The Philistines take the Arc – The Lord works in mysterious ways

This is the way it went down? Really?

It just so happened that after Moses but before King David the Hebrews lived near the Philistines. Well, the Hebrews figured they should just go ahead and kill all the Philistines and take their stuff. After all, it had worked very well for them in the past. So they all line up and have this big battle where the Philistines kick the piss out of the Hebrews, killing several thousand of them.

The Hebrews weren’t used to losing so this kinda threw them for a loop, but as luck would have it, some of the Hebrew leaders had seen Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Arc. They remembered how those German guys said the Arc would make any army who possessed it invincible. In another stroke of luck, they actually had the arc. So they sent some people to fetch the thing. When it arrived the Hebrew army got super excited because they were sure they could win by using the Arc. The Philistines had seen the film too, so they were genuinely concerned. These Philistines weren’t the kind to run away from a fight though, so they engaged the Hebrews again.

Well, it turns out the Arc wasn’t really all that, so the Philistines were still able to massacre the invading Hebrews; taking out another 30 thousand. They also captured the Arc and took it to the temple of their god, Dagon. Even though the Jehovah couldn’t be bothered to help his chosen people win the fight against the Philistines, he didn’t like them having the Arc, so with all his Godly might, he made the statue of Dagon fall over sometime during the night. That’s right, God made a statue fall down while nobody was looking.

The Philistines thought it was weird their statue had fallen over, so they put it back up. God wasn’t about to let them get away with that, so he made the statue fall over AGAIN the next night. This time though, the statue’s hands and head broke off. Good thing the Philistine priests were incredibly superstitious because they figured if their statue had fallen twice it must be bad news. They blamed the falls on the Arc and sent it away to a different Philistine city. When the arc got there everybody got sick. After this the Philistines figured the Arc wasn’t worth the trouble if it made statues fall down and made people sick, so they sent it to the Hebrew city of Beth-shemite.

The Hebrews in Beth-shemite hadn’t seen Raiders of the Lost Arc because they couldn’t afford a surround sound upgrade for their theater and Lucas Arts was only allowing screenings in THX theaters. Therefore they didn’t know how the movie ended. In any case, they were super excited to see the Arc and opened it to have a look inside.

For those of you who have not seem Raiders of the Lost Arc, let me explain what happens when you open the thing. First you see that there’s nothing in there but dust, then strange lights appear and a big wind comes out of nowhere. Then demonic looking creatures start flying through the air killing everyone that isn’t smart enough to close their eyes and at least one person has their face melted off. If you believe the biblical account, 50,070 men died that way.

I think this is sad because it shows that God only punishes the Philistines for messing with the Arc by making some dumb statue fall down, but he’s perfectly happy to melt the faces off his Hebrew buddies.

Ref: 1 Samuel 4-6