Samson's marriage and exploits against the Philistines

Samson sees a Philistine woman at Timnah and tells his parents to get her for him, and when they object he says, get her for me; she is right in my eyes. Their objection is the ordinary one about marrying outside the community, and they do not know that something else is going on behind it.

On the way to Timnah a young lion comes at him and he tears it apart with his bare hands, and tells nobody. Returning later he turns aside to look at the carcass and finds a swarm of bees and honey in it, scrapes the honey out with his hands and eats it as he walks, and gives some to his parents without saying where it came from. A lifelong Nazirite has just eaten food out of a dead animal and fed it to his mother.

At the wedding feast he sets a riddle to thirty Philistine companions and stakes thirty linen garments and thirty sets of clothes on it. Out of the eater, something to eat; out of the strong, something sweet. It is unanswerable, since it describes something only he has seen.

They pressure his bride, who weeps for the seven days of the feast until he tells her, and she tells them. His response to their answer is the crudest line in the episode: if you had not ploughed with my heifer, you would not have solved my riddle. He then goes down to Ashkelon, kills thirty men, strips them, and pays the wager with their clothes.

He goes home in a rage, and while he is away her father gives her to the companion who had attended him. When he comes back to claim her and finds out, he catches three hundred foxes, ties them in pairs by the tail with a torch between each pair, and turns them loose in the standing grain and the vineyards and olive groves at harvest. The Philistines respond by burning the woman and her father to death, which is what her family had been trying to avoid when they made her extract the answer in the first place.

He attacks them again, then hides in a cave. Three thousand men of Judah come to arrest him and hand him over, and the exchange with them is the bleakest thing here. Do you not realise that the Philistines are rulers over us? What have you done to us? Judah is not asking to be rescued. It is asking to be left alone, and it ties up its own deliverer and hands him to the occupying power.

He breaks the ropes, picks up the fresh jawbone of a donkey and kills a thousand men with it, which is a second violation of the vow since it means handling a corpse.

Everything he does is personal. Not one action is taken on behalf of the nation, and every fight starts as a private grievance. What is said about all of it is that his father and mother did not know it was from the LORD, who was seeking an occasion to confront the Philistines.