She named the child Ichabod, meaning "The glory has departed from Israel."

[1 Sam. 4:21]

In addition to the capture of the ark, 1 Samuel 4 records the deaths of numerous Israelites, including Eli and his daughter-in-law, the wife of Phinehas. Eli, we are told, had judged Israel for forty years but was unable to control his sons, who served as priests at Shiloh. Earlier, a "man of God" had come to Eli and had predicted doom on Eli's house (1 Sam. 2:27-36), a prediction that was fulfilled in part in the battle during which the ark was captured by the Philistines. The crushing blow for Eli, which brought on his death, was not the death of his two sons in battle but the realization that they had been instrumental in the loss of the ark. The wife of Phinehas grieved for the loss of the ark as well as for the loss of her father-in-law and husband. Her dying wish, after a traumatic childbirth, was that her infant son be named Ichabod, for "the glory has departed from Israel, for the ark of God has been captured" (1 Sam. 4:22).

The focus of the passage is on the ark, the object that the Israelite army thought they could use to manipulate God and the outcome of the battle. God, though, had not been defeated, nor had he abandoned them. He was definitely in control, as the events of chapters 5 and 6 would show.

The Philistines then took the ark to Ashdod: "When the Philistines captured the ark of God, they brought it from Ebenezer to Ashdod; then the Philistines took the ark of God and brought it into the house of Dagon and placed it beside Dagon" (1 Sam. 5:1-2).

The stratum or layer of earth at Ashdod that is believed to belong to the period of Samuel and Saul is stratum X (mid-eleventh century B.C.). However, archaeologists have not yet uncovered the remains of a temple from that period in the areas excavated. At this time Ashdod was a well-built Philistine city with a distinctive pottery now referred to as Ashdod ware. (It was the earlier strata XIII-XI that had the Mycenaean IIIC:1b and the Philistine bichrome ware). The Ashdod of this period expanded outside its walls and was not destroyed until the tenth century B.C., perhaps by King David or by the Egyptian pharaoh Siamun, who conducted a military campaign in this region around 960 B.C. It was Ashdod stratum XII of the late twelfth century that produced the Ashdoda, and the building associated with the Ashdoda may have had cultic significance. But it was the still earlier stratum XIII of the early twelfth century where the Philistine "High Place" was found. The High Place contained a square altar of plastered bricks and a round stone pillar base, which may have been used as a stand for the god of the city; it may have been this type of altar and pillar base that appeared in our story of the ark.

First Samuel 5 tells us that the god of Ashdod was Dagon. The god Dagon was also mentioned in the earlier Samson story when the Philistines of Gaza thanked him for having delivered "Samson our enemy into our hand" (Judg. 16:23). The Philistine god of Ekron of the eighth century B.C., whom we will be studying later (2 Kings 1:2), was Baal-zebub (or Baal-zebul). As has been explained previously, very little epigraphic material of any type has been recovered at the Philistine sites thus far; therefore, no one is sure if the Philistines simply adopted the local gods of Palestine or if they identified the gods of their places of origin with the local gods. Dagon is known to have been an ancient Semitic god of the northern Mesopotamian area, who was worshiped as far back as the third millennium B.C. A northwest Semitic word for grain is dagan, so it is thought that Dagon was the god of grain, a fertility god. This Semitic god is well known from the excavated eighteenth-century B.C. archives at Mari in the mid-Euphrates Valley. The name Dagon is used not only in reference to the god, but also as part of a Semitic personal name and even in the name of a month.

Additionally, Dagon is known from some Ugaritic materials as the father of Baal Haddu. Ugarit was on the East Mediterranean coast just opposite the island of Cyprus. It was a major seaport, accepting trade on the east-west routes between Mesopotamia and Greece as well as on the trade routes moving north-south between Egypt and Anatolia. Ugarit was destroyed at the beginning of the twelfth century B.C., and for a time its excavator, Claude Schaeffer, suspected that the Sea Peoples, of whom the Philistines were a part, had razed it on their march south towards Egypt. Schaeffer later determined that a major earthquake had destroyed Ugarit, implying that the Sea Peoples may have bypassed its ruins (Schaeffer 1983, 74-75). Because of Ugarit's prominent role in the Eastern Mediterranean as a trading center and the importance of Dagon there as a major fertility god, it is unlikely that Dagon would have remained unknown to anyone conducting trade in the region.

A great temple was dedicated to Baal at Ugarit, as well as a house for Baal's high priest, but just to the east of this was a still greater temple, one dedicated to Dagon (Curtis 1985, 36, 88, 91). Two dedicatory stelae in Dagon's name have been found there. Another site, Beth-shean in lower Galilee, also had a temple dedicated to Dagon (Douglas 1962, 287 with picture). The Philistines evidently had a garrison in Beth-shean, which is located in the Valley of Jezreel north of Philistia. This was the place where Saul's body would be hung after his death in battle with the Philistines. The temple there is in the correct time frame for our 1 Samuel 5 story, but we will leave Beth-shean for now and will return later.

Ashdod evidently had a temple dedicated to Dagon that was used until around 150 B.C., for 1 Maccabees 10:83-84 and 11:4 describe Jonathan Maccabeus going there and "burning down the temple of Dagon with all the fugitives who had crowded into it." Presently, however, in order to find a temple in Philistia, a "house of Dagon" comparable to the temple the Bible refers to in 1 Samuel 5, we must turn to the three successive temples at Tell Qasile (see pp. 113-18). It is the third of these temples that is the largest and that fits into the time frame of the Philistine capture of the ark. Again, this is the stratum X (ca. 1050-980 B.C.) temple, referred to in the archaeological literature as temple 131. Tell Qasile is not Ashdod, but viewing the temples at Qasile provides an excellent glimpse into the Philistine cult. T. Dothan believes that the architecture of the temples at Tell Qasile demonstrates links between the Aegean and the Philistine worlds. She mentions that at Qasile there is evidently a fusion of Canaanite temple styles and of temple styles from Mycenae in Greece, from shrines on the isle of Melos in the Cyclades, and from shrines at Kition on Cyprus (T. Dothan 1985, 170). Amihai Mazar, the excavator at Qasile, has elaborated on the nature of this fusion (1980, 61-73). He compares various architectural components of some of the temples of the Late Bronze Age in Palestine (among them the temples at Lachish and Beth-shean), with thirteenth-century temples of Mycenae and Cyprus. He also includes in his comparisons the twelfth-eleventh-century temples at Tell Qasile and on Cyprus. The architectural components that he surveys are 1) the entrances, 2) raised platforms within the temples, 3) benches, 4) pillars, 5) chambers in the backs of the temples, 6) the location and orientation of the temples, and 7) courtyards containing sacrificial altars.

Amihai Mazar suggests that the architectural tradition of the temples at Qasile differs from the West Semitic temple traditions of the Late Bronze and Iron Ages in Palestine. He believes, however, that a connection between the temples of Qasile and those of Cyprus and other Aegean sites is undeniable (1980, 68). He recognizes that this may be due in part to trade between the Near East and the Aegean during the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B.C., but adds that this resemblance could also be due to the coming of the Sea Peoples during the thirteenth/twelfth century B.C. Through the work of T. Dothan and Mazar, we are better able to understand the journey of the ark of the covenant from one Philistine shrine to the next. As the ark of the Lord was brought into Ashdod and carried into the temple, the people would probably have gathered in the temple courtyard as they would have gathered during cultic ceremonies. First Samuel 5 describes a contest between two gods, Dagon and the Lord God of Israel. It is true that the ark of the covenant had been captured, but does this mean that God had also been captured?

At Qasile, each of the three successive temples had a "holy of holies" where the god would have been venerated. Two of the three definitely had a stepped, raised platform, a bamah in the holy of holies (see diagram on p. 114). It is easy to picture Dagon falling off such a platform to a prostrate position before the ark of the Lord.