Judges 15:1-13 ▼

1 And it comes to pass after [some] days, in the days of wheat-harvest, that Samson looks after his wife, with a kid of the goats, and says, “I go in to my wife, to the inner chamber”; and her father has not permitted him to go in,

2 and her father says, “I certainly said that you surely hated her, and I give her to your companion; is her younger sister not better than she? Please let her be to you instead of her.”

3 And Samson says of them, “I am more innocent this time than the Philistines, though I am doing evil with them.”

4 And Samson goes and catches three hundred foxes, and takes torches, and turns tail to tail, and puts a torch between the two tails, in the midst,

5 and kindles fire in the torches, and sends [them] out into the standing grain of the Philistines, and burns [it] from heap even to standing grain, even to vineyard [and] olive-yard.

6 And the Philistines say, “Who has done this?” And they say, “Samson, son-in-law of the Timnite, because he has taken away his wife, and gives her to his companion”; and the Philistines go up, and burn her and her father with fire.

7 And Samson says to them, “Though you do thus, nevertheless I am avenged on you, and afterward I cease!”

8 And he strikes them hip and thigh [with] a great striking, and goes down and dwells in the cleft of the rock of Etam.

9 And the Philistines go up, and encamp in Judah, and are spread out in Lehi,

10 and the men of Judah say, “Why have you come up against us?” And they say, “We have come up to bind Samson, to do to him as he has done to us.”

11 And three thousand men of Judah go down to the cleft of the rock of Etam, and say to Samson, “Have you now known that the Philistines are rulers over us? And what [is] this you have done to us?” And he says to them, “As they did to me, so I did to them.”

12 And they say to him, “We have come down to bind you—to give you into the hand of the Philistines.” And Samson says to them, “Swear to me, lest you fall on me yourselves.”

13 And they speak to him, saying, “No, but we certainly bind you, and have given you into their hand, and we certainly do not put you to death”; and they bind him with two thick bands, new ones, and bring him up from the rock.