It’s time to get in touch with your inner viking! You decide to write a song about the slaughter of a thousand men. What genre of music do you choose? Is it a happy or sad song?
Judges 15 — Brewery Ministries Paraphrase
Samson had left his wife after she told the Philistines how to solve his riddle. After some time, he finally cooled down enough to go visit her. Samson showed up with a young goat, which in ancient terms was apparently the “I brought flowers” move. In the most awkward moment of all-time, Samson strolled up to his father-in-law and declared, “I will go in to my wife in the chamber!” But his father-in-law stopped him. “Oh… I honestly thought you hated her, so I gave her to your best man. But good news: her younger sister is even better looking! Want her instead?”
Apparently Samson didn’t agree. He was so mad that his Philistine wife had been given away that he vowed “This time I’ll be innocent when I harm the Philistines.” So Samson schemed up a most creative form of vandalism. He caught three hundred foxes — or possibly jackals — tied them tail-to-tail in pairs, stuck lit torches between them, and sent them running through the Philistines’ fields. Their grain, vineyards, and olive groves went up in flames. When the Philistines found out Samson was behind it, they burned his wife and her father to death.
Samson was furious. He took a page straight out of the movie Gladiator and vowed revenge. He slaughtered the people responsible, promised to stop his tour of vengeance, and retreated to a cave.
But the Philistines marched into Judah looking for him, and the people panicked. They went to him and said, “Do you not realize the Philistines rule over us? Please stop provoking them. They’ll punish us for your actions.” Samson agreed to let them tie him up and hand him over, as long as they promised not to kill him themselves. So three thousand men of Judah bound him and took him to the Philistines.
But when the Philistines started cheering, the Spirit of God rushed on Samson again. He snapped the ropes that bound him and grabbed the nearest weapon he could find: the fresh jawbone of a donkey (exactly how he got it, nobody knows!). With it, he killed a thousand men, then sang a little song about it (surely it was a metal song). It went something like this:
“With the jawbone of a donkey, heaps upon heaps,
with the jawbone of a donkey have I struck down a thousand men.”
But then he became so thirsty that he started to wonder if he would die. He looked up towards the sky and cried, “God, did you save me from the Philistines just to let me die of thirst?” At that very moment, God split open a seam in a rock, and the water trapped inside was released. Samson recovered for now… but the Philistines weren’t done with him yet.
Judges 15:4–5 · a 30-second run — weave past the rocks and trees and stay ahead of Samson.
Work Through the Evidence
Samson’s desire for justice is understandable, but what do you think of the way he went about getting it?
This story started when Samson gave the Philistines a riddle at his wedding party. They couldn’t solve it, so they threatened his wife until she manipulated the answer out of him. They cheated — and Samson knew it. His anger isn’t coming from nowhere.
At what points do you see the conflict escalating in this story?
Try to map each action and reaction: Samson burns the fields → Philistines burn his wife and father-in-law → Samson slaughters them → Philistines march into Judah → Judah hands Samson over → Samson kills a thousand. Each response is bigger than the one before it, and innocent people keep getting pulled in.
Does God granting Samson “superpowers” mean God approves of Samson’s choices, or does it simply mean God still works through messy people?
Samson took the Nazarite vow — a promise to God with conditions including “never touch a corpse.” In the previous chapter (Judges 14, covered in our first Samson module), he already broke the vow three times: he ate honey scooped from a lion’s rotting corpse, attended a week-long mishteh (a “drinking party”), and stripped clothes from dead Philistines he had killed. And now here in Judges 15, he grabbed the fresh jawbone of a donkey — meaning he touched yet another corpse to get it. The word “fresh” is likely the Bible’s way of signaling that clearly. He’s broken virtually every condition of his calling — and God keeps showing up anyway.
The song Samson sang after the battle is actually a clever wordplay. In modern terms, it reads: “With a donkey’s jawbone I made donkeys out of them.” It’s ancient trash talk, embedded in Scripture. Are you surprised to find something like this in the Bible? Why do you think it’s here?
The Hebrew pun in Samson’s song (Judges 15:16) plays on chamor (donkey) and chamoratayim (heaps). Remember that a donkey is also called an “ass.” Samson is literally saying he made heaps of them (piles of bodies) — while also calling them all asses.
This story shows God working through Samson even though Samson is deeply flawed and does not always reflect God’s character well. How does that help you process some of the confusing or hurtful things you may have seen from people who claim to represent God?
Samson is described as Spirit-filled and God-appointed — and yet he’s impulsive, vengeful, and self-serving. The Bible doesn’t clean him up. If God can work through someone like Samson without that meaning God endorses everything Samson does, it might change how we think about leaders, pastors, or institutions that have disappointed us.
Why It Matters
At first, it can be hard to know what we are supposed to take away from a story like this. Samson has God-given, seemingly inhuman strength, but that does not mean Samson is always a good example of God’s character. In fact, Samson often seems to reflect the chaos and moral confusion of Israel itself.
That matters because Samson lived during a time when Israel was being oppressed by the Philistines, but Israel was also spiritually compromised. They needed rescue, but they were not exactly a portrait of healthy and faithful people. So God begins working through Samson — a deeply flawed, impulsive, and often selfish person — to start breaking Philistine control over Israel.
This does not mean God approves of everything Samson does. It means God is able to work through messy people and messy situations without being defined by them. Samson’s story reminds us not to confuse God with every person who claims to represent Him. Religious people can do confusing, harmful, or disappointing things, and those actions may not reflect God’s character at all. But at the same time, human flaws do not automatically stop God from bringing something good out of the wreckage.
Read the full chapter at Bible Gateway: ESV · NIV · NLT
What Did You Find?
My Overall Conclusions
I Learned This About God
I Learned This About Myself
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