Charles Ellicott Commentary 1 Samuel 4:3

"And when the people were come into the camp, the elders of Israel said, Wherefore hath Jehovah smitten us to-day before the Philistines? Let us fetch the ark of the covenant of Jehovah out of Shiloh unto us, that it may come among us, and save us out of the hand of our enemies." — 1 Samuel 4:3 (ASV)

Why has the Lord smitten us? —The people and the elders who, as we have seen above, had undertaken the war of liberty at the instigation of the young man of God, amazed at their defeat, were puzzled to understand why God was evidently not among them; they showed by their next procedure how thoroughly they had gone astray from the old pure religion.

Let us fetch the ark of the covenant. —Whether or not Samuel acquiesced in this fatal proposition we have no information. It evidently did not emanate from him. But, as we are expressly told, from the “elders of the people.” Probably the lesson of the first defeat had deeply impressed him, and he saw that a thorough reformation throughout the land was needed before the invisible King would again be present among the people.

It may save us. —It was a curious delusion, this baseless hope of the elders, that the unseen God was inseparably connected with that strange and beautiful symbol of His presence, with that coffer of perishable wood and metal overshadowed by the lifeless golden angels carved on the shining seat which closed this sacred Ark—that glittering mercy seat, as it was called, around which so many hallowed memories of the glory vision had gathered.

Far on in the people’s story, one of the greatest of Samuel’s successors, Jeremiah, presses home the same truth the people were so slow in learning, when he passionately urges his Israel, “Trust ye not in lying words, saying The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord are these. For if ye thoroughly amend your ways and your doings, then will I cause you to dwell in this place, in the land that I gave to your fathers, for ever and ever” (Jeremiah 7:4–5; Jeremiah 7:7).

Wordsworth here, with great force, thus writes: “Probably David remembered this history when, with a clearer faith, he refused to allow the Ark to be carried with him in his retreat before Absalom out of Jerusalem; and even when the priests had brought it forth, he commanded them to carry it back to its place, saying, ‘If I shall find favour in the eyes of the Lord, He will bring me again, and show me both it and His habitation’ (2 Samuel 15:25).

“David, without the Ark visibly present, but with the unseen help of Him who was enthroned on the mercy-seat, triumphed, and was restored to Jerusalem; but Israel, with the Ark visibly present, but without the blessing of Him whose throne the Ark was, fell before their enemies, and were deprived of the sacred symbol, which was taken by the Philistines.”