Judges 15

Revised Geneva Translation

15 But after a while, in the time of wheat harvest, Samson visited his wife with a kid, saying, “I will go in to my wife, into the chamber.” But her father would not allow him to go in.

² And her father said, “I thought that you had hated her; therefore, I gave her to your companion. Is not her younger sister fairer than she? Please take her instead of the other.’

³ Then Samson said to them, “Now I am blameless regarding the Philistines, if I do them displeasure.”

⁴ And Samson went out and took three hundred foxes, and took firebrands, and turned them tail to tail, and put a firebrand in the midst, between two tails.

⁵ And when he had set the brands on fire, he sent them out into the standing grain of the Philistines and burnt up both the ricks and the standing grain, with the vineyards and olives.

⁶ Then the Philistines said, “Who has done this?” And they answered, “Samson, the son-in-law of the Timnite, because he had taken his wife and given her to his companion.” Then the Philistines came up and burnt her and her father with fire.

⁷ And Samson said to them, “Though you have done this, I will still be avenged of you; and then I will cease.”

⁸ So he struck them, hip and thigh, with a mighty plague. Then he went and dwelt in the top of the rock, Etam.

⁹ Then the Philistines came up and camped in Judah and were spread out in Lehi.

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

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

¹² Again they said to him, “We have come to bind you and to deliver you into the hand of the Philistines.” And Samson said to them, “Swear to me that you will not fall upon me yourselves.”

¹³ And they answered him, saying, “No. We will bind you and deliver you into their hand, but we will not kill you.” And they bound him with two new ropes and brought him from the rock.

¹⁴ When he came to Lehi, the Philistines shouted at him. And the Spirit of the LORD came upon him; and the cords that were upon his arms became as flax that was burnt with fire. For the bands loosed from his hands.

¹⁵ And he found a new jawbone of a donkey and put forth his hands and caught it and killed a thousand men with it.

¹⁶ Then Samson said, “With the jaw of a donkey, are heaps upon heaps! With the jaw of a donkey, I have killed a thousand men!”

¹⁷ And when he had stopped speaking, he cast away the jawbone from his hand, and called that place, Ramath Lehi.

¹⁸ And he was very thirsty, and called on the LORD, and said, “You have given this great deliverance into the hand of your servant. And now shall I die for thirst and fall into the hands of the uncircumcised?”

¹⁹ Then God broke the cheek tooth that was in the jaw; and water came out from there. And when he had drunk, his spirit returned, and he was revived. Therefore, its name is called, En Hakkore, which is in Lehi to this day.

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