Judges
Chapter Fifteen
1 ¶ After a while,
in the time of wheat harvest, it happened that Samson visited his wife with
a young goat. And he said, "Let me go in to my wife, into her room."
But her father would not permit him to go in.
2 Her father said, "I really thought that you thoroughly hated her; therefore
I gave her to your companion. Is not her younger sister better than she? Please,
take her instead."
3 And Samson said to them, "This time I shall be blameless regarding the
Philistines if I harm them!"
4 Then Samson went and caught three hundred foxes; and he took torches, turned
the foxes tail to tail, and put a torch between each pair of tails.
5 When he had set the torches on fire, he let the foxes go into the standing
grain of the Philistines, and burned up both the shocks and the standing grain,
as well as the vineyards and olive groves.
6 Then the Philistines said, "Who has done this?" And they answered,
"Samson, the son-in-law of the Timnite, because he has taken his wife and
given her to his companion." So the Philistines came up and burned her
and her father with fire.
7 Samson said to them, "Since you would do a thing like this, I will surely
take revenge on you, and after that I will cease."
8 So he attacked them hip and thigh with a great slaughter; then he went down
and dwelt in the cleft of the rock of Etam.
9 ¶ Now the Philistines went up, encamped in Judah, and deployed themselves
against Lehi.
10 And the men of Judah said, "Why have you come up against us?" So
they answered, "We have come up to arrest Samson, to do to him as he has
done to us."
11 Then 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 rule over us?
What is this you have done to us?" And he said to them, "As they did
to me, so I have done to them."
12 But they said to him, "We have come down to arrest you, that we may
deliver you into the hand of the Philistines." Then Samson said to them,
"Swear to me that you will not kill me yourselves."
13 So they spoke to him, saying, "No, but we will tie you securely and
deliver you into their hand; but we will surely not kill you." And they
bound him with two new ropes and brought him up from the rock.
14 When he came to Lehi, the Philistines came shouting against him. Then the
Spirit of the LORD came mightily upon him; and the ropes that were on his arms
became like flax that is burned with fire, and his bonds broke loose from his
hands.
15 He found a fresh jawbone of a donkey, reached out his hand and took it, and
killed a thousand men with it.
16 Then Samson said: "With the jawbone of a donkey, Heaps upon heaps, With
the jawbone of a donkey I have slain a thousand men!"
17 And so it was, when he had finished speaking, that he threw the jawbone from
his hand, and called that place Ramath Lehi.
18 ¶ Then he became very thirsty; so he cried out to the LORD and said,
"You have given this great deliverance by the hand of Your servant; and
now shall I die of thirst and fall into the hand of the uncircumcised?"
19 So God split the hollow place that is in Lehi, and water came out, and he
drank; and his spirit returned, and he revived. Therefore he called its name
En Hakkore, which is in Lehi to this day.
20 And he judged Israel twenty years in the days of the Philistines.
Go to Chapter Sixteen
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