Judges 15:9-20

Evangelical Heritage Version

⁹ Meanwhile the Philistines went up, set up camp in Judah, and occupied the territory around Lehi. ¹⁰ The men of Judah asked, “Why have you come up against us?”

They said, “We have come up to tie up Samson—to do to him as he did to us.”

¹¹ So three thousand men from Judah went down to the cleft in the Rock of Etam. They said to Samson, “Don’t you know that the Philistines are now ruling over us? So what is this you have done to us?”

Samson answered them, “As they did to me, so I did to them.”

¹² They said to him, “We have come down to tie you up and hand you over to the Philistines.”

Samson said to them, “Swear to me that you will not attack me yourselves.”

¹³ They said to him, “We will not. We will indeed tie you up and hand you over to them, but we will not kill you.” Then they tied him up with two new ropes and brought him up from the rock.

¹⁴ When Samson came to Lehi, the Philistines came to meet him, shouting a war cry. But then the Spirit of the Lord rushed upon Samson, and the ropes around his shoulders were like flax charred by fire, and the ropes melted off his wrists. ¹⁵ Samson found the fresh jawbone of a donkey, reached out his hand, and took it. With it he struck down a thousand men.

¹⁶ Samson said:

¹⁷ When he finished speaking, he threw the jawbone out of his hand, and he named the place Ramath Lehi.^[b]

¹⁸ Then he became very thirsty, and he called to the Lord, “You placed this great victory into the hand of your servant. Shall I now die of thirst and fall into the hands of the uncircumcised?” ¹⁹ Then God split the hollow that is in Lehi, and water came out of it. Samson drank, his vitality was restored, and he was revived. For this reason he called the place En Hakkore,^[c] which remains in Lehi to this day.

²⁰ Samson judged Israel for twenty years in the days of the Philistines.