1 Samuel 7:1-2
The Voice
7 The people of Kiriath-jearim did as they were asked. They collected the chest of the Eternal One and brought it up the hill to the house of Abinadab. They performed sacred rituals to set apart his son Eleazar to be in charge of caring for the chest of the Eternal.
This section about the chest of the covenant shows God’s power in the world when all the nations around Israel believe in their own gods. Hebrew literature often talks about the Lord as the greatest of all gods, and this passage shows Him using the covenant chest to declare His preeminence. He embarrasses another god in his own temple, brings death and destruction on those around Him (as He did with the plagues of Egypt), and inflicts something like the bubonic plague, which would devastate Europe in the Middle Ages, on the Philistines. God is powerful and must be treated with the greatest of reverence. Even the people of God are happy to see the chest of the covenant move on, because it is too powerful for sinful human beings to live close to with comfort.
2 Time passed, 20 years or so, from the time that the covenant chest was taken to Kiriath-jearim, and all the people of Israel began to grieve over their separation from the Eternal One.
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