1 After some time, during 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 let him go in. 2 Her father said, “I was certain that you utterly hated her, so I gave her to your companion. Is not her younger sister more beautiful than she? Please take her instead.” 3 Samson said to them, “This time I will be blameless with regard to the Philistines when I do them harm.” 4 Samson went and caught three hundred foxes. He took torches, paired the foxes tail to tail, and placed one torch between each pair of tails. 5 He lit the torches and released the foxes into the standing grain of the Philistines. He burned the stacked grain, the standing grain, and the olive groves. 6 The Philistines said, “Who did this?” They were told, “Samson, the son-in-law of the Timnite, because the Timnite took his wife and gave her to his companion.” So the Philistines went up and burned her and her father with fire. 7 Samson said to them, “If this is how you act, I will take revenge on you, and only then will I stop.” 8 He struck them hip and thigh in a great slaughter. Then he went down and lived in the cleft of the rock of Etam.

9 The Philistines went up, camped in Judah, and spread out at Lehi. 10 The men of Judah said, “Why have you come up against us?” They said, “We have come up to bind Samson, to do to him as he has done to us.” 11 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.” 12 They said to him, “We have come down to bind you and give you into the hand of the Philistines.” Samson said to them, “Swear to me that you yourselves will not attack me.” 13 They said to him, “No, we will only bind you securely and give you into their hand. We certainly will not kill you.” They bound him with two new ropes and brought him up from the rock. 14 When he came to Lehi, the Philistines shouted as they met him. The Spirit of the LORD rushed upon him. The ropes on his arms became like flax burned with fire, and his bonds melted away from his hands. 15 He found a fresh jawbone of a donkey, reached out his hand, took it, and struck down a thousand men with it. 16 Samson said, “With the jawbone of a donkey, a heap, two heaps! With the jawbone of a donkey I have struck down a thousand men.” 17 When he finished speaking, he threw the jawbone from his hand and called that place Ramath-lehi. 18 He was very thirsty and called to the LORD, saying, “You have given this great deliverance into the hand of your servant. Now must I die of thirst and fall into the hand of the uncircumcised?” 19 God split open the hollow at Lehi, and water came out of it. Samson drank, his spirit returned, and he revived. Therefore he called its name En-hakkore, which is at Lehi to this day. 20 He judged Israel twenty years in the days of the Philistines.