Graham Hancock on religion: what the evidence says · JRE #2215
SUBJECT: RELIGION
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
It kills 50,000 Philistines in the city of Ashdod when they briefly capture it from the Israelites and make the mistake of treating it like a tourist object and they open the Ark of the Covenant and look inside and suddenly everybody in that city is dying and what they're dying of is cancerous tumors. This is described in the Old Testament.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
The account in 1 Samuel 5-6 conflates two distinct events. At Ashdod (1 Samuel 5) the Ark afflicts the Philistines with tumors, but the text gives no death toll and does not say 50,000 died there. The figure of about 50,000 comes from a later scene at Beth-shemesh (1 Samuel 6:19), where the victims are Israelites struck for looking into the Ark, not Philistines. That number is itself a well-known textual crux: the Hebrew reads awkwardly as fifty thousand and seventy, and many modern translations and scholars treat the fifty thousand as a scribal corruption and read only seventy. The affliction is described in Hebrew as tumors or swellings (ophalim), which scholars have interpreted as bubonic plague buboes, hemorrhoids, or tularemia, not as cancer.