But the hand of Yahweh was heavy on them of Ashdod, and he destroyed them, and struck them with tumors, even Ashdod and the borders of it.
"He afflicted them with tumors"  (1 Samuel 5:6).  What was this disease? There is little doubt that it was anything other than an epidemic of the bubonic plague, the black death that wiped out a major fraction of the human race in the mid-14th century.  Edward Gibbon wrote that, "The moity of mankind perished."  Will and Ariel Durant stated that one-third of the human race perished, and Barbara Tuckman writes (in 1978) that, "Modern demographers have settled, for the area extending from India to Iceland, around the same figure expressed by Froissart's words. `a third of the world died.'"[20] We have introduced this here to emphasize the size of the disaster that came to the Philistines.  Again, from Tuckman, the mortality rate in all the cities of Europe ranged.  "Between 20% and 90% of the whole population."[21] This occurred in a matter of a very few days.  Just imagine what a devastation like this would have produced in the way of a panic  (1 Samuel 11).