Judges 15:9-20

Living Bible

⁹ The Philistines in turn sent a huge posse into Judah and raided Lehi.

¹⁰ “Why have you come here?” the men of Judah asked.

And the Philistines replied, “To capture Samson and do to him as he has done to us.”

¹¹ So three thousand men of Judah went down to get Samson at the cave in the rock of Etam.

“What are you doing to us?” they demanded of him. “Don’t you realize that the Philistines are our rulers?”

But Samson replied, “I only paid them back for what they did to me.”

^12-13 “We have come to capture you and take you to the Philistines,” the men of Judah told him.

“All right,” Samson said, “but promise me that you won’t kill me yourselves.”

“No,” they replied, “we won’t do that.”

So they tied him with two new ropes and led him away. ¹⁴ As Samson and his captors arrived at Lehi, the Philistines shouted with glee; but then the strength of the Lord came upon Samson, and the ropes with which he was tied snapped like thread and fell from his wrists! ¹⁵ Then he picked up a donkey’s jawbone that was lying on the ground and killed a thousand Philistines with it. ^16-17 Tossing away the jawbone, he remarked,

(The place has been called “Jawbone Hill” ever since.)

¹⁸ But now he was very thirsty and he prayed to the Lord and said, “You have given Israel such a wonderful deliverance through me today! Must I now die of thirst and fall to the mercy of these heathen?” ¹⁹ So the Lord caused water to gush out from a hollow in the ground, and Samson’s spirit was revived as he drank. Then he named the place “The Spring of the Man Who Prayed,” and the spring is still there today.

²⁰ Samson was Israel’s leader for the next twenty years, but the Philistines still controlled the land.