Judges 15:1–11

¹And it came to pass after a time, in the days of the wheat-harvest, that Samson visited his wife with a kid of the goats. And he said, I will go in to my wife into the chamber; but her father would not suffer him to go in. ²And her father said, I verily thought that thou didst utterly hate her; therefore I gave her to thy companion. Is not her younger sister fairer than she? Let her, I pray thee, be thine instead of her. ³And Samson said to them, This time I am blameless toward the Philistines, though I do them harm. ⁴And Samson went and caught three hundred jackals, and took torches, and turned tail to tail, and put a torch in the midst between the two tails. ⁵And he set the torches on fire, and let them run into the standing corn of the Philistines, and burnt up both the shocks, and also the standing corn, and the olive gardens. ⁶And the Philistines said, Who has done this? And they answered, Samson, the son-in-law of the Timnite, because he took his wife and gave her to his companion. And the Philistines came up, and burned her and her father with fire. ⁷And Samson said to them, If ye act thus, for a certainty I will avenge myself on you, and then I will cease. ⁸And he smote them hip and thigh with a great slaughter. And he went down and dwelt in the cleft of the cliff Etam.

⁹And the Philistines went up, and encamped in Judah, and spread themselves in Lehi. ¹⁰And the men of Judah said, Why are ye come up against us? And they said, To bind Samson are we come up, to do to him as he has done to us. ¹¹Then three thousand men of Judah went down to the cleft of the cliff Etam, and said to Samson, Knowest thou not that the Philistines rule over us? And what is this that thou hast done to us? And he said to them, As they did to me, so have I done to them.