Judges 15

¹After a while, at the time of wheat harvest, Samson went to visit his wife with a kid; and he said, “I will go in to my wife in the chamber.” 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 fairer than she? Pray take her instead.” ³And Samson said to them, “This time I shall be blameless in regard to the Philistines, when I do them mischief.” ⁴So Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and took torches; and he turned them tail to tail, and put a torch between each pair of tails. ⁵And when he had set fire to the torches, he let the foxes go into the standing grain of the Philistines, and burned up the shocks and the standing grain, as well as the olive orchards. ⁶Then the Philistines said, “Who has done this?” And they said, “Samson, the son-in-law of the Timnite, because he has taken his wife and given her to his companion.” And the Philistines came up, and burned her and her father with fire. ⁷And Samson said to them, “If this is what you do, I swear I will be avenged upon you, and after that I will quit.” ⁸And he smote them hip and thigh with great slaughter; and he went down and stayed in the cleft of the rock of Etam.

⁹Then the Philistines came up and encamped in Judah, and made a raid on Lehi. ¹⁰And the men of Judah said, “Why have you come up against us?” They said, “We have come up to bind Samson, to do to him 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 rulers over us? What then is this that you have done to us?” And he said to them, “As they did to me, so have I done to them.” ¹²And they said to him, “We have come down to bind you, that we may give you into the hands of the Philistines.” And Samson said to them, “Swear to me that you will not fall upon me yourselves.” ¹³They said to him, “No; we will only bind you and give you into their hands; we will not kill you.” So they bound him with two new ropes, and brought him up from the rock.

¹⁴When he came to Lehi, the Philistines came shouting to meet him; and the Spirit of the Lord came mightily upon him, and the ropes which were on his arms became as flax that has caught fire, and his bonds melted off his hands. ¹⁵And he found a fresh jawbone of an ass, and put out his hand and seized it, and with it he slew a thousand men. ¹⁶And Samson said,

“With the jawbone of an ass,

heaps upon heaps,

with the jawbone of an ass

have I slain a thousand men.”

¹⁷When he had finished speaking, he threw away the jawbone out of his hand; and that place was called Raʹmath-leʹhi.

¹⁸And he was very thirsty, and he called on the Lord and said, “Thou hast granted this great deliverance by the hand of thy servant; and shall I now die of thirst, and fall into the hands of the uncircumcised?” ¹⁹And God split open the hollow place that is at Lehi, and there came water from it; and when he drank, his spirit returned, and he revived. Therefore the name of it was called En-hakkorʹe; it is at Lehi to this day. ²⁰And he judged Israel in the days of the Philistines twenty years.