OET-RV JDG chapter 15

This is still a very early look into the unfinished text of the Open English Translation of the Bible. Please double-check the text in advance before using in public.

15 Some days later during the wheat harvest, Shimshon visited his wife with a young goat as a present for the family, because he said, “I’ll go into the bedroom with my wife.” But her father wouldn’t allow him to go in, 2 and pleaded, “Truly, I I thought that you must hate her, so I gave her to your close friend. But wouldn’t her younger sister be better anyway? Please, would you take her instead.”

3 Shimshon responded, “This time I’m blameless concerning the Philistines when I cause trouble for them.” 4 Then he went and captured three hundred foxes and tied them in pairs—tail to tail. He took torches, and tied one torch between the tails of each pair. 5 He lit the torches and let the foxes loose into the grain crops of the Philistines. As a result, he burnt both the standing grain plants and also the harvested stacks of sheaves, and even a vineyard and an olive orchard. 6 So the Philistines asked, “Who did this?”

“Shimshon,” they replied, “the son-in-law of the man from Timnah, because he took Shimshon’s wife and gave her to his close friend.” As a result, the Philistines went to Timnah and they burnt both the woman and her father. 7 Then Shimshon told them, “Since you actually did that horrible thing, I certainly won’t stop until I’ve avenged myself against you all.” 8 Then he attacked the Philistines and crippled many of them, before going to Etam’s rock where he lived in a cave.

15:9 Shimshon defeats the Philistines

9 However, the Philistine warriors went and camped in Yehudah, and spread out around the town of Lehi. 10 But the men of Yehudah asked them, “Why have you all come here to attack us?”

“We’ve come to capture Shimshon,” they replied. “To give him some of his own back.” 11 Then three thousand men from Yehudah went down to the cleft of Etam’s rock, and told Shimshon, “Don’t you realise that the Philistines are ruling over us? Why are you causing more trouble for us?”

“Just as they’ve done to me,” he replied, “so I’ve done to them.”

12 “We’ve come here to tie you up so we can hand you over to the Philistines,” they said.

“Okay,” Shimshon responded. “But promise me that you all won’t injure me yourselves.”

13 “No, however, we’ll certainly tie you up,” they replied, “and we’ll hand you over to them. But truly we won’t kill you.” Then they tied him up with two new ropes and brought him up from the rocks.

14 When they’d taken him as far as Lehi, the Philistines shouted triumphantly when they saw him. Then Yahweh’s spirit rose in Shimshon and the ropes around his arms just seemed as weak as burnt flax stalks when he simply snapped them off him. 15 He saw a fresh donkey’s jawbone lying on the ground, and he reached out his hand and grabbed it, and he slaughtered a thousand Philistine men with it. 16 Then Shimshon declared,

“With a donkey’s jawbone, one heap, two heaps,

≈with a donkey’s jawbone, I’ve slaughtered a thousand men.”

17 When he finished reciting that, he hurled the jawbone away, and he called that place ‘Ramat-Lehi’ (which means ‘jawbone hill’).

18 Then he was very thirsty and cried out to Yahweh, “You yourself have given your servant this great victory, but now must I die with this thirst and get captured by those uncircumcised Philistines?” 19 So God split open the little hollow that’s at Lehi, and water came out of it. When he drank, his strength returned and he revived. Because of that, he called it ‘En-Hakkore’ (which means ‘the fountain of the one who called out’), which is in Lehi to this day. 20 And so Shimshon led Israel for twenty years at the time of the Philistine oppression.

OET-RV JDG Chapter 15