Charles Ellicott Commentary 1 Samuel 6:19

"And he smote of the men of Beth-shemesh, because they had looked into the ark of Jehovah, he smote of the people seventy men, [and] fifty thousand men; and the people mourned, because Jehovah had smitten the people with a great slaughter." — 1 Samuel 6:19 (ASV)

They had looked into the ark. — Some commentators consider that the words here should be rendered, “because they had looked at the Ark” with a foolish, irreverent staring, which dishonored the holiness of the sacred mercy-seat; but it is far better to preserve the rendering of our English Version, which is also the favorite Rabbinical explanation of the original.

It seems probable that the chief men of the city, most of whom were priests and Levites, after the festive rejoicings that accompanied the sacrificial feast celebrating the Ark’s joyful return, became heated with wine and lost all sense of reverence. They then determined to use this opportunity to gaze into that sacred chest, about which they had heard so much. No profane eye in Israel had ever peered into it since the golden Cover—on which the glory of the Eternal loved to rest—had sealed up the sacred treasures in the wilderness. Perhaps they wished to see those gray Sinai tablets on which the finger of God had traced His ten solemn commandments; perhaps they excused themselves by a desire to learn if the Philistines had violated the secrets of the holy chest.

Even he smote of the people fifty thousand and threescore and ten men. — Here it is perfectly clear that the present Hebrew text, which the English Version literally translates, is corrupt. The system of writing letters for numbers, as we have seen, has frequently caused great discrepancies in the various versions, etc. Here, the arrangement of the letters that express this enormous number is quite unusual and, taken by itself, would be sufficient to raise serious doubts about the accuracy of this text.

The number of those stricken, 50,070, is simply inconceivable. Beth-shemesh was never a large or important place; there were, in fact, no great cities in Israel. The population was always scattered, with people generally living on their farms. Dean Payne Smith computes the population of Jerusalem in its best days as under 70,000. The various versions (Septuagint, Chaldee, etc.) vary in their translation of these astounding figures.

Josephus, in his Antiquities 6.1.4, states in his account of this event that seventy people were struck down. This is probably the correct number.

A strange reading, which the Septuagint inserts here, deserves to be quoted; it is another proof of the uncertainty of the text at the close of this sixth chapter: “And the children of Jechoniah among the Beth-shemites were not pleased with the men of Beth-shemesh because they saw the Ark, and he smote them, etc.” Erdmann, in Lange, is inclined to believe the Septuagint Version represents the true text, and thus comments on it: “The reason for the sudden death of the seventy of the race of Jechoniah is their unsympathetic and, therefore, unholy attitude towards the symbols of God’s presence among His people. This attitude showed a mind wholly estranged from the living God—a symptom of the religious and moral degeneracy that had spread among the people, even though piety was still to be found.”