The Philistines had had the ark in their custody for 7 months when they called for their priests and diviners to decide how to send it back to its rightful place. They suggested that the ark should be returned with a guilt offering of 5 gold tumours and 5 gold rats symbolizing what they had been facing. So they put the ark with the guilt offering on a cart drawn by 2 cows and set them off in direction of Canaan, and when the people of Beth Shemesh saw the ark they were over the moon. They chopped up the cart and sacrificed the cows as a burnt offering, observed at a distance by the 5 Philistine rulers who then went back to Ekron. However 70 men at Beth Shemesh died as a result of looking inside the ark of the covenant. However the good thing was that the ark was back in Israel.
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