(The view expressed in this blog are my own and should not be taken as inspired in any way.)
Judges 15:1–8, “But it came to pass within a while after, in the time of wheat harvest, that Samson visited his wife with a kid; and he said, I will go in to my wife into the chamber. But her father would not suffer him to go in. And her father said, I verily thought that thou hadst utterly hated her; therefore I gave her to thy companion: is not her younger sister fairer than she? take her, I pray thee, instead of her. And Samson said concerning them, Now shall I be more blameless than the Philistines, though I do them a displeasure. And Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and took firebrands, and turned tail to tail, and put a firebrand in the midst between two tails. And when he had set the brands on fire, he let them go into the standing corn of the Philistines, and burnt up both the shocks, and also the standing corn, with the vineyards and olives. Then the Philistines said, Who hath done this? And they answered, Samson, the son in law of the Timnite, because he had taken his wife, and given her to his companion. And the Philistines came up, and burnt her and her father with fire. And Samson said unto them, Though ye have done this, yet will I be avenged of you, and after that I will cease. And he smote them hip and thigh with a great slaughter: and he went down and dwelt in the top of the rock Etam.”
Samson recovered from his fit of anger and decided that he would go back to spend some time with his wife. When he got to her home, her father refused to let Samson in because she was married to another man. He tried to persuade Samson to marry her sister but he was angry at the new situation and decided that the Philistines had done enough to provoke him. He caught three hundred foxes and tied them into pairs by the tail. He set the foxes alight and let them run through the Philistine crops so that the crops were destroyed. Remember that this book is just a historical record of a brutal time in history and relating this story does not mean that the Lord God approved of Samson’s action. He had the gift of free will, like everyone else, and chose to do this to provoke the Philistines. This is the same as trying to say that all people belonging to any religion are responsible for the actions of a few fanatics or that their religion approves of the actions of every member of that religion. The Philistines were angry so they burnt Samson’s wife and her father in their house. Samson took the responsibility of a relative and exacted revenge on the families of the Philistines in that region. After that he went to a quiet place and took a break from the problems that he was facing.
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