The big picture
Judges 15 is driven by the logic of retaliation. Samson returns to his wife and learns she has been given to another man. He answers by burning Philistine crops, vineyards, and olives with animals carrying firebrands. The Philistines then burn the woman and her father, fulfilling the very threat that had hung over the wedding feast. Samson retaliates again. When Philistine forces enter Judah, three thousand Judahites do not mobilize against their rulers but to bind Samson and surrender him. The Spirit comes mightily upon him, the cords fall away, and he strikes a thousand men with a fresh jawbone. Triumph is immediately followed by thirst, and Samson must cry to the LORD for life-giving water. The chapter ends by preserving both his extraordinary deliverance and his continuing dependence.
In this chapter
- Loss and Revenge Spread from Household to Harvest Judges 15:1-8
Samson returns with a gift expecting access to his wife and discovers that her father has given her to his companion.
- Judah Binds Its Deliverer, and God Preserves Him Judges 15:9-20
When the Philistines enter Judah seeking Samson, three thousand men of Judah go to meet him, but not to join his resistance.
Scripture beside the summary
Judges · King James Version · 20Judges 15:1-8
Loss and Revenge Spread from Household to Harvest
Samson returns with a gift expecting access to his wife and discovers that her father has given her to his companion. The father offers the younger sister instead, treating marriage as something that can be rearranged around male conflict. Samson answers the offense by burning Philistine grain, shocks, vineyards, and olive trees through a spectacular use of animals and firebrands. The destruction reaches far beyond the household dispute because crops carry the labor and food of an entire community. Philistine retaliation then targets the woman and her father, killing them by the very method earlier threatened at the feast. Samson responds with another declaration of vengeance and another violent attack. Each side can point to a prior wrong, but the sequence never repairs the original betrayal. It multiplies victims until household humiliation has become communal destruction.
Deep dive
Each party explains violence as a response to prior wrong. Samson says he is blameless before burning the harvest because his wife was taken. The Philistines answer property destruction by killing her and her father, the very harm earlier threatened at the wedding. Samson then announces another act of vengeance. The cycle creates new victims rather than repairing the first betrayal.
The text’s account of retaliation is descriptive, not a command to imitate Samson’s methods. Crops represent many households’ food and labor, while the woman is treated by men as an object in their contest. Teaching should keep her death visible and reject jokes about the spectacle of the firebrands. Judges is showing what escalating vengeance does to a community.
Words to trace: Samson, Philistines, father, wife, burnt, companion
Verse-by-verse path
- Judges 15:1
Wheat harvest fell in early summer, when the fields were at their driest. Samson brings a kid as a gift, the same present Judah promised Tamar when he took her for a prostitute on the road (Genesis 38:17). He means to go straight into the chamber as a husband.
- Judges 15:2
“Utterly hated” is a doubled verb, hating thou didst hate her, and “hate” is the marriage law’s word for divorce (Deuteronomy 24:3). The father took Samson’s angry departure (14:19) as a divorce. His offer of the younger sister recalls Laban, who swapped one daughter for another (Genesis 29:25–26).
- Judges 15:3
“More blameless” is niqqeti, “I am clear”, free of guilt. Samson declares himself innocent before he acts, and calls what he is about to do “a displeasure”, raah, harm. He sets the moral account in his own favour in advance.
- Judges 15:4
“Foxes” is shualim, which can also mean jackals, animals that live in packs and would be easier to trap in large numbers. Three hundred is the same number as Gideon’s chosen men (7:6). Tying them in pairs made each firebrand run erratically across the fields.
- Judges 15:5
Shocks, standing corn, vineyards and olives cover the three staples of the land, grain, wine and oil, the harvest Deuteronomy 7:13 promised to bless. The Roman poet Ovid describes a spring festival at which foxes with burning torches tied to them were let loose (Fasti 4.681–712), a curious parallel from another world.
- Judges 15:6
“Who hath done this?” is the question the men of Ophrah asked after Gideon tore down Baal’s altar in the night (6:29). The Philistines identify Samson by his marriage, “the son in law of the Timnite”, and punish the in laws instead of the man.
- Judges 15:7
“After that I will cease” is a promise to end the feud once he has been avenged, a promise the rest of his life does not keep. Lamech’s boast of vengeance, “If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold”, is the Bible’s first picture of revenge that multiplies (Genesis 4:23–24).
- Judges 15:8
“Hip and thigh” is literally “leg upon thigh”, perhaps a wrestling term for a crushing defeat, and the source of the English phrase “to smite hip and thigh”. “The top of the rock Etam” is literally “the cleft of the rock”, a cave or fissure in a cliff where Samson went to ground.
Judges 15:1-8
King James Version1But 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.
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.
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.
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.
Judges 15:9-20
Judah Binds Its Deliverer, and God Preserves Him
When the Philistines enter Judah seeking Samson, three thousand men of Judah go to meet him, but not to join his resistance. Their question reveals how completely domination has been normalized: “Knowest thou not that the Philistines are rulers over us?” They bind Samson with new cords and hand him over, provided they will not kill him themselves. At Lehi the Spirit comes mightily upon him, the cords fall away like burned flax, and a fresh jawbone becomes the instrument through which a thousand Philistines fall. Samson’s boast over the jawbone is immediately followed by severe thirst. Suddenly the strong man is helpless enough to fear dying after the victory. He calls on the LORD, receives water, revives, and continues. Judges places extraordinary power and elementary dependence side by side. Strength can break bonds, but Samson still cannot provide his own next drink.
Deep dive
Judah’s question reveals accommodation to oppression: “Knowest thou not that the Philistines are rulers over us?” They mobilize in great numbers not to resist Philistia but to deliver a fellow Israelite. Samson agrees on the condition that they will not kill him themselves. Israel’s fragmentation is so deep that its strength serves the oppressor’s order.
The victory song about the jawbone celebrates Samson’s feat, but thirst immediately exposes his dependence. He fears dying and falling into uncircumcised hands after the triumph. God opens a hollow place and revives him. Extraordinary strength does not make Samson self-sustaining. The chapter ends by noting twenty years of judging during Philistine rule, not the complete deliverance promised only as a beginning.
Words to trace: hand, Philistines, Lehi, Samson, bind, jawbone
Verse-by-verse path
- Judges 15:9
Lehi means “jawbone”. The place is called by that name before the event that explains it has happened; the account uses the name its readers knew.
- Judges 15:10
“To do to him as he hath done to us” is the language of exact retaliation. Samson will answer the men of Judah with the same logic in the next verse: each side describes its violence as a repayment.
- Judges 15:11
“What is this that thou hast done unto us?” is the question Pharaoh put to Abram (Genesis 12:18). Samson’s reply, “As they did unto me, so have I done unto them”, echoes Adoni-bezek’s confession, “as I have done, so God hath requited me” (1:7), in the book’s first chapter.
- Judges 15:12
Judah, the tribe God had sent up first against the Canaanites (1:2), now sends three thousand men to hand an Israelite over to the Philistines. “Fall upon me” is paga, to strike: Samson will not fight his own people, but he wants their oath that they will not kill him.
- Judges 15:13
“New cords” are fresh ropes, untried and strong. Delilah will try the same thing, binding him “with new ropes that never were occupied” (16:11), with the same result. The men of Judah keep their oath: they bind him but do not kill him.
- Judges 15:14
“Shouted against him” is the war cry, teruah, the shout Israel raised at Jericho. The cords melt “as flax that was burnt with fire”: the man who burned the Philistines’ fields now burns off their bonds, and the fire image runs on from verse 5.
- Judges 15:15
“New” here is teriyyah, fresh or moist: a jawbone from a recently dead ass, heavy and not yet brittle. It is also a carcass, and the Nazirite’s hand closes on it. “Put forth his hand, and took it” is the gesture of Jael reaching for the peg (5:26).
- Judges 15:16
The couplet is a pun: chamor means “ass” and also “heap”, so “with the jawbone of an ass (chamor), a heap (chamor), two heaps”. Samson celebrates his victory in a two line song, with himself as the only subject.
- Judges 15:17
Ramath-lehi can mean “the height of the jawbone”, but Hebrew ramah also sounds like the verb for throwing, and Samson has just “cast away” the jawbone. The place name remembers the throw.
- Judges 15:18
This is the first time Samson calls on the LORD. He calls himself “thy servant” and the victory “this great deliverance”, teshuah, the word Moses used at the sea: “see the salvation of the LORD” (Exodus 14:13). The thousand dead and the dry throat come in the same hour.
- Judges 15:19
“An hollow place that was in the jaw” is maktesh, a mortar or basin; since Lehi is the name of the place, many take it as a hollow in the rock at Lehi, not in the bone. “His spirit came again” is said of Jacob when he heard Joseph was alive (Genesis 45:27). En-hakkore means “the spring of the one who called”.
- Judges 15:20
The same notice, twenty years “in the days of the Philistines”, is repeated at 16:31, after his death. It reads here like the close of an account, and the next chapter adds the last and most famous part of his life.
Judges 15:9-20
King James Version9Then 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
20And he judged Israel in the days of the Philistines twenty years.
Questions to keep in mind while reading
- Track who acts, who speaks, who is affected, and what changes.
- Notice repeated promises, failures, rescues, and consequences.
- Do not assume the account approves every action that is reported.
Text first
Where readers differ
The chapter summary begins with what the passage says and how its parts fit together. It does not assume one denomination has already settled every question. Where a conclusion depends on a tradition, literary theory, or historical reconstruction, that dependence is named openly.
The KJV text is presented first. Interpretive conclusions are labeled, and differences are introduced only when they help a reader understand why serious communities do not always reach the same answer.
Comparative interpretive notes for this chapter are in preparation. Until reviewed notes are ready, this page separates the KJV text from summary and application without claiming that serious readers agree on every question.
Questions beneath the surface
- What account of God, human freedom, responsibility, and the good life emerges from Judges 15?
- Which tension does the chapter refuse to resolve quickly?
- What changes when the chapter is read as part of the whole canon rather than as an isolated moral lesson?
- Where might a sincere reader confuse a familiar tradition with something the text states directly?
Questions for serious personal contemplation
These open-ended questions make room for tension, honest response, prayer, and conclusions that remain accountable to the chapter.
Observe without rushing
What part of Judges 15 makes you stop, feel unsettled, or feel surprised, and why?
Which detail in the passage would be easiest to overlook? How does that detail change your understanding?
Where do you see tension between what happens and this focus: Judges 15 develops its own movement around Philistines, Samson, hand, Lehi, bind?
What important question does the passage leave open instead of resolving quickly?
Examine your inner life honestly
Which person, response, fear, or desire in the passage feels most like your own life right now?
What assumption about God, other people, or yourself does this text challenge?
Which part would you rather soften, avoid, or explain away too quickly? What might that reaction reveal?
If this Scripture could ask you one direct question, what do you think it would ask?
Respond with wisdom and courage
What do you need to remember, confess, grieve, thank God for, or trust after reading this passage?
How might another faithful person read this situation differently without ignoring the text?
What obedient response would be costly, uncomfortable, or slow, yet still faithful to Scripture?
What question will you carry into prayer this week, and which verses will you keep in front of you?
Music and video connected to the passage
Related media appears when its Scripture reference overlaps this study. Music and video can illuminate a theme while the biblical text remains the foundation.
