I Samuel 6:4

The trespass-offering was to correspond to the number of the princes of the Philistines. מספּר is an accusative employed to determine either measure or number (see Ewald, 204, a.), lit., "the number of their princes:" the compensations were to be the same in number as the princes. "Five golden boils, and five golden mice," i.e., according to Sa1 6:5, images resembling their boils, and the field-mice which overran the land; the same gifts, therefore, for them all, "for one plague is to all and to your princes," i.e., the same plague has fallen upon all the people and their princes. The change of person in the two words, לכלּם, "all of them," i.e., the whole nation of the Philistines, and לסרניכם, "your princes," appears very strange to us with our modes of thought and speech, but it is by no means unusual in Hebrew. The selection of this peculiar kind of expiatory present was quite in accordance with a custom, which was not only widely spread among the heathen but was even adopted in the Christian church, viz., that after recovery from an illness, or rescue from any danger or calamity, a representation of the member healed or the danger passed through was placed as an offering in the temple of the deity, to whom the person had prayed for deliverance; (Note: Thus, after a shipwreck, any who escaped presented a tablet to Isis, or Neptune, with the representation of a shipwreck upon it; gladiators offered their weapons, and emancipated slaves their fetters. In some of the nations of antiquity even representations of the private parts, in which a cure had been obtained from the deity, were hung up in the temples in honour of the gods (see Schol. ad Aristoph. Acharn. 243, and other proofs in Winer's Real-wrterbuch, ii. p. 255). Theodoret says, concerning the Christians of the…

In this chapter we have the return of the ark to the land of Israel, whither we are now gladly to attend it, and observe, I. How the Philistines dismissed it, by the advice of their priests (Sa1 6:1-11), with rich presents to the God of Israel, to make an atonement for their sin (Sa1 6:3-5), and yet with a project to bring it back, unless Providence directed the kine, contrary to their inclination, to go to the land of Israel (Sa1 6:8, Sa1 6:9). II. How the Israelites entertained it. 1. With great joy and sacrifices of praise (Sa1 6:12-18). 2. With an over-bold curiosity to look into it, for which many of them were struck dead, the terror of which moved them to send it forward to another city (Sa1 6:19-21).

6:4 rats: See study note on 5:6.