1 Samuel 4:8 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

Who shall deliver us, &c. They had fought with men before; but now they thought they should have to fight with God, before whom none could stand. Here we see their unreasonableness and folly. They secretly confess the Lord to be greater than their gods, and yet presume to oppose him! That smote the Egyptians in the wilderness They seem to have had but a very imperfect and incorrect knowledge of the Israelitish affairs, and to have supposed that all those plagues which are recorded in their history had fallen on the Egyptians while the Israelites were in the wilderness, where they were when the last of these plagues befell them, and they were drowned in the Red sea. But it is not strange that these heathen should mistake some circumstances relating to the affairs of another people, with whom they had no friendly intercourse, but were in a state of almost continual hostility, especially as some hundreds of years had now elapsed since these events had taken place.