And when he came, lo, Eli sat upon a seat by the wayside watching: for his heart trembled for the ark of God. And when the man came into the city, and told it, all the city cried out.
Eli sat upon a seat by the way-side. The aged priest, as a public magistrate, used, in dispensing justice, to seat himself daily in a spacious recess at the entrance gate of the city; and in his intense anxiety to learn the issue of the battle, he took up his usual place as the most convenient for meeting with passers-by. His seat was an official chair, similar to those of the ancient Egyptian judges, richly carved, superbly ornamented, high, and without a back. The calamities announced to Samuel as about to fall upon the family of Eli were now inflicted by the death of his two sons, and after his own death, by that of his daughter-in-law, whose infant son received a name that perpetuated the fallen glory of the Church and nation. The public disaster was completed by the capture of the ark, which made God, according to pagan nations, the captive of the victorious Philistines (cf. 2 Chronicles 25:14). The images of the pagan gods were in the portable shrines they carried with them to the battle: and although the ark had no image, yet God was believed peculiarly to inhabit it, so that the capture of the ark was regarded as the conquest of Him. Poor Eli! he was a good man, in spite of his unhappy weaknesses. So strongly were his sensibilities enlisted on the side of religion, that the news of the capture of the ark proved to him a knell of death; and yet his over-indulgence or sad neglect of his family-the main cause of all the evils that led to its fall-has been recorded as a beacon to warn all heads of Christian families against making shipwreck on the same rock.