The Jawbone and Retaliation

At wheat harvest Samson comes with a kid to visit his wife, but her father has given her to another. "Now shall I be more blameless than the Philistines, though I do them a displeasure." He catches 300 shuʿalim, ties them tail to tail with a torch between, and sends them into the standing grain, vineyards and olives. The Philistines burn his wife and her father. Samson: "Though ye have done this, yet will I be avenged of you," and smites them "hip and thigh."

The Philistines camp in Judah. Three thousand men of Judah come to Samson at the rock Etam: "Knowest thou not that the Philistines are rulers over us?" They bind him with new ropes and hand him over at Lehi.

"The Spirit of the LORD came mightily upon him, and the cords… became as flax that was burnt with fire." He finds "a new jawbone of an ass" and kills a thousand men: "With the jawbone of an ass, heaps upon heaps, with the jaw of an ass have I slain a thousand men." Then, near death from thirst, he cries out, and "God clave an hollow place that was in the jaw [Lehi], and there came water." He calls it En-hakkore, "the spring of the one who called." He judges Israel twenty years.

Foxes or jackals?

Hebrew shuʿal can mean fox or jackal. Jackals live in packs and would be easier to catch in number; foxes are solitary. Ancient translations chose foxes (Greek and Latin both have "foxes"). The text does not settle the species; this is a lexical question, not a manuscript difference.

Fire in the fields

Wheat harvest falls in May–June, when grain is dry. Burning crops was a known form of ancient warfare and punishment. A Roman festival (the Cerialia) released foxes with burning torches, which some scholars compare; the connection is uncertain.

Lehi and En-hakkore

Lehi means "jaw." The place and its spring are unidentified; the name likely comes from a landform. The Hebrew of 15:19 is "the hollow place in Lehi"; older translations made it "in the jaw."