- Judges 15 BSB ↗
Anyone who has watched a family feud or a neighbourhood quarrel knows the pattern. One side hurts the other; the other hits back harder; each insists it is only settling the score. Soon no one remembers who started it, and innocent people are caught in the fire. Judges 15 is a cycle of revenge told at breakneck speed. Samson burns fields, the Philistines burn a woman and her father, Samson slaughters in return — and his own people, rather than stand with him, tie him up and hand him over.
Where it sits in the story: The Samson cycle shows Israel so used to foreign rule that it no longer wants rescue. Earlier judges rallied tribes; here the men of Judah come three thousand strong not to fight the Philistines but to arrest their own deliverer. The chapter also records Samson's first prayer — a cry of thirst — and closes by noting he judged Israel twenty years, a partial deliverance at best.
What this chapter is doing: To trace how Samson's private grievances escalate into open conflict with the Philistines, and to expose how accommodated Israel has become — while showing God still answering Samson when he finally calls on him.
- 15:1–5 — At wheat harvest Samson visits his wife with a gift, but her father has given her to another man and offers her younger sister instead. Samson ties three hundred foxes tail to tail with torches and sets them loose in the Philistine grain, vineyards and olive groves.
- 15:6–8 — In reply, the Philistines burn Samson's wife and her father to death — the very fate she had tried to avoid in chapter 14. Samson strikes them in a great slaughter and retreats to a cave in the rock of Etam.
- 15:9–13 — The Philistines raid Judah. Three thousand men of Judah come to Samson and ask whether he does not know the Philistines rule over them. He lets them bind him with new ropes and hand him over, on condition that they will not kill him themselves.
- 15:14–17 — At Lehi the Spirit rushes on him; the ropes melt like burnt flax, and with a fresh jawbone of a donkey he kills a thousand men. He celebrates with a punning victory song, and the place is named Ramath-lehi, 'Jawbone Hill'.
- 15:18–20 — Near death from thirst, Samson cries out to the Lord for the first time. God splits open a hollow place and water flows; the spring is named En-hakkore, 'the spring of the one who called'. Samson judges Israel twenty years in the days of the Philistines.
Key verse: Judges 15:18 · So what: The chapter does not celebrate revenge; it shows how revenge consumes the innocent first. The woman Samson wanted and her father die because of a feud between men. It also shows a people who prefer a quiet life under oppression to the risk of freedom. Yet when Samson at last prays — not heroically, just desperately — God answers. That is honest, and it is hopeful.