It was the season of wheat harvest, when the golden fields swayed beneath the sun.
Samson, fierce and restless, took a young goat in his hands and journeyed to see his wife.
"I will go to my wife's chamber," he said with a confident heart.
But her father blocked the doorway, trembling.
"I thought you hated her," the man said, regret clouding his eyes.
"I gave her to your companion. But see—her younger sister is fairer than she. Take her instead."
Rage flared in Samson's eyes. His jaw tightened.
"This time," he said, voice cold as iron, "I will not be blamed. The Philistines shall pay."
He went into the wilderness and caught three hundred foxes—swift, trembling, wild.
He tied them tail to tail in pairs, and between each pair he fastened a burning torch.
When the fire roared to life, Samson loosed them among the standing grain of the Philistines.
The night blazed red.
The flames devoured their harvest, their vineyards, their olive groves—everything that promised life.
When the Philistines demanded, "Who has done this?"
They were told, "It is Samson, the Timnite's son-in-law, because his wife was given to another."
Enraged, the Philistines went up and burned the woman and her father in cruel vengeance.
Samson's fury deepened.
"You have done this," he said, his voice like thunder. "I will not rest until I have repaid you."
And he struck them down, viciously, until the ground itself seemed to cry out with blood.
Then he withdrew, hiding in the cave of Etam's rock.
But the Philistines would not rest. They marched into Judah and spread their camp near Lehi.
The men of Judah, fearful, came to Samson—three thousand of them.
"Why have you brought this upon us?" they said. "Don't you know the Philistines rule over us?"
"I only did to them," Samson replied, "what they did to me."
They answered, "We have come to bind you and hand you over."
"Swear to me," said Samson, "that you will not kill me yourselves."
"We swear," they said. And they bound him with two new ropes and led him away.
But as the Philistines came shouting toward him, their victory cries filling the air—
The Spirit of the Lord came upon Samson with power.
The ropes burned away like flax in fire, falling useless to the ground.
He reached for the first thing his hand found—a fresh jawbone of a donkey.
And with it, he struck.
Again and again.
Until a thousand men lay silent before him.
Then Samson lifted his voice and said,
"With the jawbone of a donkey, I have made them donkeys.
With the jawbone of a donkey, I have slain a thousand men."
When his fury was spent, he threw the bone aside.
The place was called Ramath-Lehi—the Hill of the Jawbone.
But victory turned to thirst.
He cried out to the Lord,
"You have given Your servant this great deliverance—must I now die of thirst and fall into the hands of the uncircumcised?"
And God, merciful, opened a hollow in the rock.
Water burst forth, pure and living.
Samson drank, and his strength returned.
The spring was called En Hakkore—"The Spring of the Caller"—and it remains in Lehi to this day.
And so Samson judged Israel for twenty years, in the days of the Philistines' dominion.