And it was after some days, in the days of the wheat harvest, that 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 did not let him go in.
And her father said, “I said, I surely said, that you utterly hated her, so I gave her to your companion. Is not her younger sister better than she? Let her be yours, please, instead of her.”
And Samson said to them, “This time I am blameless toward the Philistines when I do them evil.”
And Samson went and caught three hundred foxes; and he took torches, and turned tail to tail, and put one torch between each two tails, in the middle.
And he set fire to the torches and sent them into the standing grain of the Philistines; and he burned up everything from stacked sheaves to standing grain, and even vineyard and olive grove.
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 his companion.” And the Philistines went up and burned her and her father with fire.
And Samson said to them, “If this is what you do, then surely I will take vengeance on you — and afterward I will stop.”
And he struck them, leg on thigh, a great blow; and he went down and lived in the cleft of the rock of Etam.
And the Philistines went up and camped in Judah, and spread out at Lehi.
And the men of Judah said, “Why have you come up against us?” And they said, “To bind Samson we have come up — to do to him as he did to us.”
And three thousand men from Judah went down to the cleft of the rock of Etam, and they said to Samson, “Do you not know that the Philistines are ruling over us? So what is this you have done to us?” And he said to them, “As they did to me, so I did to them.”
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.”
And they said to him, saying: “No — we will only bind you and give you into their hand; we will surely not put you to death.” And they bound him with two new ropes and brought him up from the rock.
He came to Lehi, and the Philistines came shouting to meet him; and the spirit of the LORD rushed on him, and the ropes that were on his arms became like flax that has burned in fire, and his bonds melted off his hands.
And he found a fresh jawbone of a donkey; and he reached out his hand and took it, and struck down a thousand men with it.
And 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.”
And it was, when he finished speaking, that he threw the jawbone from his hand; and he called that place Ramath-lehi.
And he was very thirsty, and he called to the LORD and said, “You yourself have given this great salvation by the hand of your servant — and now shall I die of thirst, and fall into the hand of the uncircumcised?”
And God split open the hollow that is at Lehi, and water came out of it; and he drank, and his spirit returned, and he revived. Therefore its name was called En-hakkore, which is at Lehi to this day.
And he judged Israel in the days of the Philistines twenty years.
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