Scripture Daily

Context No. 1134 of 4322 · 1 Samuel

Context · Reflection

1 Samuel 4:17-22: in context

17He who brought the news answered, “Israel has fled before the Philistines, and there has been also a great slaughter among the people. Your two sons also, Hophni and Phinehas, are dead, and God’s ark has been captured.” 18When he made mention of God’s ark, Eli fell from off his seat backward by the side of the gate; and his neck broke, and he died, for he was an old man and heavy. He had judged Israel forty years. 19His daughter-in-law, Phinehas’ wife, was with child, near to giving birth. When she heard the news that God’s ark was taken and that her father-in-law and her husband were dead, she bowed herself and gave birth; for her pains came on her. 20About the time of her death the women who stood by her said to her, “Don’t be afraid, for you have given birth to a son.” But she didn’t answer, neither did she regard it. 21She named the child Ichabod, saying, “The glory has departed from Israel!” because God’s ark was taken, and because of her father-in-law and her husband. 22She said, “The glory has departed from Israel; for God’s ark has been taken.”

The messenger delivers the full weight of the disaster: Israel has fled, there has been a great slaughter, Eli's two sons Hophni and Phinehas are dead, and the ark of God has been captured. At the word about the ark, old Eli falls backward off his seat, breaks his neck, and dies. His daughter-in-law, Phinehas's wife, heavily pregnant, goes into labor at the news; as she dies giving birth, the women tell her she has borne a son, but she does not respond except to name the boy Ichabod, saying, the glory has departed from Israel, for the ark of God has been captured.

The name she gives with her dying breath is the theme: Ichabod, the glory has departed. She does not name the child for her dead husband or her own life ebbing away; she names him for the deepest loss of all, that the ark, the sign of God's presence and glory among his people, has been carried off by the enemy. In the middle of every other grief, that is the one that undoes her. There is something searching in her sense of proportion. She has lost husband, father-in-law, and her own life, and yet the loss she names is the departure of God's glory; the presence of God among his people mattered to her more than any of it. Ichabod is the ache of a people who have lost the sense of God with them, and it is a real ache, one the church can still feel when God seems to have withdrawn, when the glory seems departed. But the story does not end there; the ark's capture will humiliate the false gods of the Philistines, and God will bring his presence back. Ichabod is a real grief, honestly named, and it is not the last word. The glory departs; the glory also returns.

Would the departure of God's glory grieve me more than any other loss, as it did this dying mother, and do I trust that even a season of Ichabod is not the last word with God?

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