Judges 15
Judges 15 opens with a man coming home to a marriage that is no longer his. Samson arrives in the time of wheat harvest with a gift for his wife, only to be barred at the door by her father, who has already given her to another and now offers her younger sister instead (vv. 1-2). What follows is a chain of fire. Samson catches three hundred foxes, ties them tail to tail with firebrands between, and turns them loose into the standing corn, the vineyards, and the olives - the food and wealth of a whole region (vv. 4-5). The Philistines answer fire with fire, burning the woman and her father (v. 6); Samson answers again with a great slaughter (vv. 7-8). The cycle of personal vengeance turns, and it consumes the very people it was meant to protect.3
The middle of the chapter is its darkest turn, and it is not about the enemy at all. When the Philistines press into Judah, the men of Judah do not rally to the deliverer God has raised; they go down to bind him. Knowest thou not that the Philistines are rulers over us? what is this that thou hast done unto us? (v. 11). Three thousand of their own come to deliver Samson into the hand of the oppressor - fear accomplishing what the enemy never could. Samson lets himself be bound, asking only that his own people swear not to kill him. He is led up from the rock, tied with two new cords, abandoned by the nation he was sent to save.
Then the chapter lifts. The Spirit of the LORD came mightily upon him (v. 14); the cords burn away like flax, and with the jawbone of an ass he strikes down a thousand men, naming the place Ramath-lehi. But the victory leaves him spent and parched, and here the strong man finally prays: now shall I die for thirst? (v. 18). God splits a hollow place, water flows, Samson revives, and the spring is named En-hakkore - the well of him that cried. The closing line is quiet and strange: he judged Israel twenty years, a deliverer the people never quite followed.2
Tap any highlighted phrase to jump to the commentary that unpacks it.
Judges 15:1-8The Foxes and the Firebrand
1But it came to pass within a while after, in the time of wheat harvest, that Samson visited his wife with a kid; and he said, I will go in to my wife into the chamber. But her father would not suffer him to go in. 2And her father said, I verily thought that thou hadst utterly hated her; therefore I gave her to thy companion: is not her younger sister fairer than she? take her, I pray thee, instead of her. 3And Samson said concerning them, Now shall I be more blameless than the Philistines, though I do them a displeasure.
The chapter opens on a tender, ordinary gesture turned to bitterness. Samson comes in the time of wheat harvest - a season of plenty and celebration - bringing a kid, a young goat, the customary gift of a husband returning to his wife. But the door is barred. Her father has given her to Samson's companion, the friend who stood with him at the wedding feast (14:20), and now reframes the whole matter as if Samson had cast her off in hatred: I verily thought that thou hadst utterly hated her. Then comes the sting dressed as kindness - is not her younger sister fairer than she? take her, I pray thee, instead. Samson is the one who was wronged, yet the wrong is laid at his feet. It is a small picture of how grievance grows: each side certain of its own innocence, each reading the other's motives in the worst possible light.
Samson's reply is the hinge of the section: Now shall I be more blameless than the Philistines, though I do them a displeasure (v. 3). He has already decided what he will do, and he reaches for justification first. In his own telling, whatever comes next is their fault - he will be the blameless one. This is the moral pattern the narrator lets us watch without comment: a man who always has a reason ready for his next act of violence, who casts retaliation as righteousness. The text does not pause to condemn him; it simply records the rationalization and then shows the fruit. There is something searchingly honest in how Scripture handles Samson. It neither hides his gifts nor sanitizes his motives. The Spirit will move through this man - and the man will still be a man who burns a harvest because a door was shut against him.
4And Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and took firebrands, and turned tail to tail, and put a firebrand in the midst between two tails. 5And when he had set the brands on fire, he let them go into the standing corn of the Philistines, and burnt up both the shocks, and also the standing corn, with the vineyards and olives.
Three hundred foxes. This is not a flash of temper; it is a campaign. The image is deliberately strange and vivid - a man catching three hundred wild creatures, binding them tail to tail in pairs, fixing a torch between each pair, and loosing them in terror through the fields. Frightened animals scatter and run, dragging fire through everything they touch. And the target is chosen with cold precision: the standing corn… the shocks… the vineyards and olives. Grain in the field, grain already harvested and stacked, the vines, the olive trees that take a generation to grow - the whole economy of a region in a single night. This is the season of harvest turned to ash. What began as a private quarrel over a marriage has become war on a people's food, their wealth, their year to come. Samson's strength has never been merely raw; here it is patient, inventive, and devastating.
6Then the Philistines said, Who hath done this? And they answered, Samson, the son in law of the Timnite, because he had taken his wife, and given her to his companion. And the Philistines came up, and burnt her and her father with fire.
The fire circles back. In the previous chapter the Timnite woman had been threatened with exactly this - lest we burn thee and thy father's house with fire (14:15) - and out of that fear she had pressed Samson until he yielded the riddle. Now the very thing she dreaded comes upon her anyway, and from her own people. Samson's revenge was set in motion over this woman; and his revenge is what brings the flame to her door. This is what feuds do. The retaliation aimed at the guilty falls on the vulnerable; the one the violence was nominally about is consumed by it. The text states it flatly, without sentiment, and lets the horror land: burnt her and her father with fire. Every turn of the cycle widens the circle of the harmed, and the people who set fires are seldom the ones who pay for them.
7And Samson said unto them, Though ye have done this, yet will I be avenged of you, and after that I will cease. 8And he smote them hip and thigh with a great slaughter: and he went down and dwelt in the top of the rock Etam.
Samson's answer to the burning is another vow of revenge: yet will I be avenged of you, and after that I will cease (v. 7). He promises an end - just one more reprisal, and then he will stop - but the end is always set one act of vengeance further on. He smote them hip and thigh with a great slaughter, an old idiom for a thorough, no-quarter defeat, striking them utterly. Then he withdraws to the top of the rock Etam, a high refuge, and waits. The slaughter is real and the strength undeniable, yet for all his promising it never delivers the peace he claims it will. Each round leaves the feud hotter than before. A deliverer who fights only his own grievances can win battle after battle and still free no one - least of all himself.3
Judges 15:9-13Bound by Their Own
9Then the Philistines went up, and pitched in Judah, and spread themselves in Lehi. 10And the men of Judah said, Why are ye come up against us? And they answered, To bind Samson are we come up, to do to him as he hath done to us. 11Then three thousand men of Judah went to the top of the rock Etam, and said to Samson, Knowest thou not that the Philistines are rulers over us? what is this that thou hast done unto us? And he said unto them, As they did unto me, so have I done unto them.
Here is the moral low point of the whole episode, and it has nothing to do with the Philistines. The army comes up into Judah hunting one man, and Judah's response is not resistance but capitulation: three thousand men of Judah go down - not against the enemy, but against their own deliverer. Their words diagnose the sickness precisely: Knowest thou not that the Philistines are rulers over us? They name their bondage accurately and then defend it. The very thing God raised Samson to break, they have come to preserve. Three thousand men, mustered not for freedom but to keep the chains comfortable. Fear has done to Judah what the Philistine army never could: it has turned an oppressed people into the wardens of their own oppression, and made the man sent to free them look like the threat. Samson's reply is bleak in its simple symmetry - as they did unto me, so have I done unto them - the language of feud, now spoken to his own brothers who have come to bind him.
12And they said unto him, We are come down to bind thee, that we may deliver thee into the hand of the Philistines. And Samson said unto them, Swear unto me, that ye will not fall upon me yourselves. 13And they spake unto him, saying, No; but we will bind thee fast, and deliver thee into their hand: but surely we will not kill thee. And they bound him with two new cords, and brought him up from the rock.
Samson negotiates with his own countrymen as though they were a hostile power - because, for this moment, they are. He asks only one thing: swear unto me, that ye will not fall upon me yourselves. He will not raise his hand against his own people; he would sooner be handed to the enemy than fight Judah. Their answer is a study in the half-measures of fear: No… we will bind thee fast, and deliver thee into their hand: but surely we will not kill thee. They will not kill him themselves - they will only deliver him up to be killed. The conscience is kept clean by a technicality. Two new cords - strong, unfrayed, made to hold - bind the strongest man in the land, and he lets them, brought up from his high refuge by the hands of his brothers. There is a quiet, painful dignity in his restraint, and a quiet horror in their compromise. People will go to great lengths to feel innocent of a thing they are nonetheless doing.3
Judges 15:14-20The Well of Him That Cried
14And when he came unto Lehi, the Philistines shouted against him: and the Spirit of the LORD came mightily upon him, and the cords that were upon his arms became as flax that was burnt with fire, and his bands loosed from off his hands. 15And he found a new jawbone of an ass, and put forth his hand, and took it, and slew a thousand men therewith.
The Philistines see a bound man delivered to them and raise a shout of triumph - and in that very moment everything turns. The Spirit of the LORD came mightily upon him, and the two new cords meant to hold him melt away as flax that was burnt with fire. Flax burns instantly and leaves nothing; that is how completely the bonds fail. This is the recurring shape of Samson's life. The Spirit comes upon him again and again, not to reform his character or correct his motives, but to empower him for the work of striking the oppressor. The narrative makes no attempt to smooth the tension: a man whose heart never visibly changes is nonetheless the one upon whom the Spirit rushes. God's power moves through a vessel that remains, to the end, flawed. The deliverance is plainly God's doing, not Samson's strategy - the strongest man in the land is freed not by his own strength but by the Spirit of the LORD, in the instant his enemies are sure they have won.
In the moment after the Spirit comes, the weapon is simply there: a new jawbone of an ass. Not a sword, not a spear - the cast-off bone of a dead animal, an object of no value, ritually unclean, the kind of thing one steps over without a glance. Yet new, not dried and brittle, and so it holds. This is a thread that runs all through Scripture's deliverances: God works through the despised and the unlikely. Shamgar had only an ox goad (3:31); David would take five smooth stones and a sling. The instrument is humble to the point of absurdity, and the result is total - a thousand men. The disproportion is the point. When deliverance comes through such a tool, no one can mistake whose power did it. The jawbone did not make Samson strong; it was simply what lay near his hand when the strength of the LORD rushed upon him.
16And Samson said, With the jawbone of an ass, heaps upon heaps, with the jaw of an ass have I slain a thousand men. 17And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking, that he cast away the jawbone out of his hand, and called that place Ramath-lehi.
Samson breaks into a little chant of victory, and in Hebrew it is a pun - the word for donkey and the word for heap sound alike, so the line rings with wordplay: heaps upon heaps… with the jaw of an ass. The repetition of jawbone seems to dwell on the sheer incongruity of it: such a worthless thing, such devastation. There is bravado here, and the chapter does not pretend otherwise; the same man who was just freed by the Spirit now takes the victory onto his own lips, with no word of the One who gave it. Yet notice what he does the instant the boast is finished: he cast away the jawbone out of his hand. He does not keep it as a trophy or carry it for the next fight. The weapon served its single purpose and is dropped. And he names the place for it - Ramath-lehi, “the height,” or “the casting away, of the jaw” - so that the spot itself remembers both the victory and the bone left behind in the dust.3
18And he was sore athirst, and called on the LORD, and said, Thou hast given this great deliverance into the hand of thy servant: and now shall I die for thirst, and fall into the hand of the uncircumcised?
This is the first recorded prayer of Samson's life, and its timing is telling. Not in the heat of battle, not while bound by his enemies, but afterward - victorious, drained, and suddenly aware that a thousand slain men cannot get him a drink of water. He was sore athirst, and the great deliverer is undone by something as ordinary as a body's need. And so he calls. There is no confession here, no reformed heart on display; the prayer is blunt, even a little wounded: thou hast given this great deliverance… and now shall I die for thirst? Yet two things shine in it. He gives God the credit he had withheld in his boast - thou hast given - and he names himself thy servant. Stripped of strength, at the end of himself, this flawed man finally turns his face the right way. And the chapter records the cry without shame, as if to say: this, too, God receives. The strong are never so close to prayer as when their strength runs out.
19But God clave an hollow place that was in the jaw, and there came water thereout; and when he had drunk, his spirit came again, and he revived: wherefore he called the name thereof En-hakkore, which is in Lehi unto this day.
God answers, and the answer comes from the unlikeliest place of all: God clave an hollow place that was in the jaw - at Lehi, the place named for the jawbone - and water comes out. Not manna sent down, not a well someone had dug, but water split from dry rock at the very site of the slaughter. Samson drinks, and the language of revival is striking: his spirit came again, and he revived. The man who had emptied himself is filled again, not by his own resources but by God's provision in a barren place. And the spring does not vanish with the moment; it is there, the narrator says, unto this day - a permanent landmark, a place people would return to and remember. Whatever else this passage holds, it holds this plainly: when His servant was spent and crying out in a dry land, God split open the ground and gave him water. The God of Israel hears the cry of the fainting and answers it from sources no one would have looked to.2
20And he judged Israel in the days of the Philistines twenty years.
The chapter closes on a single, quiet line: he judged Israel in the days of the Philistines twenty years. Samson was a judge, a deliverer raised up like the others in this book - and yet how unlike them his tenure was. He led no army; the people never truly rose with him. The phrase in the days of the Philistines is pointed: the oppression continued all through his judgeship. He fought, and won, and freed no nation, because the nation would not be freed - the same men of Judah who bound him preferred their rulers to their rescue. Twenty years is a long time to be strong and largely alone, to resist when no one will resist beside you, to be feared and abandoned in equal measure. It is a portrait of a deliverer the people could not quite believe in - and a quiet ache running underneath, for the kind of Deliverer who would one day not only fight for His people but win their hearts to follow.
Further study
- The Hebrew text of Judges 15 with Rashi and other classical commentators side by side - useful for the verb tsalach (v. 14, the Spirit that “came mightily” or rushed upon Samson), for lechi (the “jaw” that names the place), and for the play on words in En-hakkore (v. 19), “the well of him that called.”
- Judges 15 ↔ 1 Corinthians 10 · John 7 & 19 · Psalm 138Intertextual BibleTraces the threads tying Judges 15 to the rest of Scripture - the Spirit rushing on a deliverer (v. 14) read with later judges and kings, water given from a dry place (v. 19) read alongside the rock in the wilderness of which that Rock was Christ (1 Cor. 10:4), and the cry of the thirsting (v. 18) read beside the One who said I thirst (John 19:28) and promised rivers of living water (John 7:38).
- Judges 15 - Translators' NotesNET BibleThe NET Bible's detailed footnotes on Judges 15 - the idiom behind Samson smiting the Philistines “hip and thigh” (v. 8), the meaning of the two new cords and the rock Etam (vv. 11-13), the much-discussed boast over the jawbone (v. 16), and the wordplay that names the place Ramath-lehi and the spring En-hakkore (vv. 17-19).
Where this echoes in Scripture
The Foxes and the Firebrand
- Romans 12:19Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves... Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.The opposite of Samson’s endless self-avenging in verses 3 and 7 - vengeance surrendered into God’s hands.
- Proverbs 24:29Say not, I will do so to him as he hath done to me: I will render to the man according to his work.The very logic Samson lives by - answering wrong for wrong - named and warned against.
- Genesis 4:23-24I have slain a man to my wounding... If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold.The escalating spiral of revenge, an ancient pattern that Samson’s “great slaughter” (v. 8) repeats.
- Matthew 5:38-39Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye... but I say unto you, That ye resist not evil.The deliverer to come overturns the eye-for-an-eye cycle that consumes the people of Judges 15.
Bound by Their Own
- John 1:11He came unto his own, and his own received him not.The deliverer rejected by his own people - as Judah rejects and binds Samson in verses 11-13.
- Matthew 27:2And when they had bound him, they led him away, and delivered him to Pontius Pilate the governor.A Deliverer bound and handed to the ruling power - the shadow Samson’s binding (v. 13) casts forward.
- John 11:48If we let him thus alone... the Romans shall come and take away both our place and nation.Fear of the ruling power driving a people to hand over their hope - the same fear that grips Judah (v. 11).
- Exodus 2:14Who made thee a prince and a judge over us?... And Moses feared.A deliverer spurned by the very people he would rescue - an old pattern repeated when Judah binds Samson.
The Well of Him That Cried
- 1 Corinthians 10:4and did all drink the same spiritual drink: for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ.Water from the rock for a thirsting people (v. 19) - read by the apostle as a figure of Christ Himself.
- John 7:37-38If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink... out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.The thirst answered at En-hakkore (vv. 18-19) opening toward the One who gives living water.
- John 19:28Jesus... saith, I thirst.The contrast to verse 18 - Samson is delivered from thirst by a cry; the Deliverer enters thirst to save.
- Psalm 34:6This poor man cried, and the LORD heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles.The truth the spring is named for - <em>En-hakkore</em>, the cry that God hears and answers (vv. 18-19).
- 2 Corinthians 4:7But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.The Spirit’s power working through a flawed man (v. 14) - the strength plainly God’s, not the vessel’s.