And Samson’s wife urged him to tell her the answer.  She cried and pleaded with him and said: 

“If you really loved me, you would not keep this a secret from me.”

At last Samson yielded, and told his wife how he had killed the lion and afterward found the honey in its body.  She told her people, and just before the end of the feast they came to Samson with the answer.  They said: 

“What is sweeter than honey?  And what is stronger than a lion?” And Samson said to them: 

    “If you had not plowed with my heifer,
    You had not found out my riddle.”

By his “heifer,”—­which is a young cow,—­of course Samson meant his wife.  Then Samson was required to give them thirty suits of clothing.  He went out among the Philistines, killed the first thirty men whom he found, took off their clothes, and gave them to the guests at the feast.  But all this made Samson very angry.  He left his wife and went home to his father’s house.  Then the parents of his wife gave her to another man.

But after a time Samson’s anger passed away, and he went again to Timnath to see his wife.  But her father said to him: 

“You went away angry, and I supposed that you cared nothing for her.  I gave her to another man, and now she is his wife.  But here is her younger sister; you can have her for your wife, instead.”

But Samson would not take his wife’s sister.  He went out very angry; determined to do harm to the Philistines, because they had cheated him.  He caught all the wild foxes that he could find, until he had three hundred of them.  Then he tied them together in pairs, by their tails; and between each pair of foxes he tied to their tails a piece of dry wood which he set on fire.  These foxes with firebrands on their tails he turned loose among the fields of the Philistines when the grain was ripe.  They ran wildly over the fields, set the grain on fire, and burned it; and with the grain the olive trees in the fields.

When the Philistines saw their harvests destroyed, they said, “Who has done this?”

And the people said, “Samson did this, because his wife was given by her father to another man.”

The Philistines looked on Samson’s father-in-law as the cause of their loss; and they came and set his home on fire, and burned the man and his daughter whom Samson had married.  Then Samson came down again, and alone fought a company of Philistines, and killed them all, as a punishment for burning his wife.

After this Samson went to live in a hollow place in a split rock, called the rock of Etam.  The Philistines came up in a great army, and overran the fields in the tribe-land of Judah.

“Why do you come against us?” asked the men of Judah, “what do you want from us?”

“We have come,” they said, “to bind Samson, and to deal with him as he has dealt with us.”

The men of Judah said to Samson: