78 HEAPS UPON HEAPS SLAIV.

made Samson so strong, to help to deliver the Jews from
them. He was going through the woods once when a
lion came out; Samson seized him with his hands and
killed him. Soon after he married a Philistine woman,
and at the wedding feast he gave a riddle, and promised
thirty men a suit of clothes each if they could guess it.
He told his wife the meaning, and she told it to the
men: when they told Samson he went out and killed
thirty of their men and took their clothes to give to those
who answered his riddle. Of course they were angry at
Samson, and his wife's father took her away from him.
 Then Samson caught three hundred foxes and tied
them together two and two by their tails, and a burning
torch or firebrand between each pair, and started them
running through the fields where the standing grain was
ripe, and burned it. Then they took Samson's wife and
father and burned them!
 After this Samson killed so many of them that they
gathered an army to fight him. The Jews were afraid
when they saw this, and three thousand of them went to
a rock where Samson was, and bound him and gave him
to the enemy. When the Philistines saw him in their
hands they shouted with joy; but Samson burst the ropes
as if they were threads. He picked up the jawbone of an
ass, and with that in his hand he killed a thousand men.
He was a judge of Israel for twenty years.
 He went once to see a woman in one of the chief