Samson’s Revenge

1And it came to pass after some days, in the days of the wheat harvest, that Samson visited his wife with a kid of the goats, and he said, “Let me go in to my wife in the inner chamber.” And her father would not permit him to go in.

2And her father said, “I surely said that you surely hated her, and I gave her to your companion. Is not her younger sister better than she? Please take her to you, instead of her.”

3And Samson said to them, “I shall be blameless this time regarding the Philistines, though I am doing them harm.”

4And Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and he took torches and turned them tail to tail, and he put one torch between the two tails in the midst. 5And he kindled fire in the torches and sent them out into the standing grain of the Philistines, and burned up from the shocks and to the standing grain, and to the vineyards and olive groves.

6And 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.”

And the Philistines came up and burned her and her father with the fire.

7And Samson said to them, “Since you⁺ would do a thing like this, yet surely I will take revenge on you⁺, and afterward I will cease.” 8And he struck them hip and thigh with a great slaughter. And he went down and dwelt in the cleft of the rock of Etam.

9And the Philistines went up and encamped in Judah, and they spread out in Lehi.

10And the men of Judah said, “Why have you⁺ come up against us?”

And they answered, “To bind Samson. We have come up to do to him as he has done to us.”

11And 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? And what is this you have done to us?”

And he said to them, “As they did to me, so I have done to them.”

12And they said to him, “We have come down to bind you, that we may deliver you into the hand of the Philistines.”

And Samson said to them, “Swear to me that you⁺ will not kill me yourselves.”

13And they spoke to him, saying, “No, but we will securely bind you and deliver you into their hands. And surely we will not put you to death.” And they bound him with two new ropes and brought him up from the rock.

14He came to Lehi, and the Philistines came out shouting against him, and the Spirit of YHWH rushed mightily upon him, and the ropes that were on his arms became like flax that is burned with the fire, and his bonds broke loose from his hands. 15And He found a fresh jawbone of a donkey, and he stretched out his hand and took it, and killed with it a thousand men. 16And Samson said,

“With the jawbone of a donkey—

a heap upon heaps†—

with the jawbone of a donkey

I have struck down a thousand men.”

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

18And he became exceedingly thirsty, and he cried out to YHWH and said, “You have given by the hand of Your servant this great deliverance, and shall I die of thirst and fall into the hand of the uncircumcised?”

19And God split the hollow place that is in Lehi, and water came out, and he drank, and his spirit returned, and he revived. Upon thus he called its name En-hakkore,† which is in Lehi to this day.

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