Fire Fox
June 18, 2025
“Fire Fox”
Blessings folk!
Samson had gone home to his father’s house in hot anger.
He never consummated his marriage to his wife.
Nor would he ever, as we will see…
Judges 15:1-8
After 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.
And 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.”
And Samson said to them,
“This time I shall be innocent in regard to the Philistines, when I do them harm.”
So 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.
And 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.
Then 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.
And Samson said to them,
“If this is what you do, I swear I will be avenged on you, and after that I will quit.”
And he struck them hip and thigh with a great blow,
and he went down and stayed in the cleft of the rock of Etam.
ESV
The assumption is that after a period of time Samson calmed down.
He missed the good-looking woman.
He decided to take a gift, the goat, and go visit.
Time to claim some marital rights.
Upon arriving he learns from the father that she had been given to another!
The father gave reasoning.
The father then offered a prettier, younger daughter.
Samson was not pleased.
What did he do?
You read it.
He set the food supply of the Philistines ablaze using foxes.
Can you imagine the whirling dervishes those foxes became with fire between them?
Samson considered himself innocent of any harm he did to the Philistines because of what they had done to him.
The Philistines learned who did this and why?
Then, they burned the wife and father.
Whoa!
The very thing by which the 30 companions had threatened the wife lest she not solve the riddle.
Samson struck them with a violent slaughter, then hid in the cleft of the rock of Etam…