15At the time of the wheat harvest, Samson went to visit his wife, taking a young goat with him. He said, “I’m going to my wife’s room,” but her father would not let him go in.

²He said to Samson, “I thought you really hated your wife, so I gave her to your best man. Her younger sister is more beautiful. Take her instead.”

³But Samson said to them, “This time no one will blame me for hurting you Philistines!” ⁴So Samson went out and caught three hundred foxes. He took two foxes at a time, tied their tails together, and then tied a torch to the tails of each pair of foxes. ⁵After he lit the torches, he let the foxes loose in the grainfields of the Philistines so that he burned up their standing grain, the piles of grain, their vineyards, and their olive trees.

⁶The Philistines asked, “Who did this?”

Someone told them, “Samson, the son-in-law of the man from Timnah, did because his father-in-law gave his wife to his best man.”

So the Philistines burned Samson’s wife and her father to death. ⁷Then Samson said to the Philistines, “Since you did this, I won’t stop until I pay you back!” ⁸Samson attacked the Philistines and killed many of them. Then he went down and stayed in a cave in the rock of Etam.

⁹The Philistines went up and camped in the land of Judah, near a place named Lehi. ¹⁰The men of Judah asked them, “Why have you come here to fight us?”

They answered, “We have come to make Samson our prisoner, to pay him back for what he did to our people.”

¹¹Then three thousand men of Judah went to the cave in the rock of Etam and said to Samson, “What have you done to us? Don’t you know that the Philistines rule over us?”

Samson answered, “I only paid them back for what they did to me.”

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