Scripture Daily

Context No. 354 of 4322 · Judges

Context · Reflection

Judges 15:1-5: in context

1But after a while, in the time of wheat harvest, Samson visited his wife with a young goat. He said, “I will go in to my wife’s room.” But her father wouldn’t allow him to go in. 2Her father said, “I most certainly thought that you utterly hated her; therefore I gave her to your companion. Isn’t her younger sister more beautiful than she? Please, take her instead.” 3Samson said to them, “This time I will be blameless in the case of the Philistines when I harm them.” 4Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and took torches, and turned tail to tail, and put a torch in the middle between every two tails. 5When he had set the torches on fire, he let them go into the standing grain of the Philistines, and burned up both the shocks and the standing grain, and also the olive groves.

Samson has a real grievance. He had married a Philistine woman, and after a disastrous wedding feast he had stormed off, and in his absence her father, assuming Samson hated her, gave her to another man. Now Samson comes back to claim her and is turned away and offered the younger sister as a consolation. He has genuinely been wronged, and the wound is not imaginary.

What he does with it is the point. This time, he says, I will be blameless when I harm the Philistines, and then he unleashes something wildly out of proportion to a family dispute. He catches three hundred foxes, ties them tail to tail in pairs with a torch between each pair, sets the torches alight, and turns them loose into the standing grain at harvest time. The fire runs through the fields and burns the cut sheaves, the standing wheat, the vineyards, and the olive groves, wiping out the livelihood of an entire farming community. A personal slight, his father-in-law's decision about a marriage, becomes a regional catastrophe. And notice the phrase he uses to license it: this time I will be blameless. He has told himself that the wrong done to him justifies whatever he does back, and he goes into the destruction with a clear conscience. Predictably, it does not end there; the burning only sets off more burning, and the cycle spirals.

The dangerous move is not the anger, which was understandable, but the little sentence Samson tells himself first, this time I am blameless. Where have I taken a genuine wrong done to me and used it to justify a response far out of proportion to it, torching far more than the offense deserved, all while assuring myself that this time I was entirely in the right?

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