1 During the time that they harvested wheat, Samson took a young goat to Timnah as a present for his wife. He planned to sleep with [EUP] his wife, but her father would not let him go into her room.

2 He said to Samson, “I really thought that you hated her. So I gave her to the man who had been your best man at the wedding, and she married him. But look, her younger sister is [RHQ] more beautiful than she is. You can marry her!”

3 Samson replied, “No! And this time I have a right to get revenge on you Philistines!” 4 Then he went out into the fields and caught 300 foxes. He tied their tails together, two-by-two. He fastened torches to each pair of tails. 5 Then he lit the torches and let the foxes run through the fields of the Philistines. The fire from the torches burned all the grain to the ground, including the grain that had been cut and piled in bundles. The fire also burned down their grapevines and their olive trees.

6 The Philistines asked, “Who did this?” Someone told them, “Samson did it. He married a woman from Timnah, but then his father-in-law gave her to the man who was Samson’s best man at the wedding, and she married him.” So the Philistines went to Timnah and got the woman and her father, and burned them to death.

7 Samson found out about that, and he said to them, “Because you have done this, I will not stop until I get revenge on you!” 8 So he attacked the Philistines furiously, and killed many of them. Then he went to hide in a cave in the large rock at a place called Etam.

9 The Philistines did not know where he was, so they went up to where the descendants of Judah lived, set up their tents near Lehi town and then raided the town. 10 The men there asked the Philistines, “Why have you attacked us?”

The Philistines replied, “We have come to capture Samson. We have come to get revenge on him for what he did to us.”

11  Someone there knew where Samson was hiding. So 3,000 men from Judah went down to get Samson at the cave in the rock where he was hiding. They said to Samson, “Do you not realize that the people of Philistia are ruling over us? Do you not realize what they will do to us?”

Samson replied, “The only thing I did was that I got revenge on them for what they did to me.”

12 But the men from Judah said to him, “We have come to tie you up and put you in the hands of the Philistines.”

Samson said, “All right, but promise me that you yourselves will not kill me!”

13 They replied, “We will just tie you up and take you to the Philistines. We will not kill you.” So they tied him with two new ropes, and led him away from the cave. 14 When they arrived at Lehi, the Philistines came toward him, shouting triumphantly. But Yahweh’s Spirit came upon Samson powerfully. He snapped the ropes on his arms as easily as if they were stalks of burned flax, and the ropes fell off his wrists. 15 Then he saw a donkey’s jawbone lying on the ground. It was fresh, so it was hard. He picked it up and killed about 1,000 Philistine men with it. 16 Then Samson wrote this poem:

18 Then Samson was very thirsty, so he called out to Yahweh, “You have given me strength to win a great victory. So now must I die because of being thirsty, with the result that those heathen Philistines will take away my body and mutilate it?” 19 So God caused water to gush out of a depression in the ground at Lehi. Samson drank from it and soon felt strong again. He named that place ‘The spring of the one who called out’. That spring is still there at Lehi.

20 Samson was the leader of the Israeli people for 20 years, but during that time the Philistines were the ones who really ruled over the land.