Judges 15

And it happened after some days, in the days of the wheat harvest, that Sampson visited his wife with a kid of the goats, and said, I will go in to my wife into the chamber. But her father would not let him go in.

And her father spoke, saying, I said that you utterly hated her, and I gave her to one of your friends. Is not her younger sister better than she? Let her be yours instead of her.

And Sampson said to them, This once I am guiltless toward the foreigners, for I am doing them harm.

And Sampson went and caught three hundred foxes, and took torches, and turned tail to tail, and set one torch between the two tails, and bound them.

And he kindled fire in the torches and sent them out among the standing grain of the foreigners; and they burned from the threshing floor even to the standing ears of grain, and to the vineyard and the olive tree.

And the foreigners said, Who has done these things? And they said, Sampson, the bridegroom of Thamni, because he took his wife and gave her to one of his friends. And the foreigners went up and burned her and her father with fire.

And Sampson said to them, If you act in this way, surely I will be avenged on you, and afterward I will cease.

And he struck them, leg upon thigh, with a great blow; and he went down and sat in a cleft of the rock Etam.

And the foreigners went up and encamped in Iouda, and were spread abroad in Leui.

And the men of Iouda said, Why have you come up against us? And the foreigners said, We have come up to bind Sampson, and to do to him as he has done to us.

And three thousand men from Iouda went down to the cleft of the rock Etam, and said to Sampson, Do you not know that the foreigners rule over us? And what is this you have done to us? And Sampson said to them, As they did to me, so I have done to them.

And they said to him, We have come down to bind you, to give you into the hand of the foreigners. And Sampson said to them, Swear to me that you yourselves will not fall upon me.

And they spoke to him, saying, No, but we will only bind you with a bond and deliver you into their hand; and we will certainly not put you to death. And they bound him with two new cords and brought him up from that rock.

And they came as far as Jawbone, and the Philistines raised a shout and ran to meet him; and the spirit of the Lord leaped upon him, and the cords that were on his arms became like tow that had been burned up in fire, and his bonds melted away from his hands.

And he found a jawbone of a donkey that had been thrown away, and he stretched out his hand and took it, and with it he struck down a thousand men.

And Sampson said: With a donkey's jawbone, wiping them out I have wiped them out, for with the jawbone of the donkey I struck down a thousand men.

And it happened, when he ceased speaking, that he threw the jawbone out of his hand, and he called that place Slaying of a Jawbone.

And he was exceedingly thirsty, and he wept to the Lord and said: You were pleased to accomplish this great deliverance by the hand of your servant; and now I shall die of thirst and fall into the hand of the uncircumcised.

And God broke open the hollow that was in Jawbone, and water came out of it, and he drank, and his spirit came back and he revived. For this reason its name was called Spring of the One Who Calls, which is in Jawbone to this day.

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