Study Desk

Delilah took new ropes, tied him up with them, and shouted, “Samson, the Philistines are here!” But while the men in ambush were waiting in her room, he snapped the ropes off his arms like a thread.

She fastened the braids with a pin and called to him, “Samson, the Philistines are here!” He awoke from his sleep and pulled out the pin, with the loom and the web.

Then she let him fall asleep on her lap and called a man to shave off the seven braids on his head. In this way, she made him helpless, and his strength left him.

Then she cried, “Samson, the Philistines are here!” When he awoke from his sleep, he said, “I will escape as I did before and shake myself free.” But he did not know that the Lord had left him.

The Philistines seized him and gouged out his eyes. They brought him down to Gaza and bound him with bronze shackles, and he was forced to grind grain in the prison.

But his hair began to grow back after it had been shaved.

Samson took hold of the two middle pillars supporting the temple and leaned against them, one on his right hand and the other on his left.

Samson said, “Let me die with the Philistines.” He pushed with all his might, and the temple fell on the leaders and all the people in it. And those he killed at his death were more than those he had killed in his life.

Then his brothers and all his father’s family came down, carried him back, and buried him between Zorah and Eshtaol in the tomb of his father Manoah. So he judged Israel twenty years.

He said to his mother, “The 1,100 pieces of silver taken from you, and that I heard you place a curse on—here’s the silver. I took it.”

He returned the 1,100 pieces of silver to his mother, and his mother said, “I personally consecrate the silver to the Lord for my son’s benefit to make a carved image and a silver idol. I will give it back to you.”

So he returned the silver to his mother, and she took five pounds of silver and gave it to a silversmith. He made it into a carved image and a silver idol, and it was in Micah’s house.

This man Micah had a shrine, and he made an ephod and household idols, and installed one of his sons to be his priest.

The man left the town of Bethlehem in Judah to stay wherever he could find a place. On his way he came to Micah’s home in the hill country of Ephraim.

and agreed to stay with the man, and the young man became like one of his sons.

Micah consecrated the Levite, and the young man became his priest and lived in Micah’s house.

He told them, “This is what Micah has done for me: He has hired me, and I became his priest.”

So the priest was pleased and took his ephod, household idols, and carved image, and went with the people.

The Danites set up the carved image for themselves. Jonathan son of Gershom, son of Moses, and his sons were priests for the Danite tribe until the time of the exile from the land.

In those days, when there was no king in Israel, a Levite staying in a remote part of the hill country of Ephraim acquired a woman from Bethlehem in Judah as his concubine.