The Philistines never failed to make reprisals after each raid, and the Benjamites were no match for their heavily armed battalions; but the labyrinth of ravines and narrow gorges into which the Philistines had to penetrate to meet their enemy was a favourable region for guerilla warfare, in which they were no match for their opponents.  Peace was never of long duration on this ill-defined borderland, and neither intercourse between one village and another, alliances, nor intermarriage between the two peoples had the effect of interrupting hostilities; even when a truce was made at one locality, the feud would be kept up at other points of contact.  All details of this conflict have been lost, and we merely know that it terminated in the defeat of the house of Joseph, a number of whom were enslaved.  The ancient sanctuary of Shiloh still continued to be the sacred town of the Hebrews, as it had been under the Canaanites, and the people of Ephraim kept there the ark of Jahveh-Sabaoth, “the Lord of Hosts."* It was a chest of wood, similar in shape to the shrine which surmounted the sacred barks of the Egyptian divinities, but instead of a prophesying statue, it contained two stones on which, according to the belief of a later age, the law had been engraved.** Yearly festivals were celebrated before it, and it was consulted as an oracle by all the Israelites.  Eli, the priest to whose care it was at this time consigned, had earned universal respect by the austerity of his life and by his skill in interpreting the divine oracles.***

* At the very opening of the First Book of Samuel (i. 3), Shiloh is mentioned as being the sanctuary of Jahveh- Sabaoth, Jahveh the Lord of hosts.  The tradition preserved in Josh, xviii. 1, removes the date of its establishment as far back as the earliest times of the Israelite conquest.

     ** The idea that the Tables of the Law were enclosed in the
     Ark is frequently expressed in Exodus and in subsequent
     books of the Hexateuch.

*** The history of Eli extends over chaps, i.-iv. of the First Book of Samuel; it is incorporated with that of Samuel, and treats only of the events which accompanied the destruction of the sanctuary of Shiloh by the Philistines.

His two sons, on the contrary, took advantage of his extreme age to annoy those who came up to worship, and they were even accused of improper behaviour towards the women who “served at the door of” the tabernacle.  They appropriated to themselves a larger portion of the victims than they were entitled to, extracting from the caldron the meat offerings of the faithful after the sacrifice was over by means of flesh-hooks.  Their misdeeds were such, that “men abhorred the offering of the Lord,” and yet the reverence for the ark was so great in the minds of the people, that they continued to have recourse to it on every occasion of national danger.* The people