As recorded in 1 Samuel, when the Israelites went up against the Phillistines in battle they carried with them the “Ark of the Covenant.” This wooden box, covered in gold, contained the tablets on which the commandments of God were written, and if the letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament is correct, also Aaron’s rod and a pot of manna.
Apparently the Israelites believed if they carried this into the battle with them it would save them from the hands of their enemies.
Imagine this scene: the box is carried away on two poles from between two cherubim. The priests (Hophni and Phinehas) who tended it watch as it is carted off.
The space above this Ark was considered to be the “seat” of God. The Shekinah. The glory of the divine presence. So the Phillistines, who know at least some of the traditions of Israel, tremble at the presence of the Ark, because “God is now in the camp.”
So the Phillistines tell themselves the story that Israel traditionally tells themselves, but now inverted. “These are the gods who smote the Egyptians with every kind of plague in the wilderness. Strengthen yourselves and be men, O Philistines, lest you become enslaved to the Hebrews as they were enslaved to you; be men and fight.”
The Phillistines do win the battle and take the ark. The two priests Hophni and Phinehas die (from grief, or because their power was in the ark, who knows). And at the loss of the ark, Phinehas’s wife upon hearing the news gives birth to the child she carried, dying in the process. But before she dies, she hears the news that she has born a son, and she gives the son a name, Ai Kavod (which in English we render Ichabod).
Now here’s where things get interesting. Ichabod may mean “no glory.” As in “there is no glory in Israel because we lost the ark.” But the “I” at the beginning of Ichabod can also mean “where,” as in “where is the glory?” And it can further be understood as a simple expression of sorrow or grief. “Alas.” Which is how Wil Gafney renders it in the Women’s Lectionary translation:
She named the child “Ai Kavod,” Ichabod, meaning, “Woe [Ai]! The glory [Kavod] has departed from Israel,” because the ark of God had been captured and because of her father-in-law and her husband. She said, “The glory has departed from Israel, for the ark of God has been taken.”
I think many of us can resonate with the extreme vulnerability contained in this brief story. A people bring out that which carries their glory and it is stolen from them. They may be guilty of having misappropriated the glory for desperate purposes, yet it is also true their enemies stole it.
I spend a lot of time thinking about glory, what it is, what it manifests, how we might express or consider it. There’s a lot of seeking after glory in our world, often seeking after a kind of glory foreign to the the true “glory of God.”
You don’t have to read very far in Scripture to see how glory, the divine presence, is “made perfect in weakness,” “hides itself,” is most manifest in absence.
It is not the ark itself but the empty space above the ark that contains it: not the two cherubim, but the space between. Not the cloud exactly, but the space where the cloud leads.
Glory is firmly elusive. Just go to worship and try to force the presence of God and you’ll see what I mean.
Go to worship and simply rest and expect nothing, and perhaps, just perhaps… glory.
And all of that anticipation, all the visions of glory, still come in the midst of the very reality of nations at war, women lost in childbirth, motherless children, and precious things lost never to be found.
Ichabod. Woe glory.