Judges 15:1

1 Later on - it was during the wheat harvest - Samson visited his bride, bringing a young goat. He said, "Let me see my wife - show me her bedroom."

Judges 15:1 Meaning and Commentary

Judges 15:1

But it came to pass within a while after
Or "after days", a year after, the same phrase as in ( Judges 14:8 ) in the time of wheat harvest; which began at Pentecost, as barley harvest did at the passover; this circumstance is mentioned for the sake of the following piece of history:

that Samson visited his wife with a kid;
by this time his passion of anger subsided, and he "remembered" his wife, as the Targum expresses it, and thought proper to return to her, and attempt a reconciliation with her; and for that purpose took a kid with him to eat a meal with her in her own apartment, which in those days was reckoned an elegant entertainment, and was a present to a king, ( 1 Samuel 16:20 ) . Isidore F19 derives the Latin word for a kid, "ab edendo", from eating, as if it was food by way of eminency, as it is both savoury and wholesome:

and he said, I will go with my wife into the chamber;
where she was, as women had their chambers and apartments by themselves; this he said within himself, or resolved in his own mind, and perhaps expressed it in her father's hearing, or however moved that way, which plainly indicated his design:

but her father would not suffer him to go in;
placed himself perhaps between him and the door, and parleyed with him, and declared he should not go into his daughter's chamber; Samson, through his superior strength, could easily have pushed him away, and broke open the door, but he did not choose to use such violent methods, and patiently heard what he had to say, and submitted.


FOOTNOTES:

F19 Origin. l. 12. c. 1. p. 101.

Judges 15:1 In-Context

1 Later on - it was during the wheat harvest - Samson visited his bride, bringing a young goat. He said, "Let me see my wife - show me her bedroom."
2 He said, "I concluded that by now you hated her with a passion, so I gave her to your best man. But her little sister is even more beautiful. Why not take her instead?"
3 Samson said, "That does it. This time when I wreak havoc on the Philistines, I'm blameless."
4 Samson then went out and caught three hundred jackals. He lashed the jackals' tails together in pairs and tied a torch between each pair of tails.
5 He then set fire to the torches and let them loose in the Philistine fields of ripe grain. Everything burned, both stacked and standing grain, vineyards and olive orchards - everything.
Published by permission. Originally published by NavPress in English as THE MESSAGE: The Bible in Contemporary Language copyright 2002 by Eugene Peterson. All rights reserved.