Old/New Testament
The Twelfth Judge: Samson Versus the Philistines
Samson’s Birth
13 The people of Israel again committed evil in the eyes of the Lord, so the Lord gave them into the hands of the Philistines for forty years.
2 Now there was a certain man from Zorah, from the clan of the Danites, whose name was Manoah. His wife was barren. She had not given birth. 3 The Angel of the Lord[a] appeared to the woman and said to her, “Listen, you are barren and have not given birth, but you will become pregnant and give birth to a son. 4 Now, please be careful. Do not drink wine or beer,[b] and do not eat anything unclean. 5 Listen, you will become pregnant and give birth to a son. No razor is to touch his head, for the boy will be a Nazirite dedicated to God from his mother’s womb. He will begin to deliver Israel from the hand of the Philistines.”
6 The woman went and told her husband, “A man of God came to me, and he looked like an angel of God, very awesome. I did not ask where he was from, and he did not tell me his name. 7 But he did say to me, ‘Listen! You will be pregnant and give birth to a son. So now, do not drink wine or beer, and do not eat anything unclean, because the young man will be a Nazirite dedicated to God from his mother’s womb until the day of his death.’”
8 Then Manoah pleaded with the Lord, “Please, Lord, the man of God whom you sent—please let him come to us again, to teach us what we are to do for the young man who is to be born.”
9 God heard the voice of Manoah, and the Angel of God returned to the woman while she was sitting in the field. Once again her husband Manoah was not with her. 10 The woman ran quickly and told her husband. She said to him, “Come, see! The man who appeared to me came to me again today.”
11 Manoah then got up and followed his wife. He came to the man and said to him, “Are you the man who spoke to my wife?”
He answered, “I am.”
12 Manoah said, “Now, when your words come true, what will be the rule for the young man and his actions?”
13 The Angel of the Lord answered Manoah, “The woman must be careful concerning everything that I said to her. 14 She must not eat anything that comes from the grapevine. She must not drink wine or beer, and she must not eat any unclean thing. Everything that I commanded her she must observe.”
15 Manoah then said to the Angel of the Lord, “May we persuade you to stay, so that we may prepare a young goat for you?”
16 But the Angel of the Lord said to Manoah, “Even if you keep me here, I will not eat any of your food, but if you make a burnt offering, offer it up to the Lord.” (Manoah did not yet know that he was the Angel of the Lord.)
17 Then Manoah said to the Angel of the Lord, “What is your name, so that we can honor you when your words come true?”
18 The Angel of the Lord said to him, “Why do you ask about my name? It is wonderful.”[c]
19 Manoah took the young goat and the grain offering, and he offered them on the rock to the Lord, who did something wonderful as Manoah and his wife were watching. 20 As the flame rose from the altar toward the sky, the Angel of the Lord ascended upward from the altar in the flame. Manoah and his wife were watching, and they fell facedown to the ground. 21 The Angel of the Lord did not appear to Manoah and his wife again, but now Manoah knew that he was the Angel of the Lord.
22 Manoah said to his wife, “We will certainly die, because we have seen God.”
23 But his wife said to him, “If the Lord wanted to kill us, he would not have accepted a burnt offering and a grain offering from our hands, and he would not have shown us all these things, nor would he have let us hear this message at this time.”
24 The woman gave birth to a son, and she named him Samson. The boy grew, and the Lord blessed him. 25 The Spirit of the Lord began to move him at Mahaneh Dan, between Zorah and Eshtaol.
Samson’s Feats
14 Samson went down to Timnah. There he saw a young woman who was a Philistine. 2 He went back and told his father and his mother, “I saw a Philistine woman in Timnah. Now, get her for me as a wife.”
3 But his father and mother said to him, “Is there no suitable woman among the young women of your relatives and among all our people that you must go to take a wife from the uncircumcised Philistines?”
Samson insisted to his father, “No, get her for me—because, in my eyes, she is the right one.”
4 His father and mother did not know that this was from the Lord, who was seeking an opportunity to confront the Philistines, who were ruling Israel at this time.
5 So Samson and his father and mother went down to Timnah, and as they approached the vineyards at Timnah, suddenly a young lion came roaring to meet him. 6 At that moment the Spirit of the Lord powerfully rushed upon Samson, and he tore the young lion in two as if he were tearing apart a young goat. He did this with his bare hands. But he did not tell his father or his mother what he had done. 7 He went down and spoke to the woman. In the eyes of Samson, she was the right one.
8 After some days, when he returned to take her as his wife, he turned aside to look at the carcass of the lion, and to his surprise there was a swarm of bees and honey in the carcass of the lion! 9 So Samson scraped out some honey with his hands, and he ate it as he walked along. As he walked alongside his father and mother, he gave them some of the honey and they ate, but he did not tell them that he had scraped the honey out of the carcass of the lion.
10 His father met with the woman, and Samson held a wedding feast there, as young men were accustomed to do. 11 When the Philistines saw him, they selected thirty young men to serve as attendants.
12 Samson said to them, “Allow me to tell you a riddle. If you figure out the solution and tell me within the seven days of the feast, I will give to you thirty linen garments and thirty changes of clothing. 13 But if you are not able to tell me, you will give me thirty linen garments and thirty changes of clothing.”
So they said to him, “Tell your riddle. Let us hear it!”
14 Samson said to them,
Out of the eater comes something to eat.
Out of the strong comes something sweet.
But they were not able to solve the riddle for three days.
15 Then, on the fourth day,[d] they said to Samson’s wife, “Persuade your husband so that you can tell us the solution to the riddle, or we will set you on fire with the house of your father. You invited us in order to take our property, didn’t you?”
16 Samson’s wife cried on his shoulder and said, “You certainly hate me and do not love me. You told a riddle to my people, but you have not explained it to me!”
Samson said to her, “Look! I have not told even my father and my mother, and I should tell you?” 17 But she cried to him for the rest of the seven-day feast.[e] Finally on the seventh day he told her, because she kept nagging him. Then she explained the riddle to the Philistine young men.
18 So the men of the town said to Samson on the seventh day, just before the sun went down:
What is sweeter than honey,
and what is stronger than a lion?
But he said to them, “If you had not plowed with my heifer, you would not have solved my riddle.”
19 Then the Spirit of the Lord rushed upon him, and he went down to Ashkelon and struck down thirty men from there. Then he took the clothing that he stripped off them and gave the clothing to the men who had solved the riddle. He was burning with anger as he went back to his father’s house. 20 Meanwhile the Philistines gave Samson’s wife to one of the men who had attended him.
15 After a number of days, during the wheat harvest, Samson came to visit his wife and brought a kid goat with him. He said, “Let me go in to my wife’s room,” but her father did not let him go in.
2 Her father said, “I was so convinced that you hated her that I gave her to your companion. Isn’t her younger sister better than she is? Please take her for yourself instead of her older sister.”
3 Samson said to them, “I am not responsible for the harm I am about to do to the Philistines.” 4 Then Samson went and captured three hundred foxes,[f] took torches, tied the foxes tail to tail, and fastened a torch between each pair of tails. 5 He set fire to the torches and released the foxes into the standing grain of the Philistines. He burned up sheaves of grain, the standing grain, the vineyards, and the olive groves.
6 The Philistines asked, “Who did this?” They were told, “Samson, the son-in-law of the man from Timnah, did it, because the man took Samson’s wife and gave her to his companion.” So the Philistines went up and burned her and her father to death.
7 At that, Samson said to them, “Since you would do something like this, I will take revenge on you. Then I will stop.” 8 He ripped them to pieces[g] in a devastating attack. Then he went down and stayed in the cleft in the Rock of Etam.
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:
With the jawbone of a donkey, heaps upon heaps![h]
With the jawbone of a donkey I have struck down a thousand men.
17 When he finished speaking, he threw the jawbone out of his hand, and he named the place Ramath Lehi.[i]
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,[j] which remains in Lehi to this day.
20 Samson judged Israel for twenty years in the days of the Philistines.
Love Your Enemies
27 “But I say to you who are listening: Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. 28 Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who mistreat you. 29 If someone strikes you on one cheek, offer the other too. If someone takes away your coat, do not withhold your shirt. 30 Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes away your things, do not demand them back.
31 “Treat others just as you would want them to treat you. 32 If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? To be sure, even the sinners love those who love them. 33 And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? Even the sinners do the same thing. 34 If you lend to those from whom you expect to be repaid, what credit is that to you? Even the sinners lend to sinners in order to be paid back in full. 35 Instead, love your enemies, do good and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, because he is kind to the unthankful and the evil. 36 Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
Consider the Beam in Your Own Eye
37 “Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. 38 Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure pressed down, shaken together, and running over will be poured into your lap. In fact, the measure with which you measure will be measured back to you.”
39 He also told them a parable: “A blind man cannot guide a blind man, can he? Won’t they both fall into a pit? 40 A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like his teacher. 41 Why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but fail to notice the beam in your own eye? 42 Or how can you tell your brother, ‘Brother, let me remove the speck in your eye,’ when you do not see the beam in your own eye? Hypocrite! First remove the beam from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck in your brother’s eye.
Listen and Do
43 “Certainly a good tree does not produce bad fruit, and a bad tree does not produce good fruit. 44 In fact, each tree is known by its own fruit. For people do not gather figs from thorn bushes, and they do not gather grapes from a bramble bush. 45 The good person brings what is good out of the good stored in his heart, and the evil person brings what is evil out of the evil within.[a] To be sure, what his mouth speaks flows from the heart.
46 “Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say? 47 Everyone who comes to me and listens to my words and does them—I will show you what he is like: 48 He is like a man building a house who dug down deep and laid a foundation on bedrock. When a flood came, the river beat against that house but could not shake it, because it was founded on bedrock.[b] 49 But the one who listened to my words and did not do them is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation. When the river broke against it, it fell immediately, and that house was completely destroyed.”
The Holy Bible, Evangelical Heritage Version®, EHV®, © 2019 Wartburg Project, Inc. All rights reserved.