Judges 15: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Samson returns for his Philistine wife and learns her father has given her to another man, so he burns the Philistines' grain fields, vineyards, and olive trees using foxes and torches. The Philistines burn the woman and her father to death, Samson strikes back, and then goes down to stay at the rock of Etam. Three thousand men of Judah hand him over bound, but the Spirit of the LORD comes on him, the ropes break, and he kills a thousand men with a donkey's jawbone. He cries out in thirst, God opens a place that gives water, and Samson judges Israel for twenty years.

Claim by Claim

1. 15:1
   • Some time later, during the wheat harvest, Samson went to visit his wife.
   • Samson brought a young goat with him.
   • Samson said he would go in to his wife in the inner room.
   • Her father would not let him go in.
2. 15:2
   • Her father said he had been sure that Samson utterly hated her.
   • Her father said that because of this he had given her to Samson's companion.
   • Her father asked whether her younger sister was not better than she.
   • Her father told Samson to take the younger sister instead of her.
3. 15:3
   • Samson said to them that this time he would be free of blame regarding the Philistines.
   • Samson said he was going to do them harm.
4. 15:4
   • Samson went and caught three hundred foxes.
   • Samson took torches.
   • Samson turned the animals tail to tail.
   • Samson put one torch between each pair of tails.
5. 15:5
   • Samson set the torches on fire.
   • Samson released the animals into the standing grain of the Philistines.
   • The fire burned the stacked sheaves.
   • The fire burned the standing grain.
   • The fire burned the olive orchards.
6. 15:6
   • The Philistines asked who had done this.
   • The answer given was that Samson, the son-in-law of the Timnite, had done it.
   • The reason given was that the Timnite had taken Samson's wife and given her to his companion.
   • The Philistines went up and burned the woman and her father with fire.
7. 15:7
   • Samson said to them that because they had acted this way, he would take vengeance on them.
   • Samson said that after taking vengeance he would stop.
8. 15:8
   • Samson struck them with a great slaughter, striking leg upon thigh.
   • Samson went down and stayed in the cleft of the rock of Etam.
9. 15:9
   • The Philistines went up and camped in Judah.
   • The Philistines spread themselves out at Lehi.
10. 15:10
    • The men of Judah asked the Philistines why they had come up against them.
    • The Philistines said they had come up to bind Samson.
    • The Philistines said they had come to do to Samson as he had done to them.
11. 15:11
    • Three thousand men of Judah went down to the cleft of the rock of Etam.
    • They asked Samson whether he did not know that the Philistines ruled over them.
    • They asked Samson what he had done to them.
    • Samson said that as the Philistines had done to him, so he had done to them.
12. 15:12
    • The men of Judah told Samson they had come down to bind him.
    • The men of Judah said they would hand him over to the Philistines.
    • Samson told them to swear to him that they would not fall upon him themselves.
13. 15:13
    • The men of Judah said no.
    • They said they would bind him securely and hand him over to the Philistines.
    • They said they would not kill him.
    • They bound Samson with two new ropes.
    • They brought him up from the rock.
14. 15:14
    • Samson came to Lehi.
    • The Philistines shouted as they met him.
    • The Spirit of the LORD came powerfully upon Samson.
    • The ropes on his arms became like flax burned with fire.
    • His bonds dissolved off his hands.
15. 15:15
    • Samson found a fresh jawbone of a donkey.
    • Samson reached out his hand and took it.
    • Samson struck a thousand men with it.
16. 15:16
    • Samson said that with the jawbone of a donkey he had made heaps upon heaps.
    • Samson said that with the jawbone of a donkey he had struck a thousand men.
17. 15:17
    • When Samson finished speaking, he threw the jawbone out of his hand.
    • Samson called that place Ramath-lehi.
18. 15:18
    • Samson was very thirsty.
    • Samson called on the LORD.
    • Samson said that the LORD had given this great deliverance by the hand of his servant.
    • Samson asked whether he must now die of thirst.
    • Samson asked whether he would fall into the hand of the uncircumcised.
19. 15:19
    • God split open the hollow place at Lehi; the text can mean either the place called Lehi or the jawbone.
    • Water came out of it.
    • Samson drank.
    • His spirit returned to him and he revived.
    • For this reason the spring was named En-hakkore.
    • The spring is in Lehi to this day.
20. 15:20
    • Samson judged Israel twenty years, in the days of the Philistines.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

15:1

This kind of marriage left the wife living in her father's household, with the husband visiting her there; a young goat was a normal gift to bring on such a visit. Samson had stormed out during the wedding feast (chapter 14), which her father had taken as a permanent break.

15:2

At the wedding feast in chapter 14, thirty local men had been assigned to Samson as companions; the one meant here filled roughly the role of a best man. Handing the bride to him was a legal act by the father, who assumed the marriage was over.

15:3

The Philistines were a people settled on the coastal plain to the southwest of Israel, organized around five cities (Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, and Gath). In this period they controlled the neighboring Israelite territory.

15:4

The Hebrew word covers both foxes and jackals. Jackals run in packs and were common in the region, which is why many translators prefer them here; foxes hunt alone and would be nearly impossible to trap three hundred of.

15:5

Wheat harvest was around May or June. The cut grain lay stacked in the fields waiting to be threshed, and the standing grain had not yet been cut, so a fire took the whole year's food supply. Burning vineyards and olive trees was worse still: both take years to grow back, so the loss ran well beyond one season.

15:6

Burning was used as a form of execution. The Philistines kill the woman and her father to turn Samson's anger away from themselves, and it is the exact fate her countrymen had threatened her with in chapter 14 to make her get the answer to Samson's riddle out of him.

15:7

Feuds of this period ran on the idea that a wrong had to be answered with a matching blow, after which the account was closed. Samson's "after that I will cease" claims he is taking one final, balancing act of revenge, but each side keeps seeing itself as the one owed a last blow, which is why the cycle in this chapter does not stop.

15:8

The King James "hip and thigh" translates a Hebrew phrase, literally "leg upon thigh," whose precise sense is no longer known. It is generally understood as a stock expression for a thorough and brutal beating.

15:9

Lehi is the Hebrew word for "jawbone." The name is introduced here before the events that the chapter later connects it to.

15:11

Judah was the largest of the Israelite tribes, and at this time was living under Philistine domination. The three thousand men are not coming to rescue Samson; they treat him as a private troublemaker whose feud endangers them all.

15:12

"Deliver thee into the hand of" simply means hand you over. Samson's demand is not a formality: an oath sworn between Israelites called on God as witness and was treated as binding, so once they swear it he can let himself be tied up without expecting a knife in the back from his own people.

15:13

New ropes were unused and therefore at full strength, the point of mentioning them is that these were not worn or frayed.

15:14

"Came on him with great power" translates a Hebrew verb meaning to rush or burst upon someone. Throughout Judges it marks a sudden surge of physical strength for a particular act, not a permanent condition. Flax is the plant fiber spun into linen thread and cord; a thread of flax that has been burned falls apart at a touch.

15:15

A fresh jawbone was still moist rather than dried out, so it would not shatter on impact. Picking up part of a carcass also broke the terms of the Nazirite vow described in chapter 13, which forbade contact with anything dead.

15:16

The saying is a pun in Hebrew that cannot survive translation: the word for donkey (chamor) sounds almost identical to the word for a heap or pile (chomer). "With the jawbone of a donkey, a heap, two heaps."

15:17

Ramath-lehi means "the height of the jawbone" or "the throwing of the jawbone", the Hebrew allows both, since the same root can mean to cast something away.

15:18

Circumcision was practiced by the Israelites and by several neighboring peoples, but not by the Philistines. "The uncircumcised" therefore worked as a standard Israelite label, and insult, for them specifically.

15:19

The Hebrew is deliberately ambiguous: the same word, lehi, is both the place name and the word for "jawbone," which is why the King James has God splitting open a hollow in the jaw itself. The word for the hollow place means a mortar, a bowl-shaped basin in rock. En-hakkore means "spring of the one who called," pointing back to Samson's cry for help. "His strength came back" is literally "his breath returned to him."

15:20

A judge in this book is not a court official but a leader raised up to free Israel from an oppressor and then lead the people. Chapter 13 says the Philistine domination lasted forty years, so Samson's twenty years fall inside that period rather than ending it.