Judges / Samson's Vengeance and Triumph over the Philistines

Samson's Vengeance and Triumph over the Philistines

Judges 15:1-20

Chapter 15

¹ After a time, during the wheat harvest, Samson visited his wife with a young goat. He said, "I will go in to my wife in the chamber." But her father would not allow him to enter. ² And her father said, “I said, ‘Since you hated her, you hate her, and I gave her to your moral evil.’ Is not her younger sister better than her? Please be to you instead of her.” ³ Samson said to them, "This time I am innocent of wrongdoing against the Philistines, though I have done evil to them." ⁴ Samson went and caught three hundred foxes. He took torches, turned tail to tail, and put one torch between every two tails. ⁵ And he kindled fire in torches and sent them into the standing grain of the Philistines, and it burned from stack to standing grain and to olive vineyard. ⁶ The Philistines said, "Who did this?" They said, "Samson, the son-in-law of the Timnite, because he took his wife and gave her to his companion." So the Philistines went up and burned her and her father with fire. ⁷ Samson said to them, "If you do such a thing, be sure that if I once avenge myself on you, then I will stop." ⁸ He struck them hip and thigh with a great slaughter. Then he went down and stayed in the cleft of the Rock of Etam. ⁹ And the Philistines went up and encamped in Judah and spread out in Lehi. ¹⁰ The men of Judah said, "Why have you come up against us?" They said, "To bind Samson, to do to him as he did to us." ¹¹ Then three thousand men of Judah went down to the cleft of the Rock at Etam, and they said to Samson, "Do you not know that the Philistines rule over us? What is this you have done to us?" He said to them, "As they did to me, so I have done to them." ¹² And they said to him, "We have come down to bind you and to give you into the hand of the Philistines." And Samson said to them, "Swear to me that you yourselves will not fall upon me." ¹³ They said to him, "No, we will bind you, you will be bound, and we will give you into their hand, but we will not put you to death." They bound him with two new ropes and brought him up from the Rock. ¹⁴ He came as far as the jawbone, and the Philistines shouted triumphantly to meet him. The Spirit of the LORD rushed upon him, and the bowstrings that were on his arms became like flax that had burned in the fire, and his bonds melted off his hands. ¹⁵ And he found a fresh jawbone of a donkey, and he reached out his hand and took it, and struck a thousand men with it. ¹⁶ And Samson said, "With the jawbone of a donkey—a donkey, donkeys—heaps—with the jawbone of a donkey I have struck down a thousand men." ¹⁷ It was as his bride to the divine word/message, and he threw the jawbone from his hand/power, and he called to the place Ramath-lehi. ¹⁸ He thirsted greatly and called to the LORD and said, "You have given into the hand of your servant this great salvation, and now I will die of thirst and fall into the hand of the uncircumcised." ¹⁹ And God split open the hollow place that is in the jawbone, and water came out from it. And he drank, and his spirit returned, and he revived. He called its name En-hakkore, that is at Lehi, until this day. ²⁰ And he judged Israel in the days of the Philistines twenty years.