The chapter, relatively brief and uncomplicated, nonetheless advances our understanding of the religious status of the Jewish people (and the surrounding nations) at that time. The Aron, the Ark of the Covenant (as Indiana Jones might say), had been taken captive by the Plishtim in the previous chapter. Now, Plishtim had to put it somewhere. They first sent it to Ashdod, where it was placed in the House of Dagon, an idol. The next morning, they found the idol falling down, facing the Aron. They righted it, and returned it to its place. The next morning, they once again found it falling down, this time with its head and hands cut off, and resting on the doorstep.

In addition to these attacks on Dagon, the Aron brought (or, more properly said, Hashem wrought) hemorrhoids on the people of Ashdod, which killed many of them and were extremely painful for the others. After some period of time (unspecified by the Nach, but apparently more than a day or two), the Ashdodites complained about the Aron in their midst, and called a meeting of the leaders of Plishtim. They decided to send the Aron to Gat, where hemorrhoids hit once again.

The people of Gat sent the Aron to Eqron, who immediately complained about its arrival, and were also hit with hemorrhoids, some so bad that they died. The first verse of the next chapter says that the Aron was in the fields of Plishtim for seven months, which seems to mean that all of this took seven months. Some commentators, however, suggest that after these events, the Plishtim simply abandoned the Aron in a field, and that nonetheless God struck them with hemorrhoids (until they sent the Aron back to Israel).

THE ARON IN THE HOUSE OF DAGON

This entire chapter occurs in the land of Plishtim, with no Jewish input that we can see (Ralbag suggests that Shmuel was the prophet in charge of these events, but it would seem to me that if that were true, that we would have seen it in the text). Its being recorded in the navi, then, means that it was a series of events that HaKadosh Barukh Hu wanted us to know about, for reasons we will need to discuss. First, let us review the events more carefully.

When the Ashdodites place the Aron in the house of their idol-worship, there is a debate in the Midrash Shmuel as to their motives. R. Yohanan is quoted as saying that it was a sign of respect, since both were (in their view) gods. Resh Lakish questions R. Yohanan’s position, asking why they would get punished as they did if those were their motvies. He instead suggests that it was a sign of conquest, placing the defeated god under the control of the victorious one.

In trying to understand how R. Yohanan would have answered Resh Lakish’s challenge (the Midrash does not record any response by R. Yohanan), I believe we might put the whole episode in the light it deserves. Resh Lakish apparently assumes that Hashem struck the Ashdodites with hemorrhoids for their having mistreated the Aron; in that view, the sin was the mistreatment rather than anything else.

That view, obviously, does not work for R. Yohanan, since he does not think that the Plishtim had mistreated the Aron in any way. Rather, we are forced to conclude that Hashem wanted to teach them a lesson that was not connected to specifically how they treated the Aron. That lesson, as evidenced by what Hashem does before inflicting hemorrhoids upon them, was the error in the comparison they drew between Dagon and Hashem.

THE LESSON OF DAGON

Remember that in R. Yohanan’s view, Plishtim thought they were showing respect for the Aron by placing it with Dagon. What they are supposed to be learning is that Dagon is in no way a real power, certainly not as compared to Hashem. The first morning, Dagon’s having been knocked down was a gentle way to make the point. When they did not catch it, Dagon’s head and hands—presumably the way he expressed his power, in the Plishtim’s view—were cut off, and moved away from the statue to the doorstep, an event that was again meant to show them that Dagon had no power before God. Instead, the priests of Dagon simply avoided the doorstep from then on.

Another interesting debate between R. Yohanan and Resh Lakish (Avodah Zarah 41b), this one with halakhic ramifications, surrounds their interpretation of the Ashdodites’ reaction to the event. R. Yohanan was of the opinion that an avodah zarah that had broken on its own (without a non-Jew breaking it, which is a sign of bittul, of nullifying the power of the idol) was still prohibited; Resh Lakish ruled that it was permitted, since the owners would presumably no longer use it as an idol once it was broken. R. Yohanan pointed to this incident as proof, since they seem to still have seen Dagon as an idol worth worshiping, but Resh Lakish claims that after this they worshiped the doorstep where Dagon’s head and hands had been found.

For R. Yohanan, the power of the avodah zarah does not seem to be the only factor in the non-Jews’ worshiping it. Thus, even after Dagon was clearly defeated by the Aron, he could envision the Plishtim as believing in it and worshiping it (that explains why they would have accorded honor to the Aron as a god even after it was "defeated"). Resh Lakish, who saw the housing of the Aron with Dagon as a sign of victory, seems to have thought that Plishtim’s subservience to a particular avodah zarah depended completely on its proven power.

Since we rule according to R. Yohanan (on the narrow halakhic question of whether an idol that breaks on its own, or accidentally, is no longer a prohibited item), we are left to assume that idol worshippers did not focus solely on the current victory of their idol. Rather, they lived in a world where there was great competition among the various powers that controlled the world. To paraphrase the NFL, on any given Sunday, in their view, any given idol could defeat any other. Having beaten the Aron, they still accorded it the respect due (in their warped world) a defeated god. Seeing Dagon defeated in turn, they continued to worship it as "their" god.

HASHEM IS GOD AND NO OTHER

All of which means that Plishtim’s error lay in their equating anything with Hashem (and His representative, the Aron) in any way. Had they understood the problem in placing the Aron in the House of Dagon, they could have avoided the unpleasant consequences thereafter.

Those consequences—hemorrhoids—might also be connected to what the Plishtim needed to be learning. If they worshiped those idols that provided them with external power, they may have assumed that idols only operated in a public way. A plague that attacks their most private recesses—and in the Midrash, that involved rats eating out their insides, a starker image of the attack they underwent—would also stress God’s power over all areas of life. Rather than an external god, an idol that has iffy powers of war, etc., Hashem was trying to show them a true God, Creator of Heaven and Earth, Omnipotent, and like no other god they knew.

My venturing a guess as to why Hashem chose hemorrhoids to plague the Plishtim assumes (an assumption I would have thought was obvious, but have found out is not) that Hashem operates in a middah ke-neged middah fashion, that punishments He administers correspond in some identifiable way to the negative act that caused that punishment. Without ever leading us to assume that we can confidently state the motives/reasons behind God’s actions, the principle of middah ke-neged middah leaves us some room to investigate such motives. In this case, the striking at the Plishtim’s innards and private parts seems related to their view of the powers of the Deity (or, in their terms, of deities).

THE STUBBORNNESS OF IDOLATRY

They don’t get it; after some period of time suffering through these hemorrhoids, they gather the other Plishtim to complain about the presence of the Aron in their midst, and the Aron gets sent to Gat. That decision shows that the Plishtim have not caught the point at all; they assume that the plagues striking the people of Ashdod were for some reason other than the presence of the Aron (and that, even after the incidents with Dagon—when people’s minds are made up, it is not easy to change them).

When the same occurs in Gat, they send the Aron to Eqron. Here, already, some progress has been made in that the people of Eqron immediately complain about the Aron’s arrival, out of fear of what God is going to do to them. They don’t however, take any meaningful action (other than, perhaps, putting the Aron in a field out of town, with no discernible effect on their fate); eventually, they call another meeting of the officers of Plishtim, which will lead (in the next chapter) to the Aron’s return. Even there, however (as we will see), the Plishtim are not yet fully convinced that this comes from God.

Seeing the Plishtim’s ability to ignore the evidence of their troubles stemming from the presence of the Aron offers us a lesson in people’s dedication to their own world-view. Plishtim, at great personal cost, continued to adhere to a picture of the world in which idols operated, sometimes winning and sometimes losing, even when offered painful and incontrovertible evidence of a single Higher Power running the world. That steadfastness of belief in a false worldview helps us understand why the Jews also have so much trouble ridding themselves of idol-worship, of black magic, and inculcating the consistent belief that listening to God is the only way Jews will secure safety and victory. As we follow Shmuel, Shaul, and David, these themes will continue to reverberate in the book. This chapter, although not happening to Jews, helps us see the depth of the challenge that was facing the Jewish people’s leaders at this time. Shabbat Shalom.