1 Samuel7chapter 7

1 Samuel 7:1-2

The ark rests at Kirjath-jearim for twenty years, in the house of a private man rather than a priest's household, with his son Eleazar set apart to keep it. The men of Beth-shemesh had just been struck down for looking into the ark at the close of chapter six, and the caution shown here, a hill town, a sanctified keeper, no public procession, reads as Israel learning that lesson. The twenty years cover most of Samuel's rise from child to judge, and the house of Israel spends them lamenting after the Lord rather than moving to bring the ark home.

1 Samuel 7:3-4

Samuel's charge is the first recorded word to reach all Israel since the ark's capture, and it names the actual idols kept in Israelite houses, Baalim and Ashtaroth, the storm god and the fertility goddess of Canaan. Returning unto the Lord with all your hearts is put before any promise of deliverance, and the people obey at verse four before Samuel calls the assembly at Mizpeh. The order of the chapter argues that reform is the ground of deliverance, not deliverance the reward for asking.

1 Samuel 7:5-6

Mizpeh becomes the site of national repentance: water drawn and poured out before the Lord, a fast kept, and the confession spoken aloud, We have sinned against the Lord. The older writers read the poured water as a picture of the heart emptied out before God, whether or not it also marked a fixed rite of the day. Samuel judges Israel at Mizpeh in the same verse as the confession, so the judge's office and the intercessor's task meet in one man.

1 Samuel 7:7-9

The Philistines march the moment Israel gathers, reading the assembly as a threat rather than the repentance it is, and Israel answers with fear rather than the presumption of chapter four. There the elders sent for the ark itself to force a victory and lost it; here the people ask Samuel only to cry unto the Lord, and Samuel offers a lamb and prays rather than carrying any object into the field. The chapter's quiet argument is that obedience without the ark does what taking the ark by presumption could not.

1 Samuel 7:10-11

The battle is decided before Israel strikes a blow: thunder from the Lord discomfits the Philistines while Samuel is still offering the burnt offering. The same weapon turns other battles in Scripture, hailstones at Gibeon in Joshua ten and the stars fighting against Sisera in Judges five, and here it answers a lamb and a prayer rather than an army drawn up for war. Israel's pursuit to Beth-car finishes what God had already broken.

1 Samuel 7:12

The name Eben-ezer, stone of help, has already marked two places earlier in the narrative, the Israelite camp before the ark was lost in chapter four and the Philistine city of Ashdod in chapter five, both mentioned before this stone is ever set up. The narrator is either naming those places ahead of time by the name this stone will carry, or the ground already bore the name for some other reason; either reading leaves the stone raised here fixing it to this deliverance for good. Hitherto looks back across the whole twenty years, the loss at Aphek, the ark's exile, and the reform just completed, and calls all of it help.

1 Samuel 7:13-14

the hand of the Lord was against the Philistines all the days of Samuel: The cities taken from Israel are restored as far as Gath, the same town Goliath will come from at 17:4, and Israel is said to have peace also with the Amorites, so this was not a single-front war. Samuel's lifetime, not one battle, is named as the span of the rest that follows, and that rest is the season in which Israel will ask for a king at 8:5.

1 Samuel 7:15-17

Samuel judged Israel all the days of his life: This closes the line the book of Judges left open, there was no king in Israel in that book's own refrain, and Samuel is named here as the last man to judge Israel by that older office before a king is asked for. His circuit runs Bethel, Gilgal and Mizpeh with Ramah as his home, where he also builds an altar, so the closing picture of the judge is a man who worships as well as rules. The office does not end because it failed but because chapter eight will ask Israel's leader for something else.