And the Philistines fought, and Israel was smitten, and they fled every man into his tent: and there was a very great slaughter; for there fell of Israel thirty thousand footmen.
There fell of Israel thirty thousand footmen. The slaughter in ancient warfare seems, from the records of profane as well as sacred history, to have been often immensely greater than in modern times, since the introduction of gunpowder and artillery. And in the nature of the case it must have been, when the soldiers of opposing armies met in close combat, man engaged in mortal strife with man; and when the weapons, too, were tipped with poison, the result could not be otherwise than a fearful carnage. The great numbers, then, of the Israelites who are recorded in this passage, as well as in similar ones, to have fallen an battle, and which have called forth the sneers of the infidels as gross exaggerations, are, from the character of the context, perfectly credible; and the statements of the sacred historian are not only in the present instance corroborated by the testimony of Josephus, but harmonize with the recital of Herodotus and other historians, as to the vast mortality that frequently marked the battles of antiquity.