Charles Ellicott Commentary Judges 15

A while later. —After days (Judges 11:4; Judges 14:8).

During the wheat harvest. —This, in the Shephelah, would be about the middle of May.

He visited his wife with a kid. —We find the same present given by Judah to Tamar in Genesis 38:17. We may compare this to the complaint of the elder brother of the prodigal son, who lamented that he was never given a kid (Luke 15:29).

I will go in to my wife. —Uxoriousness was the chief cause of Samson's weakness and ruin, as it was later for Solomon, a very different type of man.

Into the chamber. —Song of Solomon 1:4; Song of Solomon 3:4.

Verily thought ... utterly hated. —In the emphatic simplicity of the Hebrew style it is, Saying I said that hating, you hate her. As Samson had left his wife in anger immediately after the wedding feast, the father might have reasonably supposed that he meant finally to desert her.

I gave her. —This must mean I have betrothed her, for otherwise she would not have still been living in her father’s house. But if the father had been an honourable man, he could not under these circumstances have done less than restore the dowry which Manoah had given for her.

To your companion. —See on Judges 14:20.

Her younger sister. —The father sought in this way to repair the wrong he had inflicted, and to offer some equivalent for the dowry which he had wrongly appropriated.

Concerning them. —There is no reason for this rendering. It should be to them. The Vulgate has cui, and the Septuagint "to them," or "to him."

Now —i.e., This time. He means that his second act of vengeance will at least have more excuse than his assault on the Askelonites.

More blameless than the Philistines. —Rather, innocent as regards the Philistines. The words are somewhat obscure. Ewald renders them—

"This time I am blameless concerning the Philistines,
If it's evil I am thinking of doing to them."

Caught three hundred foxes.—Rather, three hundred jackals. The word Shualim is used for both; but it would be difficult to catch three hundred foxes, whereas jackals are still heard howling in herds around these very regions at night. They must have been even more common in Palestine in ancient times, and therefore we find such names as “the land of Shual” (1 Samuel 13:17), Hazar-shual (“jackal’s enclosure,”Joshua 15:28), Shalim (1 Samuel 11:4), and Shaalabbin (“place of foxes or jackals,”Joshua 19:42). There would have been no difficulty in trapping them, nor is it said that they were all let loose at once.

Turned tail to tail.—This implies that he tied the tails together (Septuagint, sunedēsen; V Vulg., junxit).

Put a firebrand in the midst.—The firebrands were pieces of resinous wood, like Gideon’s torches (Judges 7:20), which were loosely trailed between the tails of the jackals. The object of tying two together was to impede their motion a little, so that they might not dart away so violently as to extinguish the torch.

Into the standing corn of the Philistines. — He probably did this at night, when his actions would be unobserved, and no one would be nearby to quench the flames. We may imagine him watching the trails of fire from his rocky stronghold, and exulting as the conflagration reddened the night. The heat of a tropical country makes everything so dry that his plan would be certain to succeed.

To burn the crops of an Arab is to this day the deadliest of all injuries (Burckhardt). This was the method adopted by Absalom in 2 Samuel 14:30 to gain an interview with Joab. It is needless to point out that these rough, coarse, and cruel measures should no more be judged by a later and better standard than his thirst for personal revenge. There can be no ground to question the literal truth of the narrative.

This is entirely in accordance with Eastern custom. It also finds curious confirmation in a story from Ovid’s Fasti (iv. 681-711): every year, at the Cerealia, torches were tied to the tails of foxes and let loose in the Roman circus. This commemorated an incident where a young man at Carseoli, to punish a fox for raiding his hen-coops, wrapped it in straw, set it on fire, and the creature escaped into the cornfields, burning down the standing crops. The attempt of Bochart to establish any connection between this custom and Samson’s revenge is quite untenable, but the incident itself sheds light on the plausibility of the narrative. Ewald refers to Mêghadûta, liv. 4; and Babrius, Fab., 11.

Both the shocks, and also the standing corn. — Literally, from the heap, even up to the standing. The extent of the vengeance and its terrible future consequences would be fully, and we fear ruthlessly, assessed by Samson as he saw the rivers of fire running and spreading through that vast plain of corn-land in harvest-time. (Compare to Exodus 22:6.)

With the vineyards and olives. — Literally, and to vineyard, to olive. There may be some slight corruption in the text, or it may be an abbreviation of “from vineyard to vineyard, and from olive to olive.” (Compare to Micah 7:12.) The low vines festooning the trees and trellis-work, and the olives with their dry trunks, would be sure to suffer injury.