1 Some time later, at the time of the wheat harvest, Samson went to see his wife, bringing a young goat. He said, "I am going in to my wife in her room," but her father would not let him in.
2 Her father said, "I was sure you hated her, so I gave her to your companion. Is her younger sister not better looking than she is? Take her instead, please."
3 Samson said to them, "This time I will be blameless before the Philistines when I do them harm."
4 Samson went off and caught three hundred foxes. He took torches, turned the foxes tail to tail, and set a torch between every two tails.
5 He lit the torches and turned the foxes loose in the Philistines' standing grain, and he burned up both the stacked sheaves and the standing grain, and the vineyards and olive trees too.
6 The Philistines asked, "Who did this?" They were told, "Samson, the Timnite's son-in-law, because the man took his wife and gave her to his companion." The Philistines went up and burned her and her father.
7 Samson said to them, "Since you act like this, I will not stop until I have taken my revenge on you."
8 He struck them hip and thigh, a great slaughter, and then went down and stayed in the cleft of the rock of Etam.
9 The Philistines came up, encamped in Judah, and spread out over Lehi.
10 The men of Judah asked, "Why have you come up against us?" They answered, "We have come up to tie up Samson and do to him what he did to us."
11 Three thousand men of Judah went down to the cleft of the rock of Etam and said to Samson, "Do you not know that the Philistines are our rulers? What is this you have done to us?" He told them, "As they did to me, so have I done to them."
12 They told him, "We have come down to tie you up and hand you over to the Philistines." Samson said to them, "Swear to me that you yourselves will not fall upon me."
13 "No," they told him, "we will only tie you up and hand you over to them; we will not kill you." They tied him with two new ropes and led him up from the rock.
14 He came to Lehi, and the Philistines came shouting to meet him. The Spirit of the LORD came powerfully upon him; the ropes on his arms became like flax that has been burned in the fire, and his bonds dissolved off his hands.
15 He came upon a fresh donkey's jawbone; he reached out, took it, and killed a thousand men with it.
16 Samson said, "With a donkey's jawbone, heaps upon heaps; with a donkey's jawbone I have killed a thousand men."
17 As he finished speaking, he flung the jawbone out of his hand, and he named that place Ramath-lehi.
18 He grew very thirsty and called out to the LORD: "You have granted this great victory by your servant's hand. Must I now die of thirst and fall into the hand of the uncircumcised?"
19 God split the hollow place at Lehi, and water flowed out of it. He drank, his spirit came back, and he revived. That is why it was named En-hakkore; it is at Lehi to this day.
20 He judged Israel for twenty years in the days of the Philistines.