Eli therefore ordered his two sons to go forth with the people and fight that enemy. So they went out, taking the Ark with them. When they had prepared for battle, Eli sat upon his chair awaiting news of what they had done. Then a man came to him and informed him that the people had been defeated and that his two sons had been killed. He asked, “What became of the Ark?” The man replied, “The enemy has taken it.” Eli gasped, fell backward from his chair, and died. Thereafter, the affairs of the Children of Israel fell into confusion, and they became divided, until Allah raised up Talut as a king. They asked him for proof, and their prophet said to them: “The sign of his kingship is that the Ark will come to you.”

The story of the Ark was as follows: those who had captured it brought it to a village in Palestine called Ashdod. They placed it in a temple containing one of their idols, setting it beneath their greatest idol. The following morning, they found the idol beneath it. So they took the idol and placed it above the Ark, and nailed its feet onto the Ark. The next morning, the idol’s hands and feet had been cut off, and it lay beneath the Ark; their other idols too were overturned. They then removed the Ark from the idol-temple and placed it in a quarter of their city. The people of that quarter were afflicted with pain in their necks, until most of them perished.

Some of them said to others, “Have you not learned that nothing can stand against the God of the Children of Israel? Take it out to such-and-such a village.” So Allah sent rats against the people of that village. A rat would spend the night with a man, and by morning he would be dead, its insides having been eaten away. They then took the Ark out into the open country and buried it in one of their latrines. But whoever relieved himself there was afflicted with hemorrhoids and colic. They were bewildered.

Then a woman among them, one of the captive descendants of the prophets from the Children of Israel, said to them, “You will continue to see what you dislike as long as this Ark remains among you, so remove it from your midst.” At that woman’s direction, they brought a cart and loaded the Ark onto it. They then hitched it to two oxen and struck their sides. The two oxen set off, and Allah Most High appointed four angels to drive them. They proceeded until they stopped in the land of the Children of Israel. They broke their yokes, severed their ropes, and set down the Ark in a field where the Children of Israel were harvesting; then they returned to their own land. Nothing surprised the Children of Israel more than the arrival of the Ark, so they proclaimed Allah’s greatness and praised Him. (1)

This is the meaning of His saying, Most High: “Carried by the angels”—that is, driven by them. Ibn Abbas, may Allah be pleased with him, said: “The angels brought the Ark, carrying it between heaven and earth while the people watched it, until they set it down before Talut.” Al-Hasan said: “The Ark was with the angels in heaven, and when Talut assumed kingship, the angels carried it and set it down among them.” Qatadah said instead: “The Ark was in the wilderness; Moses had left it with Joshua son of Nun, and it remained there. Then the angels carried it until they placed it in Talut’s house.” Thus they acknowledged his kingship. “Surely in that is a sign for you, if you are believers.” Ibn Abbas, may Allah be pleased with him, said: “Indeed