1 Kings 6:9

This did He also with respect to them of Ascalon, and of Gaza. For those five cities too (when at the coming of the ark they had been smitten with a deadly plague, and found no deliverance from the ills under which they lay), the men of them called their prophets, and gathered an assembly, and sought to discover an escape from this divine scourge. Then, when their prophets said that they should yoke to the ark heifers untamed, and having their first calves, and let them go their way, with no man to guide them, for so it would be evident whether the plague was from God or whether it was any accident which brought the disease; (“for if,” it is said, “they break the yoke in pieces for want of practice, or turn where their calves are lowing, ‘it is a chance that hath happened;’but if they go on right, and err not from the way, and neither the lowing of their young, nor their ignorance of the …

By “evil” here He means, not wickedness, far from it, but affliction, and trouble, and calamities; much as in another place also He saith, “Is there evil in a city, which the Lord hath not done?”nor any thing like these, but the scourges which are borne from above. And again, “I,” saith He, “make peace, and create evils:” For neither in this place doth He speak of wickedness,but of famines, and pestilences, things accounted evil by most men: the generality being wont to call these things evil. Thus, for example, the priests and prophets of those five lordships, when having yoked the kine to the ark, they let them go without their calves,gave the name of “evil” to those heaven-sent plagues, and the dismay and anguish which thereby sprang up within them.

And from what writers should he address them? From the Prophets? They would not have believed them. Since with the Jews too he does not argue from the Gospels, but from the Prophets. For this reason he says, “Unto the Jews I became as a Jew, to them that are without law, as without law, to those that are under the Law, as under the Law.” ( 1 Cor. ix. 20, 21 .) Thus does God too, as in the case of the wise men, He does not conduct them by an Angel, nor a Prophet, nor an Apostle, nor an Evangelist, but how? By a star. For as their art made them conversant with these, He made use of such means to guide them. So in the case of the oxen, that drew the ark. “If it goeth up by the way of his own coast, then He hath done us this great evil” ( 1 Sam. vi. 9 .), as their prophets suggested. Do these prophets then speak the truth? No; but he refutes and confounds them out of their own mouths. …