Troublesome Topic: SAMSON VS 1000 ARMED MEN

Judges 15:9-19

First, here’s the context for this story: To get back at the Philistines for something they had done to him, Samson had burned the fields of the Philistines using 300 jackals with torches tied to their tails. Then there were a few skirmishes in which Samson slaughtered many Philistines. After that the Philistines got serious and took an entire army and encamped in the land of Judah. The men of Judah went and asked the Philistines why they had come to fight against them and they were told that the Philistines’ only purpose was to take Samson prisoner so they could do to him what he had done to them. 

The Israelites of that area yielded to pressure from the Philistines. 3,000 Jews went and told Samson that they had to tie him up and hand him over to the Philistines. Samson agreed to it as long as the Jews did not kill him themselves.  

The Philistines thought they would be able to take possession of Samson as a tied-up prisoner, and just take him away. But when he broke the ropes and grabbed something he could use as a weapon, the jaw-bone of a donkey, things changed; it was now a matter of challenges from individual warriors.

It is obvious that God was helping him because a sword provides much more reach than the jawbone of a donkey. Another miracle is that the jawbone of a donkey lasted long enough without being broken apart or being chipped by swords. 

I believe it was a situation where the Philistine soldiers took on Samson one at a time; it was a fight between two challengers, not one man against as many as could surround him at one time. At first they kept coming at him because they thought a sword or spear should be a better weapon than the jawbone or a donkey, I mean, “What kind of weapon is that?” But how would you keep men motivated to step up after they have seen many of their comrades felled by this mad-man? Up to this point, the passage has included more than one, “just getting back at him” statements. So there was lots of animosity and hatred. They also probably encouraged one another, with statements like, “We’ve got to stop this guy.” “He’s got to be getting tired pretty soon.” So they kept trying and did not stop until Samson had vanquished 1000 challengers.

If it were a free-for-all, I envision Samson, at some point, getting ahold of a spear that was thrust at him, and taking it from his enemy, then using it to fight with. Or he could have just bent down and grabbed a sword from the hand of a dead or wounded man. But the Biblical text is clear that he used the jawbone to kill all 1000 of his opponents. In a one-on-one combat with rules that everyone seems to have followed, Samson was not allowed to bend down and grab the weapon of a fallen enemy; he had to use the weapon he had brought with him, which in his case was the first thing he could grab after he broke his ropes and as the first enemies approached. The other way to look at this is that Samson sometimes used trusted God and sometimes did his own thing. He may have trusted God to provide him some kind of weapon and God came through for him. Therefore Samson trusted God and the strange weapon God had provided instead of reaching for a different weapon.

One would assume that eventually the lone man would get tired and not be able to fight at his best, especially if the challengers stepped up in close succession. If Samson beat one man every 30 seconds it would take over 8 hours to vanquish 1000 of them, but he did not get tired.

When it was over he was so thirsty he thought he would die of thirst. This seems to give credence to the one-at-a-time for 8 hours idea. He prayed to God about his intense thirst and God opened up a spring which provided cool, fresh water.