1And after a time, in the days of the wheat harvest, Samson visited his wife with a kid, and he said, “Let me come to my wife in the chamber,” and her father would not let him come in. 2And her father said, “I surely thought that you altogether hated her, and I gave her to your companion. Is not her younger sister better than she? Let her be yours instead of her.” 3And Samson said to them, “This time I am clear of the Philistines, for I am about to do harm to them.” 4And Samson went and caught three hundred foxes and took torches and turned tail to tail and put one torch between each two tails. 5And he set fire to the torches and sent them into the Philistines’ standing grain and set fire to the stacked grain and the standing grain and the vineyards and the olive trees. 6And the Philistines said, “Who did this?” And they said, “Samson, the son-in-law of the Timnite, for he took his wife and gave her to his companion.” And the Philistines came up and burned her and her father in fire. 7And Samson said to them, “If this is what you do, I will be avenged of you, and then I will stop.” 8And he struck them a great blow, hip on thigh, and went down and stayed in the crevice of the rock of Eitam. 9And the Philistines came up and camped in Judah and deployed at Lehi. 10And the men of Judah said, “Why have you come up against us?” And they said, “We have come up to bind Samson, to do to him as he has done to us.” 11And three thousand men of Judah went down to the crevice of the rock of Eitam and said to Samson, “Do you not know that the Philistines rule over us? And what have you done to us?” And he said to them, “As they did to me, so I have done to them.” 12And they said to him, “We have come down to bind you, to give you into the hand of the Philistines.” And Samson said to them, “Vow to me that you yourselves will not harm me.” 13And they said to him, “No, for we will certainly bind you and give you into their hand, but we will not put you to death.” And they bound him with two new ropes and brought him up from the rock. 14He was coming up to Lehi when the Philistines shouted to greet him, and the spirit of the LORD seized him, and the ropes that were on his arms became like flax burning in fire, and his bonds fell apart from upon his hands. 15And he found the fresh jawbone of a donkey and reached out his hand and took it, and he struck down a thousand men with it. 16And Samson said:
mound upon mound,
With a donkey’s jawbone,
I struck down a thousand men.”
17And it happened when he finished speaking, that he flung the jawbone from his hand, and he called that place Ramath Lehi. 18And he was very thirsty, and he called out to the LORD: “You Yourself gave a great victory in the hand of your servant, and now should I die from thirst and fall into the hand of the uncircumcised?” 19And God split open the hollow that was in Lehi, and water came out of it, and he drank and his spirit returned and he revived. Therefore has its name been called Ein Hakkore to this day. 20And he led Israel in the days of the Philistines twenty years.
CHAPTER 15 NOTES
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1. Let me come to my wife in the chamber. What he has in mind is obviously sex, and, in fact, the initial verb could also be construed as “let me come to bed with my wife.”
2. I surely thought that you altogether hated her. He has two good reasons for thinking this: Samson’s angry declaration that his wife has been unfaithful to him with the thirty companions (14:18) and his abrupt return to his own father’s house.
3. to them. Evidently, he is addressing not only his father-in-law but other Philistines he views as complicit in wronging him.
This time I am clear of the Philistines. I am clear of guilt for what I will do to them, seeing as how they have behaved toward me. The emphasis on “this time” returns later in the story.
4. caught three hundred foxes. Most of the numbers in the story are multiples of three. Samson, himself a feral hero, is repeatedly involved with animals: the lion, the foxes, and then the jawbone of a donkey. The foxes, running wild through the fields with fire at their tails, are an effective delivery system for spreading incendiary destruction.
5. the stacked grain and the standing grain and the vineyards and the olive trees. These items cover most of the principal products of agriculture in this region, and, moreover, the wheat harvest is just taking place, so the overall destruction is devastating.
6. burned her and her father in fire. Many manuscripts and two ancient translations read “her and her father’s house.” Fire answers fire now, and it is in the nature of fire uncontrolled to destroy everything in its path, much like Samson.
7. If this is what you do, I will be avenged of you. The Philistine retaliation leads to a second round of vengeance for Samson.
8. he struck them a great blow, hip on thigh. The implication is that he battered down a large throng of Philistines, though the number in this case is not specified. The word for “hip” actually means “leg” or “calf of the leg,” but “hip on thigh” is a fine old locution coined by the King James translators that effectively conveys the intended sense of a murderous thrashing.
9. Lehi. As elsewhere, the name, which means “jawbone,” is proleptic, and is explained in verse 17.
10. to bind Samson. He is such a lethally powerful adversary that before they can think of killing him, they have to imagine immobilizing him by trussing him up. The notion of binding Samson will return in Delilah’s dealings with him.
11. three thousand men. This is still another multiple of three.
As they did to me, so I have done to them. This unbending code of vengeful retaliation is fully shared by Samson and the Philistines. Compare verse 10.
12. Vow to me that you yourselves will not harm me. He uses the emphatic pronoun before the conjugated verb to make sure that they are not the ones who intend to harm him. If they were, he would have to exert his power and wreak havoc among his countrymen, which he wants to avoid. On this condition, he allows himself to be bound.
14. the ropes that were on his arms became like flax burning in fire. The fire motif is continued here in a simile, as it will be in Delilah’s failed attempts to have him bound. New ropes also occur in the Delilah episode, the idea being that new ropes are in no way worn or frayed and so are very hard to break.
fell apart. Literally, “melted.”
15. the fresh jawbone of a donkey. The skeletal remains of the beast are relatively new, and so the jawbone would not be dry and brittle. As before, Samson fights with an improvised and unconventional weapon. This is the second time he comes in contact with what is left of an animal carcass—an unclean object: the first time, he draws out something sweet; now, antithetically, he finds a weapon.
16. With a donkey’s jawbone, / mound upon mound. Samson seals his conquest, like Lamech in Genesis 4, with an exulting poem of triumph. The meaning of the second verset of this line is not certain. A long tradition of interpretation understands it as “mounds”—perhaps, the mounds of bodies of the slain. In that case, the two Hebrew words ḥamor ḥamoratayim would be a pun on ḥamor, “donkey.” But the word for “mound” requires different vowels, so it is possible that the phrase is actually an incremental repetition of “donkey” in the first verset and means “a donkey, a pair.”
17. Ramath Lehi. The name means “casting of the jawbone.”
19. hollow. The Hebrew makhteish means “mortar” (as in mortar and pestle) and by extension a concave formation in rock.
Ein Hakkore. In this etiology of the name, it is understood to mean “the spring of the one who calls out.” But the Hebrew qoreiʾ, one who calls out, has a homonym that means “partridge,” and it is likely that a place originally called Partridge Spring, because partridges frequented the area, was given this new narrative explanation for its name.
20. And he led Israel . . . twenty years. This notice of the length of Samson’s career seems out of place because further episodes of his story follow. The statement is repeated at the very end of his story, where we would expect it, with the verb “led” (or “judged”) in the pluperfect.