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.

and said to him, “This is what Jephthah says, ‘Israel did not steal the land of Moab and the land of the Ammonites.

You have the right to take what Chemosh your god gives you, but we will take the land of all whom the Lord our God has driven out before us.

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

The Lord’s angelic messenger appeared to the woman and said to her, “You are infertile and childless, but you will conceive and have a son.

Manoah took a young goat and a grain offering and offered them on a rock to the Lord. The Lord’s messenger did an amazing thing as Manoah and his wife watched.

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.”

So she made him go to sleep, wove the seven braids of his hair into the fabric on the loom, fastened it with the pin, and said to him, “The Philistines are here, Samson!” He woke up and tore away the pin of the loom and the fabric.

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 Philistines captured him and gouged out his eyes. They brought him down to Gaza and bound him in bronze chains. He became a grinder in the prison.

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 said to the young man who held his hand, “Position me so I can touch the pillars that support the temple. Then I can lean on them.”

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.

When these men broke into Micah’s house and stole the carved image, the ephod, the personal idols, and the metal image, the priest said to them, “What are you doing?”