Judges 15

Judges 15 is the fifteenth chapter of the Book of Judges in the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible. According to Jewish tradition the book was attributed to the prophet Samuel, but modern scholars view it as part of the Deuteronomistic History, which spans in the books of Deuteronomy to 2 Kings, attributed to nationalistic and devotedly Yahwistic writers during the time of the reformer Judean king Josiah in 7th century BCE. This chapter records the activities of judges Samson. belonging to a section comprising Judges 13 to 16 and Judges 6:1 to 16:31.

Text

This chapter was originally written in the Hebrew language. It is divided into 20 verses.

Textual witnesses

Some early manuscripts containing the text of this chapter in Hebrew are of the Masoretic Text tradition, which includes the Codex Cairensis, Aleppo Codex, and Codex Leningradensis.
Extant ancient manuscripts of a translation into Koine Greek known as the Septuagint include Codex Vaticanus and Codex Alexandrinus.

Analysis

A linguistic study by Chisholm reveals that the central part in the Book of Judges can be divided into two panels based on the six refrains that state that the Israelites did evil in Yahweh's eyes:
Panel One
Panel Two
Furthermore from the linguistic evidence, the verbs used to describe the Lord's response to Israel's sin have chiastic patterns and can be grouped to fit the division above:
Panel One
Panel Two
Chapters 13–16 contains the "Samson Narrative" or "Samson Cycle", a highly structured poetic composition with an 'almost architectonic tightness' from a literary point-of-view. The entire section consists of 3 cantos and 10 subcantos and 30 canticles, as follows:

Canto I : the birth story of Samson
Canto II : the feats of Samson in Timnah and Judah
Canto III : Samson's exploits in the Valley of Sorek and the temple of Dagon.

The distribution of the 10 subcantos into 3 cantos is a regular 2 + 4 + 4, with the number of canticles per subcanto as follows:

Canto I: 3 + 3
Canto II: 3 + 3 + 3 + 5
Canto III: 2 + 2 + 3 + 3

The number of strophes per canticle in each canto is quite uniform with numerical patterns in Canto II showing a 'concentric symmetry':

Canto I: 4 + 4 + 4 | 4 + 4 + 4
Canto Ila: 4 + 3 + 3 | 4 + 4 + 4 | 3 + 3 + 4
Canto IIb: 4 + 4 + 3 + 4? + 4
Canto III: 4 + 4 | 4 + 4 | 4 + 4 + 4 | 3 + 3 + 4

The structure regularity within the whole section classifies this composition as a 'narrative poetry' or 'poetic narrative'.
Besides the thematic symmetry, parts of the narrative shows an observable structure with chapter 13 balances chapter 16 whereas chapters 14 and 15 show a parallelism in form and content.
Chapter 15:1–19 has the following structure:

Samson's revenge (15:1–8)

Samson's desire for his woman coincides with the harvest season, a time of fertility., and he brought a peace offering as if all is forgiven, displaying 'his obliviousness to social convention'. The woman's father offered Samson another deal, the younger sister, but this was declined and followed by Samson's superheroic vengeance, attaching torches to the tails of 300 foxes to set fire among the standing grain, vineyards, and olive groves of the Philistines. The Philistines retaliated by setting the whole family of Samson's wife-to-be on fire. Samson had an outburst that he killed many Philistines as vengeance, then withdrew to a cave in Etam.

Verse 8

"Hip and thigh": from Hebrew: "soq al-yarek", probably an idiom for "total victory".
"Rock of Etam": presumed to be a place down in a valley or creek with caves to hide. Etam is mentioned as village in the territory of Simeon, which was within Judah, later fortified by Jeroboam and listed between Bethlehem and Tekoa.

Samson defeats the Philistines (15:9–20)

Israelites are elsewhere portrayed as tending to collaborate with the enemy than to revolt, thus the men of Judah would rather to hand over Samson to the Philistines to avoid an attack. As many as 3,000 men of Judah came to Samson to bind him as instructed by the Philistines, but starting with an accusation of wrongdoing to convince Samson to allow himself to be given over peacefully to the enemy. Samson went with the Philistines until Lehi before he had an outburst with a 'power fuelled by the divine frenzy', breaking the ropes that bind him with an imagery of 'fire', then using the jawbone of a donkey to kill a thousand Philistine men.
The basic elements of this fight recalls a similar pattern in Samson's fight with the lion in the vineyards of Timnah as follows:

Judges 14:5–6	Judges 15:14–19
A lion comes "roaring" to meet Samson	The Philistines come "shouting" to meet Samson
The Spirit of YHWH rushes upon Samson	The Spirit of YHWH rushes upon Samson
Samson "tears" the lion in two	Samson "strikes down" the Philistines

Thereafter Samson used a proverb to declare his victory in a 'war-taunt' with word play of the root h-m-r. The record of the amazing victory over the Philistines concludes with Samson's plea to God to quench his thirst, characteristically with a hyperbole if 'God intends to reward the hero of Israel with death by thirst'. God responded by splitting open a spring from a rocky hollow so that Samson could drink and be revived. Verse 20 marks the end of the first part of Samson epic, to be followed by the story of Samson's fall in the next chapter.

Verse 20

"In the days of the Philistines": serves as a reminder of Samson's limitation, that his acts as a judge started and ended within the period of the Philistine occupation, so Samson did not fully deliver Israel from the oppression of the Philistines. The final victory against the Philistines would be achieved under the leadership of Samuel in Eben-Ezer, "twenty years" after the return of the Ark of the Covenant by the Philistines.