Judges 15
Samson retaliates against the Philistines with three hundred foxes bearing torches, is handed over by his own people at Lehi, and kills a thousand with a donkey's jawbone.
Summary
After a time, Samson goes to visit his wife with a young goat, but her father will not let him in — I really thought you utterly hated her, so I gave her to your companion. Samson says: this time I will be innocent in regard to the Philistines when I do them harm. He catches three hundred foxes, takes torches, and ties the foxes tail to tail with a torch between each pair of tails. He lights the torches and releases the foxes into the standing grain of the Philistines, burning the grain and the shocks and the olive orchards. The Philistines ask who did this. When they learn it was Samson, motivated by the giving away of his wife, they go up and burn her and her father with fire. Samson says: if this is what you do, I will surely get my revenge on you, and only then will I stop. He strikes them with great slaughter. Then he goes down and stays in the cleft of the rock of Etam.
The Philistines go up and make a raid on Judah and spread out at Lehi. The men of Judah ask: why have you come up against us? They say: to bind Samson, to do to him as he did to us. Three thousand men of Judah go to the rock of Etam and say to Samson: do you not know that the Philistines are rulers over us? What then is this that you have done to us? He says: as they did to me, so I have done to them. They say: we have come down to bind you, that we may give you into the hands of the Philistines. He makes them swear they will not kill him themselves, then lets himself be bound with two new ropes. When they bring him to Lehi, the Philistines come shouting to meet him. The Spirit of the Lord rushes upon him and the ropes become as flax burned with fire and his bonds melt off his hands. He finds a fresh jawbone of a donkey, picks it up, and strikes down a thousand men. He is very thirsty and calls out to the Lord, who opens a spring at Lehi. He judges Israel for twenty years in the days of the Philistines.
- Judges 1Chapter 1 functions as a historiographical preface to the whole book, cataloguing the success or failure of each tribe to dispossess the Canaanites after Joshua's death.
- Judges 2Chapter 2 is the hermeneutical key to Judges.
- Judges 3Chapter 3 introduces the judge cycle in action for the first time.
- Judges 4Chapter 4 is the prose account of the same events that chapter 5 will sing.
- Judges 5The Song of Deborah in chapter 5 is widely considered one of the oldest pieces of Hebrew poetry in the entire Bible, possibly dating to the twelfth century BCE, nearly contemporaneous with the events it describes.
- Judges 6Chapter 6 is the opening of the Gideon narrative, which runs through chapter 8 and is the longest major-judge story in the book.
- Judges 7Chapter 7 is the central action of the Gideon narrative and one of the most memorable military scenes in the book.
- Judges 8Chapter 8 is the darkest portion of the Gideon narrative.
- Judges 9Chapter 9 is the longest chapter in Judges and the only episode in the book devoted to an anti-judge — a man who makes himself king by violence and holds it for exactly three years.
- Judges 10Chapter 10 performs two functions.
- Judges 11Chapter 11 is one of the most morally complex chapters in the Hebrew Bible.
- Judges 12Chapter 12 begins with a conflict that is structurally parallel to the Ephraimite quarrel after Gideon's battle in chapter 8, but this time Jephthah's response is not diplomacy — it is war.
- Judges 13Chapter 13 is the birth narrative of Samson, and it is the most elaborate annunciation scene in Judges.
- Judges 14Chapter 14 introduces the adult Samson and establishes the pattern that will govern the rest of his narrative: a desire for a Philistine woman, a display of supernatural strength, a riddle or trap, betrayal by intimacy.
- Judges 15Chapter 15 escalates the private vendetta between Samson and the Philistines into a series of increasingly spectacular acts of violence.
- Judges 16Chapter 16 is the climax and conclusion of the Samson narrative.
- Judges 17Chapter 17 begins the two-part appendix with which Judges closes, and the shift in tone is immediate.
- Judges 18Chapter 18 is the first of the book's two closing appendices.
- Judges 19Chapter 19 is one of the most disturbing chapters in the Hebrew Bible, and the text makes no attempt to soften it.
- Judges 20Chapter 20 is the longest military account in Judges and is remarkable for what it shows about what has gone wrong with Israel as a political and moral community.
- Judges 21Chapter 21 closes the book and extends the moral horror of chapter 19-20 in a different register: the horror of improvised solutions to self-inflicted catastrophe.