Dagon - 1st Samuel 5

The Israelites are devastated that the ark of the covenant has been captured by the Philistines, and maybe it’s partially because they have a quasi legitimate view of their God because it’s been so warped by centuries of apostasy that I think they are more equating the ark with the pagan idols that everyone else worships. In their mind, I would imagine, this is no different than when Rachel stole her father Laban’s idols and he came after them so fiercely. I think that they saw the ark as their idol representative of God and it being captured was the same as their God being captured. Yesterday I talked about why God would command Israel to go to war knowing that they were going to be slaughtered and have the ark captured, and I think there maybe two different reasons for that. The first might have been that maybe the 34,000 soldiers who were slain were a especially wicked part of Israel that would have impeded their turn back to God. It’s interesting to note that in the Book of Mormon especially, and even in modern church history, when there is a God sent calamity because of the wickedness of the people, it always seems to say “and the more wicked part of the people were killed,” which indicates to me that while these calamites might impact everyone, God might use them to target those especially wicked people who are inhibiting His work. Secondly, maybe one of the reasons for this defeat was so that ark would be captured by the Philistines, but why? This is the first (but not the last) time that the ark was taken away from Israel, maybe now they will appreciate it, and God, more. And maybe it was to show the Philistines the power of Israel’s God, so that when they say they can’t be friends anymore because God said no, the Philistines would be like “yeah don’t make your God mad because He hurts us.”

That’s exactly what happens too. The Philistines naturally take the ark of the covenant, or the physical idol of Israel’s God, to their main city and put it in the same temple as their main god Dagon, “and set it by Dagon.” TB says that this means that they situated it so that it looked like Dagon was using it as a foot stool, representative of the defeat of Israel’s God by the Philistine God. Just as a side note, this god Dagon looked like a male mermaid, or a mer-man as Zoolander would call it. This makes sense because they were a seafaring people, they would naturally worship a fish/man type of God. Incidentally, the city of Nineveh also worshipped Dagon, the half fish/half man god, so when Jonah showed up to teach them the gospel, a man coming out of a fish, they of course that they he was sent by Dagon and listened to his message. Just very interesting how God used what the people already knew and strengthened His message while also chastening Jonah at the same time. Curious.

The ark is perched so that it looks like Dagon defeated Israel’s God, and everyone goes to sleep. In the morning, the people find that the Dagon statue had “fallen upon his face to earth before the ark of the Lord.” They think it’s weird but stand him back up. The next morning, Dagon was fallen to the earth before the ark again, but this time, “the head of Dagon and both the palms of his hands were cut off upon the threshold; only the stump of Dagon was left to him.” If there had been a god fist fight in the middle of the night between those two idols, clearly the God of Israel won, and it was obvious. This apparently changed the way that the priests of Dagon came into the building from that point forward because now they stepped or even jumped over the threshold because that’s where they found Dagon. I don’t know why this is significant, but it apparently is a big enough deal that an entire people changed their habit of walking into a single room, and TB confirms that it is a very big deal.

Besides leaping over the threshold to Dagon’s temple from that point forward, the Philistines didn’t change anything else because of what happened between the two gods, so God had to take it up a notch. Now he started afflicting the people of that city with tumors or boils. The people rightly ascribed it to the God of Israel and the ark of the covenant, so they sent it to another city and wouldn’t you know it, those people broke out in boils and tumors too. So they went to sent it to another city but those people protested because they didn’t want to die either. It was suggested that they send it back to Israel, and that’s where chapter 5 ends.

But it’s interesting, from the perspective of the Israelites, God send them to die in a war and they wouldn’t have known why and would have seen it as a massive betrayal, just like I saw what happened to me and my family as a betrayal by God. They never would have seen that the purpose of humbling the people to get them ready to obey was probably central to the purpose, and they certainly wouldn’t have seen the capture of the ark as being so that God could convince the Philistines of His power. It just would have looked like massive betrayal, they wouldn’t have seen past that, just like I haven’t seen past that. That’s a huge lesson to me, in fact both chapters 4 and 5 have been huge lessons for me, very applicable, and very needed

I’m off to Mexico for about 10 days, so I won’t be back until then, but I will be thinking about this while I’m there, and we’ll see what happens.