9 However, the Pelishti warriors went and camped in Yehudah (Judah), 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 (Samson),” they replied. “To give him some of his own back.” 11 Then three thousand men from Yehudah went down to the crevice in Eytam’s rock, and told Shimshon, “Don’t you realise that the Pelishtim 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 Pelishtim,” 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 Pelishtim 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 Pelishti 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 Pelishtim?” 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 ‘Eyn-Hakore’ (which means ‘the fountain of the one who called out’), which is in Lehi to this day. 20 And so Shimshon led Yisrael (Israel) for twenty years at the time of the Pelishti oppression.
