So the Philistines asked their priests how they can get God to stop. The priests told them to make five golden hemorrhoids and five golden mice as trespass offerings, and put the ark and the offerings in a cart pulled by two cows. Then let the cows go wherever they choose. If they go toward Bethshemesh, then it was God who was striking the people with hemorrhoids in their secret parts.
The Philistines called for the priests and the diviners, saying, What shall we do to the ark of the LORD? And they said, If ye send away the ark of the God of Israel, send it not empty; but … return him a trespass offering: then ye shall be healed … What shall be the trespass offering? They answered, Five golden emerods, and five golden mice … take the ark of the LORD, and lay it upon the cart; and put the … trespass offering … and send it away … And see, if it goeth up by the way of his own coast to Bethshemesh, then he hath done us this great evil: but if not, then we shall know that it is not his hand that smote us: it was a chance that happened to us. 1 Samuel 6.2-9Since that sounded like a reasonable plan, that's what they did. And the cows headed straight for Bethshemesh "and turned not aside to the right hand or to the left."
They laid the ark of the LORD upon the cart, and the coffer with the mice of gold and the images of their emerods. And the kine took the straight way to the way of Bethshemesh. 6.11-12So the world now knows for sure that it was God who killed the Philistine people by putting hemorrhoids in their secret parts.
That would have been a happy ending, I suppose, except some of the Bethshemeshites looked into the ark. So God had to kill 50,070 of them.
He smote the men of Bethshemesh, because they had looked into the ark of the LORD, even he smote of the people fifty thousand and threescore and ten men: and the people lamented, because the LORD had smitten many of the people with a great slaughter. 6.19Stories like this can only be found in the Bible.
5 comments:
I'm imagine the poor peoples' faces alternately melting and exploding, for some reason...
Nice guy, that God, huh?
Maybe the Philistines shoulod have put a 'Do Not Open til Christmas' sign on the cart.
Four enormous posts in four days - I'm in heaven !
Maybe they had radiation burns from the ark, or a bio-logical weapon from the moses god. Everyone with possession of the ark got sick, chalked up to punishment from him.
'The problem with this arguement is that the man doesn't give context of the story. One example of this is that the Philistines had taken the Ark of the Covenant, which is literally where the God of the Israelites, the people that the Philistines were constantly trying to slaughter and even made slaves at one point. So I don't think that taking the physical dwelling of a God that has proven his power in Egypt, which if you read 1 Samuel chapters two and up, then you know that the Philistines knew that the Israelite God was real. Another point is that the people in Bethshemesh, were Israelites, which meant that they knew the law. The laws states that no man shall look inside the Ark, for the holiness and judgement of a perfect, righteous God would pour out.
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