a painful swelling of the lower body, a tumor of the sort English Bibles have long called an emerod
This word names a disease: a painful, protruding swelling in the lower body, in or near the seat and groin. It shows up only nine times across two passages, and in both it is a blow that God brings. In the covenant warnings of Deuteronomy it is one of the sicknesses Israel is threatened with if the nation turns away. In the story of the captured ark it is the plague that falls on the Philistine cities one after another once they take the ark of God as war plunder.
The word we read here is actually a polite stand-in. The written Hebrew text uses a blunter, cruder term for the same swelling (עפל), and Jewish tradition, going back many centuries, replaced it in reading aloud with this more clinical word so the coarse term would not be said in the synagogue. So every time this word appears, it is a decorous substitute for something the ancient scribes found too indelicate to pronounce.
Beyond the general picture, a swelling of the lower body, scholars have argued for well over a century about exactly what illness is meant. The oldest reading, reflected in the old King James word "emerods," is hemorrhoids. Many modern scholars instead see the buboes of bubonic plague, pointing to the golden mice that the Philistines send back with the ark and to the way the sickness spreads from town to town with heavy loss of life. Others have proposed a plague-like fever or a shameful swelling of the genitals. The Hebrew word itself settles only that it is a swelling in that region; it does not pin down the diagnosis.
Disputed
What illness the word actually names. The general sense (a protruding swelling in the lower body) is agreed, but the precise medical identification is not.
- contestedHemorrhoids, following the Aramaic and Syriac cognates and the anatomical localization in the Greek and Latin versions; the traditional reading of Josephus, the rabbis, and the King James "emerods".; HALOT, s.v. טְחֹרִים; S. R. Driver, Notes on the Hebrew Text and the Topography of the Books of Samuel, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1913), 51-58
- contestedThe buboes of bubonic plague, tying together the rodent imagery (the golden mice and the Greek text's mouse-plague), the groin localization, the sudden mass mortality, and the rapid spread between cities.; R. W. Klein, 1 Samuel, WBC 10 (Waco: Word, 1983), 48-65; J. Wilkinson, 'The Philistine Epidemic of I Samuel 5 and 6,' Expository Times 88 (1977): 137-41
- minorityA shameful swelling of the genitals, argued from Iron-Age phallic figurines recovered in Philistine territory.; A. M. Maeir, 'A New Interpretation of the Term ʿopalim in the Light of Recent Archaeological Finds from Philistia,' JSOT 32.1 (2007): 23-40