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1After some days, at the time of wheat harvest, Samson went to visit his wife with a young goat. And he said, "I will go in to my wife in the chamber." But her father would not allow him to go in. 2And her father said, "I really thought that you utterly hated her, so I gave her to your companion. Is not her younger sister more beautiful than she? Please take her instead." 3And Samson said to them, "This time I shall be innocent in regard to the Philistines, when I do them harm." 4So Samson went and caught 300 foxes and took torches. And he turned them tail to tail and put a torch between each pair of tails. 5And when he had set fire to the torches, he let the foxes go into the standing grain of the Philistines and set fire to the stacked grain and the standing grain, as well as the olive orchards. 6Then the Philistines said, "Who has done this?" And they said, "Samson, the son-in-law of the Timnite, because he has taken his wife and given her to his companion." And the Philistines came up and burned her and her father with fire. 7And Samson said to them, "If this is what you do, I swear I will be avenged on you, and after that I will quit." 8And he struck them hip and thigh with a great blow, and he went down and stayed in the cleft of the rock of Etam.
9Then the Philistines came up and encamped in Judah and made a raid on Lehi. 10And the men of Judah said, "Why have you come up against us?" They said, "We have come up to bind Samson, to do to him as he did to us." 11Then 3,000 men of Judah went down to the cleft of the rock of Etam, and said to Samson, "Do you not know that the Philistines are rulers over us? What then is this that you have done to us?" And he said to them, "As they did to me, so have I done to them." 12And they said to him, "We have come down to bind you, that we may give you into the hands of the Philistines." And Samson said to them, "Swear to me that you will not attack me yourselves." 13They said to him, "No; we will only bind you and give you into their hands. We will surely not kill you." So they bound him with two new ropes and brought him up from the rock.
14When he came to Lehi, the Philistines came shouting to meet him. Then the Spirit of the LORD rushed upon him, and the ropes that were on his arms became as flax that has caught fire, and his bonds melted off his hands. 15And he found a fresh jawbone of a donkey, and put out his hand and took it, and with it he struck 1,000 men. 16And Samson said,
"With the jawbone of a donkey,
heaps upon heaps,
with the jawbone of a donkey
have I struck down a thousand men."
17As soon as he had finished speaking, he threw away the jawbone out of his hand. And that place was called Ramath-lehi.
18And he was very thirsty, and he called upon the LORD and said, "You have granted this great salvation by the hand of your servant, and shall I now die of thirst and fall into the hands of the uncircumcised?" 19And God split open the hollow place that is at Lehi, and water came out from it. And when he drank, his spirit returned, and he revived. Therefore the name of it was called En-hakkore; it is at Lehi to this day. 20And he judged Israel in the days of the Philistines twenty years.
What does this text say about God? God continues to work. In fact, he works in rather unconventional fashion. In ch.14 Samson scraped honey from a carcass. This time he grabs a fresh jawbone. This is significant, because in both instances the contact with the carcass (or part thereof) violated the Nazirite consecration (cf. Num. 6:9-12). Yet, it does not seem as though the meticulous rituals prescribed for Nazirites are of any concern to God (they certainly are not to Samson). Samson's Naziriteship did not come to an end upon his ritual defilement, nor did he have to undergo rites of reinstatement. Thus, alongside of Samson's callous disregard for ceremonial purity, Yahweh too seems to operate outside of the scope of "orthodox" expectations.
We have to read this text from the vantage point of an Israelite audience somewhat puzzled over how liberally God handles the situation, especially after the angel's words of 13:5, which are clearly intended to make one think of the Mosaic ceremonial prescriptions. We see here something that also characterized the ministry of Jesus. He did not walk around teaching people to violate purity laws. But the thrust of his teachings and ministry was to the effect that he was more interested in people's hearts and the salvation of the lost than the religious elite of his day, who jealously guarded rituals almost at all costs. In Jesus we see that God desires mercy and not sacrifice (ritual and formalism), something worthwhile remembering, lest we lose our focus.
But God is also operating outside of standard OT retribution theology, and this is not the first time we have seen this in Judges. Just as Samson dances between two poles (vengeance and love for foreign women), God's relationship with Israel has its stress. On one hand, God proclaims, "I will never break my covenant with you" (2:1). On the other, God threatens to terminate his relationship with Israel: "I will deliver you no more" (10:13). Retribution and unrelenting love are held out in tension. Samson's violent drive for vengeance and his illicit love for women will end up crushing him and lead to his death. But God's solution for our problem with sin is similar. The tension between justice and love as God's attributes could only be resolved in the atoning death of the Son. The cross is God's act of justice (or vengeance), and it is God's steadfast love for you. How will you respond?
The author of these devotionals, the Rev. Martin Emmrich, is an ordained OPC minister (Westminster OPC, Corvallis, Oregon) as well as the author of Pneumatological Concepts in the Epistle to the Hebrews, a book on the teaching of Hebrews on the Holy Spirit. We are happy to make these devotionals on Ecclesiastes and other passages of Scripture available to you.
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