Today, I am reading and commenting on Judges 14-16.

I usually write about the lessons we can learn from Samson.  However, today I want to point out why God was so harsh in his judgements against the people of Canaan whom the Israelites displaced, as illustrated by the Philistines.  When Samson challenged the Philistine men chosen to be his companions at his wedding feast, they could have refused it.  However, they accepted it because they thought that he was not smart enough to come up with a riddle they couldn’t solve.  But that’s not the key thing about them from this story.  When they could not solve his riddle, rather than accept their loss and pay him their wager, they threatened his wife and her family.  Specifically, they threatened to burn her and her entire family to death.  Samson’s in-laws were Philistines from the same town as those who threatened them.  Further, we know it was not an empty threat because they later did just that after Samson burned their fields.  What kind of people burn their neighbors to death?  The answer is, very evil people.  The way the story presents it, Samson’s wife fully believed the men chosen as Samson’s wedding companions would have burned her entire family to death if she did not tell them the answer to Samson’s riddle.  That suggests that they had done something like that before.  These were the type of people whom God commanded the Israelites to drive out of the land or destroy.  They considered burning a family to death over the answer to a riddle to be routine.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.