3. send it back. The Hebrew meshalḥim is the same verb repeatedly used for Pharaoh’s sending Israel out of Egypt and thus sustains the network of allusions to the Exodus story. In Exodus, the Israelites, too, were told that they would not leave Egypt “empty-handed” but would take with them golden ornaments despoiled from the Egyptians.

there will be atonement for you. The Masoretic Text has “it will become known to you” (wenodʿa lakhem), but the reading of both the Qumran Samuel scroll and the Septuagint, wenikaper lakhem, “and it will be atoned for you,” makes far better sense.

5. you shall give glory to the God of Israel—perhaps He will lighten His hand. Once again, the writer harks back to the play of antonyms, kavod/kaved (glory/heavy) and qal (light, and in other contexts, worthless). Glory has been exiled from Israel with the capture of the Ark: now, with the restitution of the Ark together with an indemnity payment of golden images, glory will be restored. This process helps explain the insistence on the term “give back” associated with the guilt offering.

6. harden your hearts. This phrase is not only an explicit link with the Exodus story, but also continues the play on glory/heaviness because the literal Hebrew idiom is “make your heart heavy” (the verb kabed).

let the Hebrews go. The Hebrew says “let them go,” but the lack of antecedent for the pronoun would be confusing in English.

7. one new cart. It is to be an undefiled instrument made specifically for this ritual purpose.

that no yoke has touched. The cows, too, are uncompromised by use in ordinary labor, though the more important point is that they are entirely devoid of experience as draft animals, so that their ability to pull the cart straight to Beth-Shemesh would have to be a manifestation of God’s intervention, or of the intrinsic power of the Ark.

their calves back inside. This, of course, is the crux of the test: the milking cows will have to go against nature in plodding forward into Israelite territory with their calves behind them, shut up in the manger and waiting to be fed.

8. chest. The Hebrew ʾargaz appears only here. Postbiblical Hebrew consistently understood it as “chest,” though some scholars, on the basis of Semitic cognates, have argued for the meaning of “pouch.” It may be more plausible that precious objects would be placed in orderly fashion in a chest rather than piled up in a pouch.

11. the Ark of the LORD . . . and the chest and the golden mice and the images of their tumors. This whole scene has a certain grotesquely comic and incongruous effect: Israel’s most sacred cult object drawn in a cart by two cows with swollen udders, and alongside the Ark golden images of vermin and tumors.

12. straight on the way, on the way to Beth-Shemesh, on a single road they went . . . and they veered neither right nor left. Against the spareness and swift efficiency of normal Hebrew narrative style, the writer here lavishes synonyms and repetitions in order to highlight the perfect geometry of the miracle: against all conceivable distractions of biology or sheer animal unknowingness, the cows pursue an arrow-straight southeast trajectory from Ekron to Beth-Shemesh.

lowing as they went. This small but vivid descriptive detail is an even more striking exception to the stringent economy that governs biblical narrative. The last thing one would expect in a biblical story, where there is scant report of the gestures of the human actors, is a specification of sounds made by draft animals. The point, however, is that the milch cows—more driven by the Ark than hauling it—are going strenuously against nature: their udders full of milk for the calves they have been forced to leave behind, they mark with maternal lowing their distress over the journey they cannot resist. There is a peculiar resonance between this episode and Hannah’s story in chapter 1. There, too, a nursing mother does not want to be separated from her young, and, as we noted, special emphasis is placed on the physical acts of nursing and weaning. (The connection between the two episodes is underscored in the Hebrew, which literally calls the cows’ young their “sons,” not their calves.) In both stories, sacrifice is offered after mother and young are separated. Here, of course, the mothers become the objects of the sacrifice; in Hannah’s story, it is a bull, and, in symbolic rather than literal fashion, the son as well. Though all these correspondences seem too pointed to be coincidental, it is unclear whether they represent the literary artifact of the redactor, or an allusion by the author of the Samuel story to the Ark Narrative.

13. the men of Beth-Shemesh were harvesting. The Hebrew uses an ellipsis: “Beth-Shemesh were harvesting.”

14. the cows they offered up. One connection between the Ark Narrative, with its concern for sanctity, and the Samuel–Saul–David cycle, with its preoccupation with politics, is a kind of brooding sense of the cruel price exacted for dedication to the higher cause. The milch cows are burned on the improvised altar; Hannah and her son, Samuel, must be separated in his dedication to the sanctuary; and later both Saul and David will pay terrible costs in their personal lives for their adhesion to power.

17. And these are the golden tumors. The introductory formula suggests a kind of ritual or epic catalogue, so that we know there is in fact one golden image corresponding to each of the five Philistine towns, just as the soothsayers had stipulated.

18. the golden mice were the number of all the Philistine towns. This appears to contradict the explicit directions in verse 4, that there should be exactly five golden mice. Kimchi resolves the discrepancy by proposing that, in the event, as added insurance for all the villages (since the mice had overrun the fields), the Philistines went beyond their instructions and fashioned multiple images of the mice.

And the great stone. The Masoretic Text reads ʾavel (brook or meadow) instead of ʾeven (stone), but both the Septuagint and the Qumran scroll have the latter reading. The Masoretic Text also has “and to” (weʿad) preceding this word, but that is probably an inadvertent scribal duplication of the preposition that occurs twice before in the verse.

19. fifty thousand men. This figure makes no sense because Beth-Shemesh was a small agricultural village. It appears in all the ancient versions, but Josephus seems to have possessed a text in which only the much more plausible number seventy appeared. The fact that the Hebrew has no indication of “and” between “seventy” and “fifty thousand” is further evidence that the latter number is an intrusion in the text.

a great blow. As in 4:8, the Hebrew for “blow” can also mean “plague.” If there is a historical kernel to this whole story, an epidemic ravaging the Philistines could have easily spread to the bordering Israelites, perhaps even through the agency of the cart and the Ark.

20. Who can stand before this holy LORD God. Throughout the Ark Narrative, including what may be its epilogue in 2 Samuel 7, runs an archaic sense of God’s sacred objects as material precipitates of an awesome and dangerous power. This notion led Leonhard Rost, one of the earliest scholars to argue for an entirely distinct Ark Narrative, to assume that the author must have been a priest, although that is hardly an inevitable inference, as these attitudes were widely held in ancient Near Eastern cultures. The phrase “stand before” means idiomatically “to serve.”

will He go up. The Hebrew could equally be construed as “will it go up,” referring to the Ark. From the point of view of the terrified speakers, it may amount to the same thing.

21. And they sent messengers to the inhabitants of Kiriath-Jearim. There seems to be no question of sending the Ark back to Shiloh, which has led to the scholarly inference that the Shiloh sanctuary was destroyed in the wake of the defeat at Aphek. The destruction of Shiloh is in fact attested in other sources.