1 Samuel 4:12-22

The Voice

¹² A Benjaminite ran from the battlefield and arrived in Shiloh that same day. He was in mourning—his clothes torn and dust heaped on his head. ¹³ When he arrived, Eli was sitting in his place of honor next to the city gate waiting anxiously for the covenant chest of God. When the man came into the city and told his news, the entire city cried out in grief. ¹⁴ But Eli, who could not see the messenger’s clothing, wondered at the meaning of the cries.

The man hurried to Eli and told him what had happened. ¹⁵ Eli was by this time 98 years old and blind.

¹⁸ When he heard this news about the covenant chest of the True God, Eli fell backward from his seat beside the gate, broke his neck, and died, for he was very old and heavyset.

He was a leader over Israel for 40 years.

¹⁹ His daughter-in-law, Phinehas’s wife, was pregnant and close to the end of her term. When she heard the news—that the covenant chest of the True God had been captured by the Philistines and that her husband and father-in-law were both dead—she was bowed over by her labor pains. She gave birth, ²⁰ and as she was about to die, the midwives told her,

But she did not answer or seem to hear them. ²¹ She said only that the son should be called Ichabod, meaning, “Where has the glory gone?” For so it must have seemed to her with the loss of the covenant chest of God and the deaths of her husband and father-in-law.