Then they said, "What shall be the trespass-offering which we shall return to him?" They said, "Five golden tumors, and five golden mice, [according to] the number of the lords of the Philistines; for one plague was on you all, and on your lords.
It will be noted that we have considered the mice mentioned in this chapter as being, in all probability, rats.  R. Payne Smith wrote that, "As the ancients used the name of animals in a very general way, any rodent may be meant,"[6] by the word rendered `mice' here.  Our thought that the animal was really the rat is derived from that creature's known association with the bubonic plague, which, according to all the evidence, was the particular plague that struck Philistia.