1 Samuel 6:7–14

⁷So prepare a new wagon and two cows that have never been yoked; hitch them to the wagon and drive their calves back to the barn. ⁸Take the Lord’s Covenant Box, put it on the wagon, and place in a box beside it the gold models that you are sending to him as a gift to pay for your sins. Start the wagon on its way and let it go by itself. ⁹Then watch it go; if it goes towards the town of Beth Shemesh, this means that it is the God of the Israelites who has sent this terrible disaster on us. But if it doesn’t, then we will know that he did not send the plague; it was only a matter of chance.”

¹⁰They did what they were told: they took two cows and hitched them to the wagon, and shut the calves in the barn. ¹¹They put the Covenant Box in the wagon, together with the box containing the gold models of the mice and of the tumours. ¹²The cows started off on the road to Beth Shemesh and headed straight towards it, without turning off the road. They were mooing as they went. The five Philistine kings followed them as far as the border of Beth Shemesh.

¹³The people of Beth Shemesh were harvesting wheat in the valley, when suddenly they looked up and saw the Covenant Box. They were overjoyed at the sight. ¹⁴The wagon came to a field belonging to a man named Joshua, who lived in Beth Shemesh, and it stopped there near a large rock. The people chopped up the wooden wagon and killed the cows and offered them as a burnt sacrifice to the Lord.