1 Samuel 6:5

Wherefore ye shall make images of your emerods,.... Which some take to be images of the five cities; others of a man at large with the disease in his back parts; others of that part of the body of a

Wherefore ye shall make images of your emerods, and images of your mice that mar the land; and ye shall give glory unto the God of Israel: peradventure he will lighten his hand from off you, and from

Glory unto the God of Israel; the glory of his power in conquering you, who seemed and pretended to have conquered him; of his justice in punishing you; and of his goodness if he shall relieve you. From off your gods they so speak, either because not only Dagon, but their other gods also, were thrown down by the ark, though that be not related; or because the plural number in that case was commonly used for the singular.

1 Samuel 6:5 Wherefore ye shall make images of your emerods, and images of your mice that mar the land; and ye shall give glory unto the God of Israel: peradventure he will lighten his hand from off you, and from off your gods, and from off your land.Ver. 5. Wherefore ye shall make images of your emerods.] Similitudines anorum vestrorum, so the Vulgate rendereth it. And indeed they could not well make the images of their emerods, without making images of their secret parts, where they brake out; which could not but redound to their great shame and perpetual ignominy. And images of your mice that mar the land.] Pliny out of Varro telleth us of a town in Spain undermined and overturned by conies: of another in Thessaly, by moles: a third in France, by frogs: a fourth in Africa, by locusts: and a fifth in Guarus marred by mice. He writeth also, that the inhabitants of Troas were driven out of their town by mice. And no longer since than in the year of grace 1581, in the county of Essex, an army of mice so overran the marshes in Dengey-hundred, near unto Southminster, that they ate the grass to the very roots; and so tainted the same with their venomous teeth, that a great murrain fell upon the cattle which grazed thereon. Lib. viii. cap. 29. Lib. x. cap. 68. Speed, in Essex.

(5) Images of your mice.—This is the first mention of the plague of “mice” in the Hebrew text. The Greek Version had (see above) carefully appended to the description of the bodily disease the account of this scourge which devastated the land of Philistia. In these warm countries which border the Mediterranean vast quantities of these mice from time to time seem to have appeared and devoured the crops. Aristotle and Pliny both mention their devastations. In Egypt this visitation was so dreaded that the mouse seems to have been the hieroglyphic for destruction. The curse then weighed heavily in Philistia, both upon man and the land.

Verse 5. He will lighten his hand from off you] The whole land was afflicted; the ground was marred by the mice; the common people and the lords afflicted by the haemorrhoids, and their gods broken in pieces.

5. images of your mice that mar the land] The Heb. text now first definitely speaks of the plague of mice, which was alluded to in ch. 1 Samuel 5:6. The Sept. as we have seen mentions it in 1 Samuel 5:6 and 1 Samuel 6:1. The extraordinary voracity of field-mice, and the incredible rate at which they multiply, are noticed by many ancient writers on Natural History. Aristotle, in his History of Animals (VI. 37) says, “In many places mice are wont to appear in the fields in such unspeakable numbers, that scarce anything is left of the whole crop. So rapidly do they consume the corn, that in some cases small farmers have observed their crops ripe and ready for the sickle on one day, and coming the next with the reapers, have found them entirely devoured.” In 1848, it is said, the coffee crop in Ceylon was entirely destroyed by mice. These images are not to be compared with the talismans or amulets made by magicians and astrologers in later times to effect cures or avert evils, as is done by Kitto, who gives many examples of such charms (Bible Illustrations, p. 84): nor with the thank-offerings for recovery in the form of the injured members which may be seen suspended at the altars of Roman Catholic churches in Switzerland and Italy at the present day: but with “a custom which according to the traveller Tavernier has prevailed in India from time immemorial, that when a pilgrim takes a journey to a pagoda to be cured of a disease, he offers to the idol a present, either in gold, silver, or copper, according to his ability, of the shape of the diseased or injured member. Such a present passes as a practical acknowledgment that the god has inflicted the suffering or evil.” Thus in the present case the Philistines offered “representations of the instruments of their chastisements” as an acknowledgment that the plagues of boils and mice were inflicted by the God of Israel, and were not “a chance.” Thereby they would “give glory to the God of Israel.” Cp. Revelation 16:9. The question has been raised, whether there was a plague of mice at all. The mouse was the Egyptian symbol of destruction, and the two kinds of images were, it is said, emblematic of the same thing, the pestilence. The words that mar the land may mean no more than “mice such as are commonly found in the country.” The theory is more ingenious than probable. The natural inference from the text certainly is that there was a plague of mice, and it is quite in accordance with the practice of Hebrew writers that in a condensed narrative like the present, the fact of the desolation of the country should be barely mentioned in ch. 1 Samuel 5:6; and the cause of it stated incidentally afterwards. We should compare (though with caution) the Brazen Serpent (Numbers 21:8).

5. Images of your mice that mar the land — This plague is here for the first time distinctly mentioned, though something of the kind is implied, 1 Samuel 5:6, where the coasts of Ashdod are said to have been smitten.