Study Desk

Then he said, "Go." So he let her go for two months; and she left with her friends, and wept on the mountains because of her virginity.

And at the end of two months she returned to her father, who did to her what he had vowed; and she had no relations with a man. And it became a custom in Israel,

Now the men of Ephraim were summoned, and they crossed to Zaphon; and they said to Jephthah, "Why did you cross over to fight against the sons of Ammon without calling us to go with you? We will burn your house down on you!"

So Jephthah said to them, "I and my people were in a major dispute with the sons of Ammon; and I did call you, but you did not save me from their hand.

Then Manoah pleaded with the LORD and said, "Lord, please let the man of God whom You have sent come to us again so that he may teach us what we are to do for the boy who is to be born."

And God listened to the voice of Manoah; and the angel of God came again to the woman as she was sitting in the field, but Manoah her husband was not with her.

So Manoah took the young goat along with the grain offering and offered it on the rock to the LORD; and He performed wonders while Manoah and his wife looked on.

Then Samson went down to Timnah with his father and mother, and came as far as the vineyards of Timnah; and behold, a young lion came roaring toward him.

When they saw him, they brought thirty companions to be with him.

Then it came about on the fourth day that they said to Samson's wife, "Entice your husband, so that he will tell us the riddle, or we will burn you and your father's house with fire. Have you invited us to impoverish us? Is this not so?"

So the men of the city said to him on the seventh day before the sun went down, "What is sweeter than honey? And what is stronger than a lion?" And he said to them, "If you had not plowed with my heifer, You would not have found out my riddle."

But after a while, in the time of wheat harvest, Samson visited his wife with a young goat, and said, "I will go in to my wife in her room." But her father did not let him enter.

When he had set fire to the torches, he released the jackals into the standing grain of the Philistines and set fire to both the bundled heaps and the standing grain, along with the vineyards and olive groves.

Then the Philistines said, "Who did this?" And some said, "Samson, the son-in-law of the Timnite, because he took his wife and gave her to his companion." So the Philistines came up and burned her and her father to death with fire.

So he struck them ruthlessly with a great slaughter; and afterward he went down and lived in the cleft of the rock of Etam.

So they said to him, "No, but we will bind you tightly and give you into their hands; but we certainly will not kill you." Then they bound him with two new ropes, and brought him up from the rock.

When he came to Lehi, the Philistines shouted as they met him. And the Spirit of the LORD rushed upon him so that the ropes that were on his arms were like flax that has burned with fire, and his restraints dropped from his hands.

Then he found a fresh jawbone of a donkey, so he reached out with his hand and took it, and killed a thousand men with it.

And Samson said, "With the jawbone of a donkey, Heaps upon heaps, With the jawbone of a donkey I have killed a thousand men."

Now Samson went to Gaza and saw a prostitute there, and had relations with her.