mice having apparently been much

wider in its ravages than that of the pestilential boils.

Comp. Robinson's Bibl. Researches, 2. pp. 223-225; 3. p. 153.