Judges 15

1And after some days, in the days of the wheat harvest, Samson visited his wife with a young goat. He said, “Let me go in to my wife, into the inner room.” But her father would not allow him to go in.

2And her father said, “I really thought that you utterly hated her, so I gave her to your companion. Is not her younger sister better than she? Please let her be yours instead of her.”

3And Samson said to them, “This time I am blameless with respect to the Philistines when I do them harm.”

4So Shimshon went and caught three hundred foxes, and he took torches and turned them tail to tail, and put one torch between each pair of tails, in the middle.

5He set fire to the torches and let them go into the standing grain of the Philistines, and burned up the shocks and the standing grain, and even the olive groves.

6Then the Philistines said, “Who did this?” And they said, “Samson, the Timnite’s son-in-law, because he took his wife and gave her to his companion.” So the Philistines went up and burned her and her father with fire.

7And Samson said to them, “If this is what you do, then I swear I will take vengeance on you, and after that I will stop.”

8And he struck them hip and thigh with a great slaughter, and he went down and stayed in the cleft of the rock of Etam.

9Then the Philistines went up and camped in Judah, and spread out at Lehi.

10And the men of Judah said, “Why have you come up against us?” And they said, “We have come up to bind Samson, to do to him just as he did to us.”

11Then three thousand men of Judah went down to the cleft of the rock of Etam and said to Samson, “Do you not know that the Philistines are ruling over us? What then is this that you have done to us?” And he said to them, “As they did to me, so I have done to them.”

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

13They said to him, “No, but we will surely bind you and hand you over into their hand; yet we will certainly not put you to death.” So they bound him with two new ropes and brought him up from the rock.

14When he came as far as Lehi, the Philistines shouted as they came to meet him. Then the Spirit of Yahweh rushed upon him, and the ropes that were on his arms became like flax that has been burned in the fire, and his bonds melted off his hands.

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

16Then Samson said, “With the jawbone of a donkey, a heap, two heaps; with the jawbone of a donkey I have struck down a thousand men.”

17And when he had finished speaking, he threw the jawbone from his hand, and he called that place Ramath-lehi.

18And he became very thirsty, and he called to Yahweh and said, “You have given this great deliverance by the hand of your servant, and now shall I die from thirst and fall into the hand of the uncircumcised?”

19Then God split open the hollow place that is at Lehi, and water came out from it. When he drank, his spirit returned and he revived. Therefore he called its name En-hakkore, which is at Lehi to this day.

20And he judged Israel in the days of the Philistines twenty years.