Wednesday Bible Study: War, what is it good for?

All of a sudden, for no discernible reason, the Israelites are at war with the Philistines. The writer gives not the slightest indication of the reason for this. It ' s evidently not about territory, because the Israelites get clobbered but as far as we can tell the Philistines don ' t take a centimeter of ground, they just go home. They do capture the Ark of the Covenant but that didn ' t have anything to do with the reason for the war, it wasn ' t even there in the beginning. Maybe the Israelites started it in order to conquer them? But why?Anyway, this never happened, at least not as described. The Israelite population at the time wasn ' t nearly big enough to raise such a large army, or to endure such casualties. Furthermore, they had no central authority, no king, as even this tale affirms. Who would conscript the troops, who would command them? The Philistines at least were real. Archaeologists aren ' t sure where they came from, but they apparently arrived by sea, perhaps from the Aegean, and we do find them in the right place, on the coast. It ' s conceivable that  they overran some Israelite villages and that was the seed for this fanciful story. Anyway they become perennial foes in the ensuing narrative. I ' ll just give you a heads up that the following chapters become weird, bizarre, and very, very strange.4 1 And the word of Samuel came to all Israel.The Ark of God CapturedNow Israel went out to battle against the Philistines; they encamped at Eben...
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