Judges 15

¹ Not long after this, at the time of the wheat harvest, Samson went back to see his wife; he had brought a kid for her; 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 of the other.’

³ Samson answered them, ‘I can only get my own back on the Philistines now 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’. Then the Philistines went up and burned the woman and her family to death.

⁷ Samson said to them, ‘Since this is how you behave, I swear I will not rest till I have had my revenge on you’.

⁸ And he fell on them for all he was worth and caused great havoc. Then he went down to the cave in the Rock of Etam, and stayed 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 answered, ‘We have come to seize Samson and to do to him what he did to us’.

¹¹ Then three thousand of the men of Judah went down to the cave in the Rock of Etam and said to him, ‘Do you not know that the Philistines have us in their power? Now what have you done to us?’ He answered, ‘What they did to me I did to them’.

¹² Then they said to him, ‘We have come down to take you, to hand you over to the Philistines’. He said to them, ‘Swear to me not to kill me yourselves’.

¹³ They answered, ‘No; we only want to bind you and hand you over to them; we certainly do not want to kill you’. Then they bound him with two new ropes and brought him up from the Rock.

¹⁴ As he approached Lehi, and the Philistines came running towards him with triumphant shouts, the spirit of Yahweh seized on Samson; the ropes on his arms beeame like burnt strands of flax and the bonds melted off his hands.

¹⁵ Catching sight of the fresh jawbone of a donkey, he reached out and snatched it up; then with it he struck down a thousand men.

¹⁶ And Samson said: ‘With the jawbone of a donkey I have thrashed them;[*a] with the jawbone of a donkey I have struck down a thousand men’.

¹⁷ And with this, he hurled the jawbone from him; and that is why the place was called Ramath-lehi.

¹⁸ And as he was thirsty, he called on Yahweh and said, ‘You yourself have worked this great victory 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-hakkore; it is still at Lehi today.

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