Later, during the wheat harvest, Samson went to visit his wife and took a young goat as a gift for her. He said to her father, “I’m going into my wife’s bedroom to sleep with her.” But her father wouldn’t let him enter. He said to Samson, “I thought you really despised her and had divorced her, so I gave her to your best man. Look, her younger sister is even more beautiful than she. Take her instead.”
Samson said, “That does it! This time I’ll settle my score with you Philistines for good!” Samson went out and caught three hundred foxes, tied their tails together in pairs, and lashed a torch between each pair of tails. He lit the torches and set the foxes loose in the grain fields of the Philistines, burning all their grain to the ground, including the sheaves and the standing grain, as well as their vineyards and olive groves.
“Who did this?” the Philistines demanded.
“Samson,” someone told them, “because his father-in-law from Timnah gave Samson’s bride to his best man.” So the Philistines went and burned both the woman and her father to death.
“Because you did this despicable act,” Samson vowed, “I won’t rest until I get even with you!” He was so furious that he launched a vicious attack on the Philistines and single handedly slaughtered many of them. Afterward, he went and hid in a cave in the cliff of Etam.
The Philistines retaliated by setting up camp in Judah and deploying their men near the town of Lehi. The men of Judah asked the Philistines, “Why are you coming against us?”
The Philistines replied, “We’ve come to capture Samson and repay him for what he did to us.”
So three thousand men of Judah went to Samson’s cave in the cliff of Etam, and they said to him, “What are you trying to do to us? Don’t you realize the Philistines rule over us?”
Samson replied, “I only did to them what they did to me.”
The men of Judah told him, “We’ve come to take you prisoner and hand you over to the Philistines.”
“All right,” Samson said, “but promise me that you won’t kill me.”
“We promise not to kill you,” they replied. “We’ll only tie you up and hand you over to the Philistines.” They bound him with two brand new ropes and led him from the cave near the cliff of Etam to Lehi.
When the Philistines saw Samson coming, they raised a shout of triumph. Immediately, the mighty Spirit of YAHWEH came rushing upon Samson! He snapped the ropes off his arms as if they were strings catching fire, and they fell from his wrists. He spotted a raw jawbone of a donkey lying there on the ground and picked it up. He began to swing it wildly and used it to kill a thousand Philistines that day.
Samson then said,
“With only a donkey’s jawbone,
I made heaps of donkeys out of them!
With only a donkey’s jawbone,
a thousand men lie slain!”
When he finished boasting, he threw the jawbone to the ground. That’s how the place got its name—Jawbone Hill.
Afterward, Samson was terribly thirsty and cried out to YAHWEH, “I was strengthened by your great power to win this awesome victory. Will you now leave me here dying of thirst—and let me fall into the hands of these pagans?” So God answered Samson’s prayer and split open the rock basin under Lehi, and water gushed out! Samson drank and his spirit was revived. He named that place “The Spring for the One Who Cried,” and it is still there in Lehi to this day.
Samson led Israel as its champion-deliverer for twenty years during the period of Philistine oppression.
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