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on, at the time of the wheat harvest, Samson visited his wife with a young goat. He said, “I will go in to my wife in her room.” But her father would not allow him to go in.
2 “I was really sure that you thoroughly hated her,” her father said, “so I gave her to one of the men who accompanied you. Isn’t her younger sister more beautiful than she? Why not take her instead?”
3 Samson said to them, “This time I will be blameless in regards to the Philistines when I harm them!”
4 So Samson went out and caught three hundred foxes. He took torches, and he turned the foxes tail to tail, and fastened a torch between each pair of tails. 5 When he had set fire to the torches, 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 asked, “Who has done this?” They were told, “Samson, the Timnite’s son-in-law, because he has taken Samson’s wife and given her to another man.”
So the Philistines went up and burned her and her father to death. 7 Samson said to them, “Because you have done this, I swear I will not rest until I have taken my revenge on you.” 8 He struck them down hip and thigh with a great slaughter. Then he went down and stayed in a cave in the rock at Etam.
9 The Philistines went up and camped in Judah, and made a raid against Lehi. 10 The men of Judah asked, “Why have you come and attacked us?”
And they answered, “We have come up to bind Samson, and to do to him as he has done to us.”
11 Then three thousand men of Judah went down to the cave in the rock at Etam, and they asked Samson, “Don’t you know that the Philistines are rulers over us? What is this that you have done to us?”
He answered, “I have merely done to them as they have done to me.”
12 They said to him, “We’ve come down to bind you, so we can deliver you into the hands of the Philistines.”
Then Samson said to them, “Swear to me that you will not kill me yourselves.”
13 “No,” they replied, “we will only bind you and deliver you into their hands. We will certainly not kill you.” Then they bound him with two new ropes and led him up from the rock.
14 When he came to Lehi, the Philistines came to meet him shouting. Then the Spirit of the Lord came upon him with power, and the ropes around his arms became like burnt flax, and the bonds fell away from his hands. 15 He found the fresh jawbone of a donkey, took it in his hand, 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 killed a thousand men!”
17 When he finished speaking, he threw the jawbone from his hand; and the place was called Ramath-lehi.
18 By then he was very thirsty, and he called out to the Lord, “You have granted this great deliverance by the hand of Your servant. Must I now die of thirst, and fall into the hands of the uncircumcised?” 19 So God split open the hollow place at Lehi, and water came out of it. When he had drank, his spirit returned, and he was revived. So he called the name of it En-hakkore, which is at Lehi to this day.
20 Samson judged Israel for twenty years in the days of the Philistines.