Judges

Chapter 15

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Leningrad Codex, through the Open Scriptures Westminster Leningrad Codex. The written consonants are printed. A Masoretic reading is footnoted when it differs. No Dead Sea reading was substituted unless it was read from a fragment. The Greek, Syriac, and Latin versions are witnesses, not the default.

A dotted word is a harder one. Point at it, or tap it, for a short definition.

1After some time, in the days of the wheat harvest, Samson visited his wife with a kid of the goats, and he said, I will go in to my wife, into the room. Her father would not let him go in.

2Her father said, I said, said, that you hated her, hated her, so I gave her to your companion. Is not her younger sister better than she? Let her be yours instead of her.

3Samson said to them, This time I am clear of the Philistines, when I do them harm.

4Samson went and caught three hundred foxes. He took torches, turned tail to tail, and put one torch between the two tails, in the middle.

5He set fire to the torches and sent them into the standing grain of the Philistines. He burned from the stacked grain to the standing grain, and as far as the olive vineyard.

6The Philistines said, Who did this? They said, Samson, the son-in-law of the Timnite, because he took his wife and gave her to his companion. The Philistines went up and burned her and her father with fire.

7Samson said to them, If you act like this, I will take vengeance on you, and after that I will stop.

8He struck them leg on thigh, a great blow. Then he went down and lived in the cleft of the rock of Etam.

9The Philistines went up and camped in Judah, and they spread out at Lehi.

10The men of Judah said, Why have you come up against us? They said, We have come up to bind Samson, to do to him as he did to us.

11Three thousand men of Judah went down to the cleft of the rock of Etam, and they said to Samson, Do you not know that the Philistines are ruling us? What is this you have done to us? He said to them, As they did to me, so I did to them.

12They said to him, We have come down to bind you, to give you into the hand of the Philistines. Samson said to them, Swear to me that you yourselves will not strike me.

13They said to him, No, we will only bind you and give you into their hand. We will not put you to death. They bound him with two new ropes and brought him up from the rock.

14He came as far as Lehi, and the Philistines shouted to meet him. The spirit of Yahweh rushed on him, and the ropes that were on his arms became like flax that has burned in the fire, and his bonds melted off his hands.

15He found a fresh jawbone of a donkey, reached out his hand, took it, and with it struck a thousand men.

16Samson said, With a donkey’s jawbone, a heap, a double heap. With a donkey’s jawbone I have struck a thousand men.

Notes (1)

Translation
Chamor is both the donkey and a heap. Chamor chamoratayim is a heap, a double heap. The line plays on that sound.

17When he finished speaking, he threw the jawbone from his hand, and he called that place Ramath-lehi.

Notes (1)

Translation
Ramath-lehi is the height of the jawbone.

18He was very thirsty, and he called to Yahweh and said, You have given this great rescue into the hand of your servant, and now shall I die of thirst and fall into the hand of the uncircumcised?

19God split the hollow that is in Lehi, and water came out of it. He drank, his spirit returned, and he revived. Therefore he called its name En-hakkore, which is in Lehi, to this day.

Notes (1)

Translation
En-hakkore is the spring of the one who calls. The hollow is the makhtesh in Lehi.

20He judged Israel in the days of the Philistines for twenty years.