So Jephthah went out to fight against the Ammonites; and Jehovah gave
him the victory over them, and delivered them into his hands. But when
he came home to Mizpah, his daughter was just coming out to meet him
with tambourines and choral dances. She was his only child; besides this
one he had neither son nor daughter. So when he saw her, he tore his
clothes and said, "Oh, my daughter, you have stricken me! It is you who
are the cause of my woe! for I have made a solemn vow to Jehovah and
cannot break it." She said to him, "My father, you have made a solemn
vow to Jehovah; do to me what you have promised, since Jehovah has
punished your enemies the Ammonites. But let this favor be granted me:
spare me two months that I may go out upon the mountains with those who
would have been my bridesmaids and lament because I will never become a
wife and mother." He said, "Go."
So he sent her away for two months with her friends, and she mourned on
the mountains because she would never become a wife and mother. At the
end of two months she returned to her father, who did what he had vowed
to do, even though she had never been married. So it became a custom in
Israel: each year the women of Israel go out for four days to bewail the
death of the daughter of Jephthah, the Gileadite.
SAMSON WHO DID TO OTHERS AS THEY DID TO HIM
There was a certain man of Zorah, of the clan of the Danites, named
Manoah; and he and his wife had no children. But the angel of Jehovah
appeared to the woman and said to her, "See, you have no children; but
now be careful not to drink any wine nor strong drink, and do not eat
anything unclean, for you are about to have a son. No razor shall be
used upon your son's head, for from birth the boy shall belong to God."
So the woman had a son and named him Samson.
Once Samson went down to Timnah and saw there a Philistine woman. When
he came back he said to his father and mother, "I have seen a Philistine
woman in Timnah. Get her as a wife for me." But his father and mother
said to him, "Is there no woman in your own tribe or among all our
people, that you must marry a wife from among the heathen Philistines?"
But Samson said to his father, "Get her for me, for she suits me."
So Samson went with his father and mother to Timnah; and just as they
came to the vineyards of Timnah, a full-grown young lion came roaring
toward him. The spirit of Jehovah came upon Samson and, although he had
nothing in his hand, he tore the beast in two as one tears a kid. But he
did not tell his father and mother what he had done.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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