Judges 15 Bible study: The jawbone and the spring

Count the returns in this chapter. Samson's wife has been given to someone else: "I gave her to your companion" (15:2) (tap companion). Samson says, "This time I will be blameless in the case of the Philistines when I harm them" (15:3) (tap blameless), and burns their grain (15:4-5). The Philistines ask who did it, hear the reason, and "burned her and her father with fire" (15:6). Samson answers, "If you behave like this, surely I will take revenge on you, and after that I will cease" (15:7) (tap revenge), and "struck them hip and thigh with a great slaughter" (15:8). Then the Philistines come into Judah: "We have come up to bind Samson, to do to him as he has done to us" (15:10). And Samson tells the men of Judah, "As they did to me, so I have done to them" (15:11). In Hebrew, the Philistines' words and Samson's are built the same way, ka'asher ("as") with the verb do. Judges 1 heard that pattern from Adoni-Bezek: "As I have done, so God has done to me" (1:7). The chapter doesn't stop to judge any of these returns; it tells them one after another.

Judges 15:11→leads toLuke 6:31

The Philistines came "to do to him as he has done to us" (15:10), and Samson answered, "As they did to me, so I have done to them" (15:11). Jesus, teaching those who heard him to "love your enemies" (Luke 6:27), said, "As you would like people to do to you, do exactly so to them" (Luke 6:31). Jesus doesn't cite Judges 15, so setting the two side by side is a reading. It rests on a question both answer: what rule do you go by in how you treat others? Some set them side by side because Samson takes his rule from what was done to him, and Jesus from what you would want done to you. Others keep each in its setting: Samson was the one who would "begin to save Israel out of the hand of the Philistines" (13:5), and "the LORD’s Spirit came mightily on him" at Lehi (15:14), while Jesus is teaching his hearers how to treat their own enemies (Luke 6:27-36); they don't look from one to the other.

לְחִיlechisay le-KHEE

Brown-Driver-Briggs: "jaw, cheek", and "jawbone, of animal". Strong's: "the cheek (from its fleshiness); hence, the jaw-bone". "He found a fresh jawbone of a donkey" (15:15), "With the jawbone of a donkey, heaps on heaps" (15:16), and "he threw the jawbone out of his hand; and that place was called Ramath Lehi" (15:17). The place where all this happens is Lehi (15:9, 15:14, 15:19), and Strong's gives that name as "a form of 3895", this word. Ramath Lehi, Strong's says, is "height of a jaw-bone". Elsewhere the WEB gives the word as cheek, as when Zedekiah "struck Micaiah on the cheek" (1 Kings 22:24).