After Abimelech’s death, Tola son of Puah, grandson of Dodo, from the tribe of Issachar, rose up to deliver Israel. He lived in Shamir in the Ephraimite hill country.

The Ammonites crossed the Jordan to fight with Judah, Benjamin, and Ephraim. Israel suffered greatly.

Now Jephthah the Gileadite was a brave warrior. His mother was a prostitute, but Gilead was his father.

When the Ammonites attacked, the leaders of Gilead asked Jephthah to come back from the land of Tob.

Jephthah said to the leaders of Gilead, “But you hated me and made me leave my father’s house. Why do you come to me now, when you are in trouble?”

He said, “You may go.” He permitted her to leave for two months. She went with her friends and mourned her virginity as she walked through the hills.

He had forty sons and thirty grandsons who rode on seventy donkeys. He led Israel for eight years.

When he got home, he told his father and mother, “A Philistine girl in Timnah has caught my eye. Now get her for my wife.”

The Lord’s spirit empowered him and he tore the lion in two with his bare hands as easily as one would tear a young goat. But he did not tell his father or mother what he had done.

Some time later, when he went back to marry her, he turned aside to see the lion’s remains. He saw a swarm of bees in the lion’s carcass, as well as some honey.

The men of Judah said, “Why are you attacking us?” The Philistines said, “We have come up to take Samson prisoner so we can do to him what he has done to us.”

She made him go to sleep on her lap and then called a man in to shave off the seven braids of his hair. She made him vulnerable and his strength left him.

The rulers of the Philistines gathered to offer a great sacrifice to Dagon their god and to celebrate. They said, “Our god has handed Samson, our enemy, over to us.”

Samson took hold of the two middle pillars that supported the temple and he leaned against them, with his right hand on one and his left hand on the other.

When he gave the silver back to his mother, she took two hundred pieces of silver to a silversmith, who made them into a carved image and a metal image. She then put them in Micah’s house.

Now this man Micah owned a shrine. He made an ephod and some personal idols and hired one of his sons to serve as a priest.

After they had gone a good distance from Micah’s house, Micah’s neighbors gathered together and caught up with the Danites.

They worshiped Micah’s carved image the whole time God’s authorized shrine was in Shiloh.

However, she got angry at him and went home to her father’s house in Bethlehem in Judah. When she had been there four months,

They stopped there and decided to spend the night in Gibeah. They came into the city and sat down in the town square, but no one invited them to spend the night.