Judges 15

1 And after some days, in the days of the wheat harvest, Samson went to visit his wife, bringing a young goat; and he said, “I am going in to my wife, into the inner room.” But her father would not let him go in. 2 And her father said, “I said to myself that you surely hated her, so I gave her to one of your friends. Is not her younger sister better than she is? Let her be yours instead of her.” 3 And Samson said to them, “This once I am guiltless toward the Philistines, in doing them evil.”

4 And Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and took torches, and turned them tail to tail, and put one torch between each pair of tails, and tied it fast. 5 And he set fire to the torches and sent the foxes into the standing grain of the Philistines; and everything burned, from the threshing floor to the standing grain, and on to the vineyard and the olive grove. 6 And the Philistines said, “Who has done this?” And they said, “Samson, the son-in-law of the Timnite, because he took his wife and gave her to one of his friends.” And the Philistines went up and burned her and her father with fire. [a] 7 And Samson said to them, “If this is how you act toward her, then I swear I will take my vengeance on you, and after that I will stop.” 8 And he struck them, leg upon thigh, a great blow; and he went down and settled in a cleft of the rock of Etam. [b]

9 And the Philistines went up and camped in Judah, and spread out in Jawbone. [c] 10 And the men of Judah said, “Why have you come up against us?” And the Philistines said, “We have come up to bind Samson, and to do to him as he did to us.” 11 And 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?” And Samson said to them, “As they did to me, so I have 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 that you will not fall on me yourselves.” 13 And they spoke to him, saying, “No — we will only bind you fast and hand you over into their hand; we will certainly not put you to death.” And they bound him with two new ropes and brought him up from that rock.

14 And they came as far as Jawbone; and the Philistines shouted and ran to meet him. And the Spirit of the Lord leaped on him, and the ropes that were on his arms became like tow burned in the fire, and his bonds melted off his hands. 15 And he found the jawbone of a donkey, thrown away; and he reached out his hand and took it, and with it he struck down a thousand men. 16 And Samson said, “With the jawbone of a donkey I have utterly wiped them out; for with the jawbone of the donkey I have struck down a thousand men.” [d] 17 And when he had finished speaking, he threw the jawbone out of his hand; and he called that place the Lifting of the Jawbone.

18 And he was very thirsty; and he wept to the Lord and said, “You were pleased to give this great rescue by the hand of your slave; and now am I to die of thirst and fall into the hand of the uncircumcised?” 19 And God broke open the hollow that was in the jawbone, and water came out of it, and he drank; and his spirit came back, and he revived. That is why its name was called the Spring of the One Who Calls, which is in Jawbone, to this day. [e] 20 And he judged Israel in the days of the Philistines for twenty years.