11. They put the Covenant Box in the wagon, together with the box containing the gold models of the mice and of the tumours.
12. The 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.
13. The 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.
14. The 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.
15. The Levites lifted off the Covenant Box of the Lord and the box with the gold models in it, and placed them on the large rock. Then the people of Beth Shemesh offered burnt sacrifices and other sacrifices to the Lord.
16. The five Philistine kings watched them do this and then went back to Ekron that same day.
17. The Philistines sent the five gold tumours to the Lord as a gift to pay for their sins, one each for the cities of Ashdod, Gaza, Ashkelon, Gath, and Ekron.
18. They also sent gold mice, one for each of the cities ruled by the five Philistine kings, both the fortified towns and the villages without walls. The large rock in the field of Joshua of Beth Shemesh, on which they placed the Lord's Covenant Box, is still there as a witness to what happened.
19. The Lord killed seventy of the men of Beth Shemesh because they looked inside the Covenant Box. And the people mourned because the Lord had caused such a great slaughter among them.
20. So the men of Beth Shemesh said, “Who can stand before the Lord, this holy God? Where can we send him to get him away from us?”
21. They sent messengers to the people of Kiriath Jearim to say, “The Philistines have returned the Lord's Covenant Box. Come down and fetch it.”