1And it came to be, after some time, in the days of wheat harvest, that Shimshon visited his wife with a young goat. And he said, “Let me go in to my wife, into her room.” But her father would not permit him to go in.

2And her father said, “Indeed, I thought that you hated her intensely; so I gave her to your companion. Is not her younger sister better than she? Please, take her instead.”

3And Shimshon said to them, “This time I am blameless regarding the Philistines if I do evil to them!”

4And Shimshon went and caught three hundred foxes, and took torches, and turned them tail to tail, and put a torch between each pair of tails,

5and set the torches on fire, and sent them out into the standing grain of the Philistines, and burned up both the shocks and the standing grain, even the vineyards and olive-trees.

6And the Philistines said, “Who did this?” And they answered, “Shimshon, the son-in-law of the Timnite, because he took away his wife and gave her to his companion.” Then the Philistines went up and burned her and her father with fire.

7And Shimshon said to them, “Though you do this, yet I shall take revenge on you, and after that I cease.”

8And he smote them hip and thigh, a great slaughter, and went down and dwelt in the cleft of the rock of Ěytam.

9The Philistines then went up and encamped in Yehuḏah, and spread out against Leḥi.

10And the men of Yehuḏah said, “Why have you come up against us?” And they answered, “We have come up to bind Shimshon, to do to him as he has did to us.”

11Then three thousand men of Yehuḏah went down to the cleft of the rock of Ěytam and said to Shimshon, “Do you not know that the Philistines are rulers over us? Why have you have done this to us?” And he said to them, “As they did to me, so I did to them.”

12And they said to him, “We have come down to bind you, to give you into the hand of the Philistines.” And Shimshon said to them, “Swear to me not to fall on me yourselves.”

13And they spoke to him, saying, “No, but we are certainly going to bind you, and shall give you into their hand but certainly not kill you.” So they bound him with two new ropes and brought him up from the rock.

14When he came to Leḥi, the Philistines came shouting to meet him. And the Spirit of יהוה came mightily upon him. And the ropes that were on his arms became like flax that is burned with fire, and his bonds broke loose from his hands.

15And he found a fresh jawbone of a donkey, and put out his hand and took it, and smote a thousand men with it.

16And Shimshon said, “With the jawbone of a donkey, one heap, two heaps, with the jawbone of a donkey I have smitten a thousand men!”

17And it came to be, when he had ended speaking, that he threw the jawbone from his hand, and called that place Ramath Leḥi.

18And he became very thirsty, and cried out to יהוה and said, “You have given this great deliverance by the hand of Your servant. And now, am I to die of thirst and fall into the hand of the uncircumcised?”

19And Elohim split the hollow place that is in Leḥi, and water came out, and he drank. And his spirit came back, and he revived. So he called its name Ěn Haqqore, which is in Leḥi to this day.

20And he ruled Yisra’ĕl twenty years in the days of the Philistines.