How long did the ark stay at Abinadab’s house?

Hard question · Israel’s history: Joshua to Esther · raised by 1 of the lists sceptics circulate

The passages

The objection

1 Samuel 7:2 says that the ark was at Kirjath-jearim for twenty years. But it was still in Abinadab’s house when David came to fetch it (2 Samuel 6:3), after the whole of Saul’s reign, which Acts 13:21 gives as forty years, and the first years of David’s. So the ark seems to have stayed there for well over forty years, not twenty.

The answer

1 Samuel 7:2 does not say that the ark left after twenty years. It says that twenty years went by, and that then Israel “lamented after the Lord”. The verse leads into what follows: Samuel’s call to put away the foreign gods, the gathering at Mizpah and the defeat of the Philistines (7:3–13). Keil and Delitzsch show that in Hebrew verses 2 and 3 are one sentence: when the days had grown long, twenty years, and all Israel mourned after the Lord, Samuel spoke to them. The twenty years measure the time of neglect before the revival, not the whole of the ark’s stay.

The rest of the history shows that the ark stayed much longer. It is never moved again in 1 Samuel. In David’s day, Israel admitted, “we enquired not at it in the days of Saul” (1 Chronicles 13:3). David fetched it from “Kirjath–jearim” (1 Chronicles 13:5–6), the same place, called “Baale of Judah” in 2 Samuel 6:2. And “Gibeah” in 2 Samuel 6:3 is the Hebrew word for ‘hill’, so that Abinadab’s house “in the hill” (1 Samuel 7:1) is the same house. Gill reckons the whole stay at between forty and fifty years at the least; Jamieson-Fausset-Brown agree that a much longer time passed before the ark was removed.

So there is no clash. Twenty years passed before Israel turned back to the Lord; the ark itself stayed on until David brought it up to Jerusalem.

Still open

The full length of the ark’s stay cannot be fixed exactly. It depends on how long Samuel judged Israel before Saul, and on the length of Saul’s reign; 1 Samuel 13:1, which should give it, is hard to read in the Hebrew.

From the classic commentators

It appears, in the subsequent history, that a much longer period elapsed before its final removal from Kirjath-jearim (2Sa. 6:1-19; Ch1 13:1-14). But that length of time had passed when the Israelites began to revive from their sad state of religious decline.Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary on 1 Samuel 7:2 (1871)