Shoftim - Chapter 15

1. And it was, after a few days, in the time of the wheat harvest, and Samson remembered his wife with a kid, and said, "I will come to my wife into the room." But her father did not allow him to come in.

2. And her father said, "I said that you had utterly hated her, and I gave her to your companion. Is not her younger sister better than she? Let her now be yours, instead of her."

3. And Samson said to them, "This time I shall be blameless from the Philistines, when I will do them harm."

4. And Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and took torches, and turned tail to tail, and put one torch between (every) two tails in the middle.

5. And he kindled fire on the torches and set them loose in the standing grain of the Philistines, and burnt up from the stacks to the standing grain and to the vineyards and olive trees.

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

7. And Samson said to them, "Are you accustomed to do like this? Then I have to be avenged from you and after that I shall cease."

8. And he struck them, the riders and the foot soldiers, with a great slaughter; and he went down and dwelt in the cleft of the rock of Etam.

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

10. And the men of Judah said, "Why have you come up against us?" And they said, "(To get you) to bind Samson we have come up; to do to him as he has done to us."

11. And there went down three thousand men from Judah to the cleft of the rock of Etam, and they said to Samson, "Did you not know that the Philistines rule over us? Now what is this that you have done to us?" And he said to them, "As they did to me, so have I done to them."

12. And they said to him, "We have come down to bind you, to give you into the hand of the Philistines." And Samson said to them, "Swear to me, lest you strike me yourselves."

13. And they spoke to him, saying, "No, however, we will bind you and give you into their hand, but we will not kill you." And they bound him with two new ropes, and brought him up from the rock.

14. (As) he came up to Lehi, the Philistines shouted towards him: and there rested upon him a spirit of the Lord, and the ropes that were upon his arms became as flax that was burnt with fire, and his bonds melted off his hands.

15. And he found a moist jawbone of a donkey, and put forth his hand and took it, and killed with it a thousand men.

16. And Samson said, "With the jawbone of a donkey I heaped them up; with the jawbone of a donkey I have killed a thousand men."

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

18. And he became very thirsty and called to the Lord and said, "You have given through the hand of Your servant this great deliverance; and now shall I die of thirst and fall into the hands of the uncircumcised?"

19. And God cleaved the socket which was in the jawbone, and water came out of it, and he drank, and his spirit returned and he revived; therefore he called its name En-hakkore, which is in Lehi until this day.

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