Philistines offered a golden mouse as a trespass-offering for the great stone upon which the ark was placed. We must therefore alter ועד into ועד: “And the great stone is witness (for ועד in this sense, see Gen 31:52) to this day in the field of Joshua the Bethshemeshite,” sc., of the fact just described.
Verses 19-21
Disposal of the Ark of God. - 1Sa 6:19. As the ark had brought evil upon the Philistines, so the inhabitants of Bethshemesh were also to be taught that they could not stand in their unholiness before the holy God: “And He (God) smote among the men of Bethshemesh, because they had looked at the ark of Jehovah, and smote among the people seventy men, fifty thousand men.” In this statement of numbers we are not only struck by the fact that the 70 stands before the 50,000, which is very unusual, but even more by the omission of the copula ו before the second number, which is altogether unparalleled. When, in addition to this, we notice that 50,000 men could not possibly live either in or round Bethshemesh, and that we cannot conceive of any extraordinary gathering having taken place out of the whole land, or even from the immediate neighbourhood; and also that the words אישׁ אלף חמשּׁים are wanting in several Hebrew MSS, and that Josephus, in his account of the occurrence, only speaks of seventy as having been killed (Ant. vi. 1, 4); we cannot come to any other conclusion than that the number 50,000 is neither correct nor genuine, but a gloss which has crept into the text through some oversight, though it is of great antiquity, since the number stood in the text employed by the Septuagint and Chaldee translators, who attempted to explain them in two different ways, but both extremely forced. Apart from this number, however, the verse does not contain anything either in form or substance that could furnish occasion for well-founded objections to its integrity. The repetition of ויּך simply resumes the thought that had been broken off by the parenthetical clause יי בּארון ראוּ כּי; and בּעם is only a general expression for שׁ בּאנשׁי ב. The stroke which fell upon the people of Bethshemesh is sufficiently accounted for in the words, “because they had looked,” etc. There is no necessity to understand these words, however, as many Rabbins do, as signifying “they looked into the ark,” i.e., opened it and looked in; for if this had been the meaning, the
