Study Desk

so she ran at once and told him, "Look! The man who came to me the other day has appeared to me again."

Manoah replied, "Tell us your name, so that we can honor you when your words come true."

So Manoah took a young goat and some grain, and offered them on the rock altar to the Lord who works wonders.

So Samson went down to Timnah with his father and mother. As they were going through the vineyards there, he heard a young lion roaring.

On the fourth day they said to Samson's wife, "Trick your husband into telling us what the riddle means. If you don't, we'll set fire to your father's house and burn you with it. You two invited us so that you could rob us, didn't you?"

So Samson's wife went to him in tears and said, "You don't love me! You just hate me! You told my friends a riddle and didn't tell me what it means!" He said, "Look, I haven't even told my father and mother. Why should I tell you?"

She cried about it for the whole seven days of the feast. But on the seventh day he told her what the riddle meant, for she nagged him so about it. Then she told the Philistines.

So on the seventh day, before Samson went into the bedroom, the men of the city said to him, "What could be sweeter than honey? What could be stronger than a lion?" Samson replied, "If you hadn't been plowing with my cow, You wouldn't know the answer now."

He told Samson, "I really thought that you hated her, so I gave her to your friend. But her younger sister is prettier, anyway. You can have her, instead."

So he went and caught three hundred foxes. Two at a time, he tied their tails together and put torches in the knots.

When the Philistines asked who had done this, they learned that Samson had done it because his father-in-law, a man from Timnah, had given Samson's wife to a friend of Samson's. So the Philistines went and burned the woman to death and burned down her father's house.

Samson told them, "So this is how you act! I swear that I won't stop until I pay you back!"

So these three thousand men of Judah went to the cave in the cliff at Etam and said to Samson, "Don't you know that the Philistines are our rulers? What have you done to us?" He answered, "I did to them just what they did to me."

They told him, "We have come here to tie you up, so we can hand you over to them." Samson said, "Give me your word that you won't kill me yourselves."

"All right," they said, "we are only going to tie you up and hand you over to them. We won't kill you." So they tied him up with two new ropes and brought him back from the cliff.

So Samson sang, "With the jawbone of a donkey I killed a thousand men; With the jawbone of a donkey I piled them up in piles."

Then Samson became very thirsty, so he called to the Lord and said, "You gave me this great victory; am I now going to die of thirst and be captured by these heathen Philistines?"

Then God opened a hollow place in the ground there at Lehi, and water came out of it. Samson drank it and began to feel much better. So the spring was named Hakkore; it is still there at Lehi.

The people of Gaza found out that Samson was there, so they surrounded the place and waited for him all night long at the city gate. They were quiet all night, thinking to themselves, "We'll wait until daybreak, and then we'll kill him."

The five Philistine kings went to her and said, "Trick Samson into telling you why he is so strong and how we can overpower him, tie him up, and make him helpless. Each one of us will give you eleven hundred pieces of silver."