The Judges · c. 1080 BC
Chapter 7
Samson
He said to them,“Out of the eater came out food.Out of the strong came out sweetness.”They couldn’t in three days declare the riddle.
For parents
Samson tears a young lion apart with his bare hands (Judges 14:5–6) and kills thirty men of Ashkelon and takes their clothes (14:19). The Philistines threaten to burn his wife and her father’s house (14:15). Later Samson sets foxes loose with burning torches between their tails (15:4–5), and the Philistines burn his wife and her father to death (15:6). Samson kills a great many Philistines (15:8), and then a thousand men with a donkey’s jawbone (15:15–16). It is all told plainly, without detail.
Once again the did what was evil in the ’s eyes, and the Lord handed them over to the for forty years.
There was a man from , from the clan of the , whose name was . His wife had no children. She had never been able to have any.
The appeared to the woman. “Listen,” he said to her. “You have never been able to have children, and you have none. But you will become pregnant and have a son. So now, please be careful. Don’t drink wine or any strong drink, and don’t eat anything . Look, you are going to be pregnant and give birth to a son. No razor is to touch his head, because the child will be a to God from before he is born. And he will begin to rescue Israel from the Philistines’ power.”
The woman came to her husband with the news. “A man of God came to me,” she said. “His face was like the face of the angel of God. It was frightening to look at. I didn’t ask him where he was from, and he didn’t give his name.
“But he told me, ‘You will become pregnant and have a son. So now don’t drink wine or any strong drink, and don’t eat anything unclean, because the child will be a Nazirite to God from before he is born until the day he dies.’”
Then Manoah prayed to the Lord. “Please, Lord,” he said, “let the man of God you sent come to us again. Let him teach us what to do for the boy who is going to be born.”
God listened to Manoah. The angel of God came back to the woman as she sat out in the field. But her husband Manoah wasn’t with her.
The woman ran quickly to tell her husband. “Look!” she said to him. “The man who came to me before has appeared to me.”
Manoah got up and followed his wife to the man. “Are you the one who spoke to my wife?” he asked him.
“I am,” he said.
Manoah said, “Now let what you said come true! How should the boy live, and what will his work be?”
The Lord’s angel said to Manoah, “The woman must be careful about everything I told her. She is not to eat anything that comes from the grapevine. She is not to drink wine or any strong drink, or eat anything unclean. She must keep everything I commanded her.”
“Please stay with us,” Manoah said to the Lord’s angel, “while we cook a young goat for you.”
The Lord’s angel said to Manoah, “Even if you make me stay, I won’t eat your bread. If you are going to prepare a , it must be offered to the Lord.” Manoah didn’t know that this was the Lord’s angel.
Manoah asked the Lord’s angel, “What is your name? Then, when your words come true, we can honor you.”
The Lord’s angel answered him, “Why are you asking my name? It is wonderful. No one can understand it.”
So Manoah took the young goat with the and offered it to the Lord on the rock. Then, as Manoah and his wife watched, the angel did an amazing thing.
As the flame went up from the toward the sky, the Lord’s angel went up in the altar’s flame. Manoah and his wife saw it, and they fell face down on the ground.
The Lord’s angel didn’t appear to Manoah or his wife again. Then Manoah knew that he was the Lord’s angel.
“We are sure to die,” Manoah said to his wife, “because we have seen God.”
But his wife said to him, “If the Lord meant to kill us, he wouldn’t have accepted a burnt offering and a meal offering from us. He wouldn’t have shown us all these things, and he wouldn’t have told us things like these now.”
The woman had a son, and she named him . The child grew up, and the Lord blessed him. The Lord’s Spirit began to stir him at , between Zorah and .
Samson went down to , and there in Timnah he saw a woman, a Philistine woman.
He came back up and told his father and his mother. “I’ve seen a woman in Timnah,” he said, “a Philistine woman. Now get her for me as my wife.”
His father and his mother said to him, “Isn’t there a woman among your relatives’ daughters, or among all my people? Do you have to go and take a wife from the Philistines?”
Samson said to his father, “Get her for me. I like her.”
His father and his mother didn’t know that this came from the Lord, because he was looking for a chance to act against the Philistines. The Philistines were ruling over Israel at that time.
Then Samson went down to Timnah with his father and his mother. He came to the vineyards of Timnah, and suddenly a young lion roared at him.
The Lord’s Spirit came on him with power, and with his bare hands he tore the lion apart, the way someone might tear apart a young goat. He didn’t tell his father or his mother what he had done.
He went down and talked with the woman, and Samson liked her.
Some time later he went back to marry her, and he went over to look at the lion’s body. Inside it there was a swarm of bees, and honey.
He took the honey in his hands and went on his way, eating as he went. He gave some to his father and mother when he got back to them, and they ate it. He didn’t tell them that he had taken the honey out of the lion’s body.
His father went down to the woman, and Samson held a feast there, as young men did in those days. When they saw him, they brought thirty companions to be with him.
Samson said to them, “Let me tell you a riddle. Find the answer and tell me before the seven days of the feast are over, and you’ll get thirty linen garments and thirty sets of clothes from me. But if you can’t tell me, you will owe me thirty linen garments and thirty sets of clothes.”
“Tell us your riddle,” they said to him. “Let’s hear it.”
He said to them:
“Out of the eater came food.Out of the strong came sweetness.”
For three days they couldn’t work out the riddle.
On the seventh day they said to Samson’s wife, “Sweet-talk your husband into telling us the riddle, or we will burn you and your father’s house. Did you invite us here to make us poor? Is that it?”
Samson’s wife cried in front of him. “You just hate me,” she said. “You don’t love me. You told my people a riddle, and you haven’t told me the answer.”
“I haven’t told my father or my mother,” he said to her. “Why should I tell you?”
She cried in front of him for the seven days their feast lasted. She kept pressing him so hard that on the seventh day he told her. Then she told the answer to her people.
The men of the city had their answer for Samson on the seventh day, before the sun went down. “What is sweeter than honey?” they asked. “What is stronger than a lion?”
Samson answered them:
“If you hadn’t used my young cow to plow,you wouldn’t have found out my riddle.”
Then the Lord’s Spirit came on him with power. He went down to and killed thirty men there. He took what they had and gave the sets of clothes to the men who had answered the riddle. Burning with anger, he went back up to his father’s house.
And Samson’s wife was given to his companion, the one who had been his friend.
Some time later, when the wheat was being harvested, Samson went to see his wife, taking a young goat with him. “I’m going into my wife’s room to be with her,” he said. But her father wouldn’t let him go in.
Her father said, “I was sure you really hated her, so I gave her to your companion. Isn’t her younger sister more beautiful than she is? Please, take her instead.”
Samson said to them, “This time I won’t be to blame when I harm the Philistines.”
Samson went out and caught three hundred foxes. He got torches, set the foxes in pairs tail to tail, and put a torch in the middle, between the two tails of every pair. When he had lit the torches, he let the foxes loose in the Philistines’ fields of grain. He burned up the bundles of cut grain stacked in the fields, the grain still standing, and the olive groves too.
The Philistines asked, “Who did this?”
“It was Samson, the son-in-law of the man from Timnah,” they were told. “He did it because the man took his wife and gave her to his companion.” Then the Philistines came up and burned her and her father to death.
Samson said to them, “If this is how you act, I will certainly take revenge on you, and after that I will stop.”
He attacked them fiercely and killed a great many of them. Then he went down and lived in the cave at .
Then the Philistines went up, camped in Judah, and spread out around .
The men of asked, “Why have you come up to attack us?”
“We have come up to tie up Samson,” the Philistines said, “and do to him what he did to us.”
Then three thousand men of Judah went down to the cave at Etam’s rock. “Don’t you know that the Philistines rule over us?” they asked Samson. “What have you done to us?”
He said to them, “I did to them what they did to me.”
They said to him, “We have come down to tie you up, so that we can hand you over to the Philistines.”
Samson said to them, “Swear to me that you won’t attack me yourselves.”
“No,” they told him. “We’ll tie you up tight and hand you over to them, but we won’t kill you.” They tied him with two new ropes and took him up from the rock.
When he reached Lehi, the Philistines met him with shouts. Then the Lord’s Spirit came on him with power. The ropes on his arms became like that has been burned in a fire, and the ties fell off his hands.
He found the jawbone of a donkey that had died not long before. He picked it up, and with it he killed a thousand men.
Then Samson said:
“With the jawbone of a donkey, heap after heap;with the jawbone of a donkey I have struck down a thousand men.”
When he finished speaking, he threw the jawbone away, and that place was named , which means “Jawbone Hill”.
He was very thirsty, and he called out to the Lord. “You have brought about this great rescue through me,” he said. “Am I going to die of thirst now, and fall into the hands of the uncircumcised?”
But God split open the hollow place at Lehi, and water came out of it. When he had drunk, his spirit came back to him, and he felt alive again. That is why it was named , which means “the spring of the one who called”. It is in Lehi to this day.
Samson Israel for twenty years, in the days when the Philistines ruled.