Judges 15

1Some time later, at the time of the wheat harvest, Samson went to visit his wife, bringing a young goat. He said, “I am going in to my wife in her room.” But her father would not let him go in.

2Her father said, “I was sure you hated her, so I gave her to your companion. Is not her younger sister more beautiful than she is? Please take her instead.”

3Samson said to them, “This time I will be blameless when I do the Philistines harm.”

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

5He set the torches on fire and let the foxes loose into the standing grain of the Philistines. He burned up both the stacked grain and the standing grain, as well as the olive groves.

6The Philistines asked, “Who did this?” They were told, “Samson, the son-in-law of the Timnite, because he took Samson’s wife and gave her to his companion.” So the Philistines went up and burned her and her father to death.

7Samson said to them, “If this is how you act, I will not stop until I have taken revenge on you.”

8He struck them down hip and thigh with a great slaughter. Then he went down and stayed in the cave in the rock of Etam.

9The Philistines went up, camped in Judah, and spread out near Lehi.

10The men of Judah asked, “Why have you come up against us?” They answered, “We have come up to take Samson prisoner, to do to him as he did to us.”

11Then three thousand men of Judah went down to the cave in the rock of Etam and said to Samson, “Do you not know that the Philistines rule over us? What is this you have done to us?” He said to them, “I only did to them what they did to me.”

12They said to him, “We have come down to tie you up and hand you over to the Philistines.” Samson said to them, “Swear to me that you will not attack me yourselves.”

13“No,” they told him, “we will only tie you up and hand you over to them. We will not kill you.” So they tied him up with two new ropes and brought him up from the rock.

14As he came to Lehi, the Philistines came shouting to meet him. Then the Spirit of Yahweh rushed on him, and the ropes on his arms became like flax that has caught fire, and the bonds melted off his hands.

15He found a fresh jawbone of a donkey, reached out his hand, took it, and struck down a thousand men with it.

16Then Samson said, “With the jawbone of a donkey, heaps upon heaps! With the jawbone of a donkey I have struck down a thousand men.”

17When he had finished speaking, he threw the jawbone away. So that place was called Ramath-lehi.

18He was very thirsty, and he called out to Yahweh, “You have given your servant this great victory. Must I now die of thirst and fall into the hands of the uncircumcised?”

19So God split open the hollow place at Lehi, and water came out of it. When Samson drank, his strength came back and he revived. That is why it was named En-hakkore; it is still at Lehi to this day.

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