Judges - Chapter 15

¹ Not long after this, at the time of the wheat harvest, Samson visited his wife, with a kid; he said, 'I wish to go to my wife in her room.' But her father would not let him enter.

² 'I felt sure', he said, 'that you had taken a real dislike to her, so I gave her to your companion. But would not her younger sister suit you better? Have her instead.'

³ But Samson answered them, 'I can get my revenge on the Philistines now only by doing them some damage.'

⁴ So Samson went off and caught three hundred foxes, then took torches and, turning the foxes tail to tail, put a torch between each pair of tails.

⁵ He lit the torches and set the foxes free in the Philistines' cornfields. In this way he burned both sheaves and standing corn, and the vines and olive trees as well.

⁶ The Philistines asked, 'Who has done this?' and received the answer, 'Samson, who married the Timnite's daughter; his father-in-law took the wife back again and gave her to his companion instead.' The Philistines then went and burned the woman and her father's family to death.

⁷ Samson said to them, 'If that is how you behave, I swear I will not rest till I have had my revenge on you.'

⁸ And he fell on them systematically and caused great havoc. Then he went down to the cave in the Rock of Etham and lived there.

⁹ The Philistines came up and encamped in Judah and made a foray against Lehi.

¹⁰ The men of Judah said to them, 'Why are you attacking us?' They replied, 'We have come to seize Samson and to treat him as he has treated us.'

¹¹ Three thousand men of Judah then went down to the cave of the Rock of Etham and said to him, 'Don't you know that the Philistines have us in their power? Now what have you done to us?' He replied, 'I have treated them only as they treated me.'

¹² They then said, 'We have come down to take you, to hand you over to the Philistines.' He said, 'Swear to me not to kill me yourselves.'

¹³ They replied, 'No; we only want to bind you and hand you over to them; we certainly do not want to kill you.' They then bound him with two new ropes and brought him up from the Rock.

¹⁴ As he was approaching Lehi, and the Philistines came running towards him with triumphant shouts, the spirit of Yahweh was on him; the ropes on his arms became like burnt strands of flax and the cords round his hands came untied.

¹⁵ Coming across the fresh jawbone of a donkey, he reached out and snatched it up; and with it he slaughtered a thousand men.

¹⁶ And Samson said: With the jawbone of a donkey I have laid them in heaps, with the jawbone of a donkey I have felled a thousand men.

¹⁷ And with that he hurled the jawbone away; and that is why the place was called Ramath-Lehi.

¹⁸ And as he was very thirsty, he called on Yahweh and said, 'You yourself have worked this great deliverance by the hand of your servant; and now must I die of thirst and fall into the hands of the uncircumcised?'

¹⁹ Then God opened a hollow in the ground, the hollow there is at Lehi, and water gushed out of it. Samson drank; his vigour returned and he revived. And therefore this spring was called En-ha-Kore; it is still at Lehi today.

²⁰ Samson was judge in Israel in the days of the Philistines for twenty years.

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