Judges 15:1-20
15 And after a while, during the wheat harvest, Samson visited his wife with a kid, and said “I will go into the chamber to my wife”; but her father would not let him go in,
2 but said “I declare I thought you positively hated her, and I gave her to your comrade; her younger sister is better anyhow—have her instead.”
3 And Samson said to them “This time the Philistines have nothing to complain of if I do them a mischief”;
4 and Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and took torches, and turned the foxes tail to tail and put a torch in the middle between every two tails,
5 * and lighted the torches and turned them loose into the Philistines’ standing crops, and burned stack and standing crop and vineyard and olive-tree.
6 And the Philistines said “Who did that?” and they said “It was Samson, that is son-in-law to the Timnathite, because he took his wife and gave her to his comrade”; and the Philistines came up and burned her and her family.
7 And Samson said to them “O, but if you do things like that I will be revenged on you, and afterward I will let it drop”;
8 * and he smote them hip and thigh a great slaughter, and went down and lived in the cleft of ʽEtam Cliff.
9 And the Philistines came up and camped in Judah and forayed at the Jawbone;
10 and the men of Judah said “Why have you come up against us?” and they said “We have come to tie up Samson, to do to him as he did to us.”
11 And three thousand men of Judah went down to the cleft of ʽEtam Cliff and said to Samson “Do you not know that the Philistines have the rule over us? what is this you have done to us?” And he said to them “As they did to me, so I did to them.”
12 And they said to him “We have come to tie you up, to give you into the hands of the Philistines.” And Samson said to them “Swear to me that you will not cut me down yourselves”;
13 and they said to him “No, but tie you up and give you into their hands; we will not kill you.” And they tied him up with two new ropes and brought him up from the Cliff.
14 He had come to Jawbone, and the Philistines had come cheering to meet him, when the spirit of Jehovah seized upon him and the ropes on his arms became like burned-up flax, and his fastenings melted off from his wrists;
15 and he found a fresh jawbone of a donkey, and reached for it and got it and killed a thousand men with it.
16 * And Samson said “With a beast’s jawbone I have been their bane! with a beast’s jawbone killed a thousand men!”
17 And when he had said it he dropped the jawbone from his hand; and they call the place Jawbone Fell.
18 And he was very thirsty, and called to Jehovah “You have given this great victory into your servant’s hands, and now I shall die with thirst and fall into the hands of the uncircumcised”;
19 * and God ripped open the hollow in the Jawbone, and water came out, and he took a drink, and his spirit came back and he revived. For this reason it is named Caller Spring, the one that is in the Jawbone to this day.
20 And he judged Israel, in the days of the Philistines, twenty years.
Footnotes
^ 15:5 Var. standing crop and olive-orchard. And the Philistines
^ 15:8 Lit. smote them leg on hip
^ 15:16 Lit. With an ass’s jawbone I have piled them in piles (the words ass and pile are alike in Hebrew)
^ 15:19 Caller is the Hebrew name for partridge
