¹⁴ “‘In the morning, present^(A) yourselves tribe by tribe. The tribe the Lord chooses^(B) shall come forward clan by clan; the clan the Lord chooses shall come forward family by family; and the family the Lord chooses shall come forward man by man.

⁷ “Now then, get a new cart^(A) ready, with two cows that have calved and have never been yoked.^(B) Hitch the cows to the cart, but take their calves away and pen them up. ⁸ Take the ark of the Lord and put it on the cart, and in a chest beside it put the gold objects you are sending back to him as a guilt offering. Send it on its way, ⁹ but keep watching it. If it goes up to its own territory, toward Beth Shemesh,^(C) then the Lord has brought this great disaster on us. But if it does not, then we will know that it was not his hand that struck us but that it happened to us by chance.”

¹⁰ So they did this. They took two such cows and hitched them to the cart and penned up their calves.

¹² Then the cows went straight up toward Beth Shemesh, keeping on the road and lowing all the way; they did not turn to the right or to the left. The rulers of the Philistines followed them as far as the border of Beth Shemesh.

²⁶ Then they cast lots, and the lot fell to Matthias; so he was added to the eleven apostles.^(A)