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Samson's Revenge on the Philistines
v. 1. But it came to pass within a while after, it may have been a matter of six weeks or two months later, in the time of wheat harvest, which usually begins in the first part of May in Palestine, that Samson visited his wife with a kid, coming with a present to show that he bore her no personal grudge; and he said, I will go in to my wife into the chamber, the inner apartment of the house, which the women occupied. But her father would not suffer him to go in, he barred his way.
v. 2. And her father said, I verily thought that thou hadst utterly hated her, the first excuse which popped into his mind, suggested by his anxiety and fear; therefore I gave her to thy companion. Is not her younger sister fairer than she? Take her, I pray thee, instead of her. The offer to let his other daughter be Samson's wife was made with the idea of placating the wronged husband, especially as he held up the beauty of this daughter as an added attraction; another glimpse of the low moral state of the Philistines.
v. 3. And Samson said concerning them, literally, "to them," either the father of his former wife and those present, or to his own family and neighbors, Now shall I be more blameless than the Philistines, though I do them a displeasure; they would not really be able to blame him for his conduct in doing them evil. He turned his personal wrong into an occasion of a national exploit against the enemy of his people as a whole, for he regarded the act of his father-in-Law as a manifestation of the Philistine hatred against the children of Israel.
v. 4. And Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, small jackals, which are very plentiful in that neighborhood to this day, and took firebrands, torches, and turned tail to tail, tying the jackals together by twos, and put a firebrand in the midst between two tails.
v. 5. And when he had set the brands on fire, he let them go into the standing corn, the grain-fields, of the Philistines, and burned up both the shocks, where the grain was already stacked, and also the standing corn, which was not yet cut, with the vineyards and olives, for the three hundred animals, almost crazed by the flaming torches that wrapped their tails in fire, sped first through the lowlands and then up the hillsides, through the vineyards and olive plantations.
v. 6. Then the Philistines said, Who hath done this? And they, men acquainted with the facts, 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 burned her and her father with fire, probably by setting fire to their house and burning it with all the inmates. It was an act of the most brutal cruelty.
v. 7. And Samson said unto them, Though ye have done this, yet will I be avenged of you, and after that I will cease, he would most certainly not rest until he had taken revenge in full upon the Philistines for this new act of brutality, which was directed also against him.
v. 8. And he smote them hip and thigh, with a destruction involving everything, said of unmerciful warfare, in which no quarter is given, with a great slaughter; and he went down and dwelt in the top of the rock Etam, in a cleft or cave on the border of the Philistine country, a standing menace to the Philistines. The believers must never grow lax in their warfare against all their spiritual enemies, since their soul's salvation is at stake.