Judges 15

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

² Her father said, “I was sure you truly hated her, so I gave her to your companion. Isn’t her younger sister better than she is? Let her be yours instead.”

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

⁴ 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.

⁵ He set fire to the torches and released the foxes into the Philistines’ standing grain. He burned everything from the stacked sheaves to the standing grain, and even the olive groves.

⁶ The 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.” Then the Philistines went up and burned her and her father to death.

⁷ Samson said to them, “If this is how you act, I will take revenge on you, and only then will I stop.”

⁸ He struck them from hip to thigh, inflicting a great slaughter. Then he went down and stayed in a cleft in the rock of Etam.

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

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

¹¹ Then three thousand men of Judah went down to the cleft in the rock of Etam and said to Samson, “Don’t you know that the Philistines rule over us? What have you done to us?” He said to them, “I did to them what they did to me.”

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

¹³ They answered, “No. We will only bind you and hand you over to them; we certainly will not kill you.” So they bound him with two new ropes and brought him up from the rock.

¹⁴ When he came to Lehi, the Philistines came shouting to meet him. The Spirit of the LORD came powerfully upon him. The ropes on his arms became like linen threads burned by fire, and his bonds fell away from his hands.

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

¹⁶ Samson said, “With a donkey’s jawbone, one heap, two heaps; with a donkey’s jawbone I struck down a thousand men.”

¹⁷ When he had finished speaking, he threw away the jawbone, and he named that place Ramath-lehi.

¹⁸ He was very thirsty and called out to the LORD, saying, “You have given this great deliverance by the hand of your servant. Now must I die of thirst and fall into the hands of the uncircumcised?”

¹⁹ Then God opened the hollow place at Lehi, and water came out of it. Samson drank, his strength returned, and he revived. That is why he named it En-hakkore; it is still at Lehi to this day.

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

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