May 18 / Judges 14-15

Judges 14-15

Dear RTB’ers,

And he was very thirsty, and he called upon the LORD … And God split open the hollow place that is at Lehi, and water came out from it. And when he drank, his spirit returned, … And he judged Israel in the days of the Philistines twenty years. (vv. 15:18-20) The ending paragraph of chapter 15 tells of a good and righteous, spirit-filled man. How to reconcile these few verses with all that went before?

What to make of the earlier 37 verses? And the Spirit of the Lord rushed upon him, and he went down to Ashkelon and struck down thirty men of the town… (v. 14:19a) He, thirty men? Or 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… (vv. 15:4-5a) 300 foxes tied tail-to-tail, bearing lit torches into the grain fields? And he found a fresh jawbone of a donkey, and put out his hand and took it, and with it he struck 1,000 men.. (v. 15:15) 1,000 men, single-handedly, with a donkey jawbone?

30, 300, 1000. What do we do with numbers like that? Let’s not immediately discount them; I’m sure conservative scholars have worked around these numbers with reasonable explanations. Our task is maybe not to fully understand, to comprehend every sentence, but to use what we read to God’s glory. All Scripture is God-breathed [inspired] and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. (II Timothy 3:16-17, slightly edited)

And we’re not finished with Samson yet…!!

Blessings!