1Some time later, during the wheat harvest, Samson visited his wife, bringing a young goat for her. He said, “I want to go into my wife’s room.” But her father wouldn’t let him.
2Her father said, “I was certain you hated her, so I gave her to your best man. Isn't her younger sister more beautiful than she is? Please take her instead.”
3Samson told them, “This time I will be innocent when I harm the Philistines.”
4Samson went and caught three hundred foxes. He took torches, tied the foxes tail to tail, and put a torch between every two tails.
5When he lit the torches, he sent the foxes into the Philistines’ standing grain fields, burning up both the bundles of grain and the standing grain, as well as the olive groves.
6Then the Philistines asked, “Who did this?” They were told, “Samson, the son-in-law of the man from Timnah, because his wife was taken and given to his best man.” So the Philistines came up and burned her and her father with fire.
7Samson told them, “Since this is how you act, I swear I will get my revenge on you, and only after that will I stop.”
8He attacked them ferociously and slaughtered many. Then he went down and lived in a cave in the rock of Etam.
9Then the Philistines came up, camped in Judah, and spread out in Lehi.
10The men of Judah asked, “Why have you come up against us?” They replied, “We have come to tie up Samson and do to him what he has done to us.”
11So three thousand men of Judah went down to the cave in the rock of Etam and said to Samson, “Don’t you know that the Philistines rule over us? What have you done to us?” He told them, “I have done to them what they did to me.”
12They said to him, “We have come to tie you up and hand you over to the Philistines.” Samson replied, “Swear to me that you yourselves will not kill me.”
13They told him, "No, we will just tie you up securely and hand you over to them. We definitely won't kill you." So they tied him with two new ropes and brought him up from the rock.
14When he arrived at Lehi, the Philistines shouted as they met him. Then the Spirit of Yahweh came powerfully upon him, and the ropes on his arms became like burned flax, and his bonds fell off his hands.
15He found a fresh jawbone of a donkey, reached out, took it, and killed a thousand men with it.
16Samson said, "With a donkey's jawbone, I piled them up! With a donkey's jawbone, I killed a thousand men!"
17When he finished speaking, he threw the jawbone from his hand, and that place was named Ramath Lehi.
18He was very thirsty, so he called out to Yahweh, saying, "You have given me this great victory through your servant. Now, will I die of thirst and fall into the hands of the uncircumcised?"
19But God split open a hollow place in Lehi, and water came out. When he drank, his spirit returned, and he felt revived. That is why the place is still called En Hakkore, which is in Lehi, to this day.
20He led Israel for twenty years during the time of the Philistines.