Judges 15

1. And afterward it came to pass, in the days of wheat harvest, Samson visited his wife with a kid. And he said, “I will go in to my wife into the room.” But her father would not allow him to go in.

2. And her father said, “I truly thought that you utterly hated her, and I gave her to your companion. Is not her younger sister fairer than she is? Please, let her be for you instead.”

3. And Samson said of them, “Now I shall be blameless concerning the Philistines in the evil I do to them.”

4. And Samson went and caught three hundred foxes and took fire brands, and turned the foxes tail to tail, and put a fire brand in the middle between the two tails.

5. And when he set the brands on fire, he let them go into the standing grain of the Philistines, and burned up both the shocks and also the standing grain, with the vineyards and olives.

6. And 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.” And the Philistines came up and burned her and her father with fire.

7. And Samson said to them, “Though you have done this, yet I will be avenged of you, and after that I will stop.”

8. And he struck them hip and thigh with a great slaughter. And he went down and lived on the top of the rock of Etam.

9. And the Philistines went up and pitched in Judah, and spread themselves in Lehi.

10. And the men of Judah said, “Why have you come up against 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? What have you done to us?” And he said to them, “As they have done to me, so I have done to them.”

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

13. And they spoke to him, saying, “No, but we will tie you up and deliver you into their hand. But surely we will not kill you.” And they bound him with two new cords and brought him up from the rock.

14. He came to Lehi, and the Philistines shouted against him. And the Spirit of the LORD came mightily upon him, and the cords upon his arms became as flax that has been burned with fire, and his bands loosed from off his hands.

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

16. And Samson said, “With the jawbone of a donkey, heaps upon heaps, with the jawbone of a donkey I have killed a thousand men.”

17. And it came to pass when he had made an end of speaking, he threw away the jawbone out of his hand, and called that place Hill of the Jawbone.

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

19. But God cut open a hollow place and water came out there. And he drank, and his spirit came again, and he revived. Therefore, its name is called Fountain of the Praying One, which is in Lehi to this day.

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