1After some days, in the days of the wheat harvest, Samson visited his wife with a young goat, and he said, “Let me go in to my wife, into the inner room.” But her father would not let him go in.
2Her father said, “I really thought that you utterly hated her, so I gave her to your companion. Is not her younger sister better than she? Let her be yours instead of her.”
3Then Samson said to them, “This time I will be blameless toward the Philistines when I do them harm.”
4So Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and he took torches and turned tail to tail and put one torch between each pair of tails, in the middle.
5He set the torches ablaze and sent them into the standing grain of the Philistines, and he burned up everything from the stacked sheaves to the standing grain and even the olive orchards.
6The Philistines said, “Who did this?” And 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.
7Samson said to them, “If this is how you act, then I swear I will be avenged on you, and only after that will I stop.”
8And he struck them, thigh on hip, a great slaughter. Then he went down and stayed in the cleft of the rock of Etam.
9Then the Philistines went up and encamped in Judah and spread out at Lehi.
10The men of Judah said, “Why have you come up against us?” And they said, “We have come up to bind Samson, to do to him as he has done to us.”
11So 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?” He said to them, “As they did to me, so I have done to them.”
12They said to him, “We have come down to bind you, to hand you over to the Philistines.” Samson said to them, “Swear to me that you yourselves will not fall upon me.”
13They said to him, “No, we will only bind you and hand you over to them, but we will certainly not put you to death.” So they bound him with two new ropes and brought him up from the rock.
14When he came to Lehi, the Philistines shouted in triumph to meet him. Then the Spirit of Yahweh rushed upon him, and the ropes that were on his arms became like flax that has burned with fire, and his bonds melted off his hands.
15He found a fresh jawbone of a donkey, reached out his hand and took it, and struck down a thousand men with it.
16Then Samson said, “With the jawbone of a donkey, heaps upon heaps; with the jawbone of a donkey I have struck down a thousand men.”
17When he finished speaking, he threw the jawbone from his hand, and he called that place Ramath-lehi.
18Then he became very thirsty and called out to Yahweh 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?”
19So God split open the hollow place that is at Lehi, and water came out of it, and he drank; his spirit returned and he revived. Therefore he called its name En-hakkore, which is at Lehi to this day.
20He judged Israel in the days of the Philistines for twenty years.
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