13
But if you can't solve it, you give me thirty linen shirts and thirty changes of good clothes." They answered, "Tell us the riddle, we want to hear it."
14
So he said to them, "Out of the eater came food; out of the strong came sweetness." Three days passed, and they couldn't solve the riddle.
15
On the seventh day, they said to Shimshon's wife, "Coax your husband into telling us the solution to the riddle. Otherwise we'll burn down your father's house and you with it. You two called us here to turn us into paupers, didn't you?"
16
Shimshon's wife went to him in tears and said, "You don't love me, you hate me! You told a riddle to my fellow countrymen, and you haven't told me the answer." He said to her, "Look, I haven't even told it to my father and mother! Should I tell you?"
17
But she had been crying throughout the seven days of the banquet; so on the seventh day, because she had kept pressing him, he told her the solution; and she passed it on to her people.
18
Then, before sundown on the seventh day, the men of the city said to him, "What is sweeter than honey? and what is stronger than a lion?" Shimshon answered, "If you hadn't plowed with my young cow, you wouldn't have solved my riddle now."
19
Then the Spirit of ADONAI came over him powerfully. He went down to Ashkelon, killed thirty of their men, took their good clothes, and gave them to the men who had "solved" the riddle. He was boiling with rage, so he went straight up to his father's house,
20
and his wife was given to the companion who had been best man at the wedding.