Judges15chapter 15

Judges 15:1-3

The reader was told at 14:20 that the wife had been given away to the companion, so this chapter opens with Samson learning what the previous chapter already reported. Wheat harvest fixes the season and supplies the fuel, since the grain is standing and dry when he arrives. Barnes takes her still being in her father's house as a sign she was betrothed rather than married, which is why the father can offer the younger sister as a substitute. Samson's word at verse 3 argues a case rather than a grievance: the tie that made his raid on Ashkelon at 14:19 a matter between kin has been cut by the other side.

Judges 15:4-5

and caught three hundred foxes: The number is given and the method is described step by step, and the text supplies no explanation of how one man took three hundred animals. Clarke sets out the long argument over the Hebrew word shualim, which is read as jackals by those who point out that jackals run in packs and are taken in numbers, and kept as foxes by the older English; Gill notes that towns in the Judah list of Joshua 15 carry the word in their names, which puts the animal in that country. What burns is listed in order at verse 5, the cut shocks, then the standing grain, then the vineyards and the olives, so the loss runs past one harvest into trees that take years to bear again.

Judges 15:6-7

The Philistines burn her and her father with fire, and that is the exact threat her own countrymen made at 14:15 to force the riddle out of her. She gave up her husband's secret to escape that fire and it reached her anyway, and the narrator reports the outcome and draws no lesson from it. Samson's answer sets a limit on himself, after that I will cease, and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown read his continuing as the work of a judge rather than the settling of a private score.

Judges 15:8-10

Hip and thigh renders a Hebrew phrase that occurs nowhere else in Scripture, and the old versions divide over it: Clarke lists wrestling holds, heaps upon heaps, and blows running from leg to thigh, and settles none of them. Etam is a cliff inside Judah's own hill country, so the deliverer withdraws into the tribe that is about to hand him over. The Philistine force does not march against Israel but camps in Judah to arrest one man, and Judah's question at verse 10 asks why they have come rather than telling them to leave.

Judges 15:11-13

three thousand men of Judah: The sentence at verse 11 is the condition of the nation in one line, because the men of Judah state Philistine rule as settled fact and then ask their own deliverer what he has done to them. The Samson cycle is the one round of the book with no cry for help in it: Israel cried unto the Lord at 3:9, 3:15, 4:3, 6:6, 6:7 and 10:10, and after 13:1 records the forty years of Philistine rule nobody cries at all. Three thousand men climb the rock to bind one Israelite and give him to the enemy, and Barnes reads their errand as men conciliating their masters. The only thing Samson asks of them is an oath that they will not kill him themselves.

Judges 15:14-15

The Spirit of the Lord is on him here for the fourth time in three chapters, at 13:25, 14:6, 14:19 and this verse, and those four are four of the seven times the book says it; the other three are Othniel at 3:10, Gideon at 6:34 and Jephthah at 11:29. The most gifted man in Judges receives the gift most often and governs himself least, and the count is checkable from the text. The weapon is a fresh jawbone, so he takes hold of a carcase as he did the lion's at 14:8-9, and Numbers 6:6 forbids a Nazarite to come near a dead body. The narrator records the act without comment, and writers have differed over whether the silence means the terms were held in abeyance or whether the book is showing the vow going item by item.

Judges 15:16-17

The song turns on one word, since chamor in Hebrew is both an ass and a heap, so the line says ass upon ass and heap upon heap at the same time. Barnes puts it with the riddle of 14:12-18 as the same habit of mind at work, and Henry gives the play on the word as the reason the fallen Philistines are pictured as tamely as they are. Ambrose of Milan, writing to Vigilius, marked what the song leaves out, that Samson names the jawbone and himself and builds no altar, and read the thirst of the next verse against it. The text records the words and the name given to the place and adds nothing to either.

Judges 15:18-19

This is the first prayer Samson is recorded praying in six chapters of his life, and it is for water. His only other recorded prayer is at 16:28, and both come out of an extremity rather than out of worship. What he says in it hands God the victory his own song had taken, thou hast given this great deliverance into the hand of thy servant, and he calls the Philistines the uncircumcised, which is what his parents called them at 14:3 and what David calls Goliath at 1 Samuel 17:26. Barnes reads the hollow place as a basin among the cliffs at Lehi rather than a cavity in the bone, and the closing words unto this day tell a reader the spring was still running when the account was written down.

Judges 15:20

The dating clause measures his rule by the enemy's, in the days of the Philistines, and the same twenty years are recorded again at 16:31 after his burial, so the two chapters of his ruin sit inside a term already closed here. The rest formula that ended the earlier deliverances at 3:11, 3:30 and 5:31 never returns, and no chapter of Samson's life is allowed to end with the land had rest. The angel had said at 13:5 that he shall begin to deliver Israel out of the hand of the Philistines, and the book keeps to that word exactly, since the Philistines are still ruling when the twenty years are over and 1 Samuel opens with them ruling still.