Judges 15:1–11

Samson Defeats the Philistines

15After a while, in the time of wheat harvest, it happened that Samson visited his wife with a ^ayoung goat. And he said, “Let me go in to my wife, into her room.” But her father would not permit him to go in.

²Her father said, “I really thought that you thoroughly ^bhated her; therefore I gave her to your companion. Is not her younger sister better than she? Please, take her instead.”

³And Samson said to them, “This time I shall be blameless regarding the Philistines if I harm them!” ⁴Then Samson went and caught three hundred foxes; and he took torches, turned the foxes tail to tail, and put a torch between each pair of tails. ⁵When he had set the torches on fire, he let the foxes go into the standing grain of the Philistines, and burned up both the shocks and the standing grain, as well as the vineyards and olive groves.

⁶Then the Philistines said, “Who has done this?”

And they answered, “Samson, the son-in-law of the Timnite, because he has taken his wife and given her to his companion.” ^cSo the Philistines came up and burned her and her father with fire.

⁷Samson said to them, “Since you would do a thing like this, I will surely take revenge on you, and after that I will cease.” ⁸So he attacked them hip and thigh with a great slaughter; then he went down and dwelt in the cleft of the rock of ^dEtam.

⁹Now the Philistines went up, encamped in Judah, and deployed themselves ^eagainst Lehi. ¹⁰And the men of Judah said, “Why have you come up against us?”

So they answered, “We have come up to ¹arrest Samson, to do to him as he has done to us.”

¹¹Then 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 ^frule over us? What is this you have done to us?”

And he said to them, “As they did to me, so I have done to them.”