1 Later Samson went to visit his wife during the wheat harvest and took her a young goat. He told her father: »Let me go to my wife in her room. But he would not let him go in.«

2 He told Samson: »I thought that you hated her, so I gave her to your friend. Her younger sister is prettier. You can have her, instead.«

3 Samson said: »This time I am not going to be responsible for what I do to the Philistines!«

4 He caught three hundred foxes. Two at a time, he tied their tails together and put torches in the knots.

5 Then he set fire to the torches and turned the foxes loose in the Philistine wheat fields. In this way he burned up both the shocks and the standing grain still in the fields. The olive orchards were also burned.

6 When the Philistines asked who had done this, they learned that Samson had done it because his father-in-law, a man from Timnah, had given Samson’s wife to a friend of Samson’s. So the Philistines burned the woman to death and burned down her father’s house.

7 Samson said to them: »This is how you act! I swear that I will not stop until I pay you back!«

8 He attacked them fiercely and killed many of them. After that he stayed in the cave in the cliff at Etam.

9 The Philistines came and camped in Judah. They attacked the town of Lehi.

10 The men of Judah asked: »Why do you attack us?« They answered: »We came to take Samson prisoner and to treat him as he treated us.«

11 These three thousand men of Judah went to the cave in the cliff at Etam and said to Samson: »Do you know that the Philistines are our rulers? What did you do?« He answered: »I did to them just what they did to me.«

12 They replied: »We have come here to tie you up and hand you over to them.« Samson said: »Give me your word that you will not kill me.«

13 They said: »We are only going to tie you up and hand you over to them. We will not kill you.« So they tied him up with two new ropes and brought him back from the cliff.

14 When he got to Lehi, the Philistines shouted and ran toward him. Suddenly Jehovah’s power made him strong. He broke the ropes around his arms and hands as if they were burnt flax.

15 Samson found a fresh jawbone of a donkey. He picked it up, and killed a thousand men with it.

16 Then Samson said: »With the jawbone of a donkey I piled them in piles. With the jawbone of a donkey I killed a thousand men.«

17 When he finished speaking he threw the jawbone away. The place where this happened was named Ramath Lehi.

18 Samson became very thirsty. He called to Jehovah: »You gave me this great victory. Will I now die of thirst and be captured by these heathen Philistines?«

19 God opened a hollow place in the ground there at Lehi, and water came out of it. Samson drank it and felt better. The spring was named Hakkore. It still exists there at Lehi.

20 Samson judged Israel for twenty years while the Philistines ruled the land.