1 Samuel 4:10 - Ellicott's Commentary On The Whole Bible

And Israel was smitten. — The result was strictly in accordance with those immutable laws which have ever guided the connection of Israel and their God-Friend. As long as they clave to the invisible Preserver, and served Him with their whole heart and soul, and kept themselves pure from the pollution of the idol nations around them, so long was He in their midst, so long would they be invincible; but if, as now, they chose to revel in the impure joys, and to delight themselves in the selfish, shameless lives of the idolatrous world around them, and only carried the Ark on their shoulders, with no memory of Him whom the mercy-seat and the overshadowing cherubim of that Ark symbolised, in their hearts, then — to use the solemn words of the hymn of Asaph — “Then God was wroth, and greatly abhorred Israel, and forsook the tabernacle of Shiloh, and delivered his strength into captivity, and his glory into the enemy’s hand.” (See Psalms 78:59-61, where the crushing defeat of Aphek and the signal victory of the Philistines is recounted in detail.)