1. After some time, in the season of the wheat harvest, Samson visited his wife, bringing a young goat. But when he said, “Let me go into my wife’s room,” her father would not let him go in.
2. He said, “I thought you hated her, so I gave her to your best man. Her younger sister is better; you may have her instead.”
3. Samson said to him, “This time I am guiltless if I harm the Philistines.”
4. So Samson went and caught three hundred jackals, and turning them tail to tail, he took some torches and tied one between each pair of tails.
5. He then kindled the torches and set the jackals loose in the standing grain of the Philistines, thus burning both the shocks and standing grain, the vineyards and olive groves.
6. When the Philistines asked, “Who has done this?” they were told, “Samson, the son-in-law of the Timnite, because his wife was taken and given to his best man.” So the Philistines went up and destroyed her and her family by fire.
7. Samson said to them, “If this is how you act, I will not stop until I have taken revenge on you.”
8. And he struck them hip and thigh—a great slaughter. Then he went down and stayed in a cleft of the crag of Etam.
9. The Philistines went up and encamped in Judah, deploying themselves against Lehi.
10. When the men of Judah asked, “Why have you come up against us?” they answered, “To take Samson prisoner; to do to him as he has done to us.”
11. Three thousand men of Judah went down to the cleft of the crag of Etam and said to Samson, “Do you not know that the Philistines are our rulers? Why, then, have you done this to us?” He answered them, “As they have done to me, so have I done to them.”