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Alternative Daily Text for Sunday, February 23, 2014
“Let me die with the Philistines!” (Judges 16:30)
Samson was “one of Israel’s outstanding judges.” (Insight on the Scriptures, volume II, page 849) Once he “went out and caught three hundred foxes and tied them together in pairs with oil-soaked rags around their tails. Then Samson took the foxes into the Philistine wheat fields that were ready to be harvested. He set the rags on fire and let the foxes go. The wheat fields went up in flames, and so did the stacks of wheat that had already been cut. Even the Philistine vineyards and olive orchards burned.” (Judges 15:4, 5, CEV) So he was an innovator of biowarfare – he utilized animals as weapons to take from his enemies their livelihood, so that many of them starved to death.
Then he took direct action against the Philistines. First he “he went smiting them, piling legs upon thighs with a great slaughter.” (Judges 15:8, NWT 1984) Later he vaunted: “With the jawbone of a donkey – one heap, two heaps! With the jawbone of a donkey I struck down 1,000 men.” (Judges 15:16) He did not need modern weapons of mass destruction to kill great crowds of men; rather “Jehovah’s spirit empowered him, and he went down to Ashkelon and struck down 30 of their men.” – Judges 14:19.
At the end of his life it became apparent that Paul counted him as a part of the “great cloud of witnesses” for good reason. (Hebrews 11:32; 12:1) He was present in the temple of the Philistines (that is, from his standpoint, infidels). There was a feast, and “Samson braced himself against the two middle pillars that supported the house, and he leaned on them with his right hand on one and his left hand on the other. Samson called out: ‘Let me die with the Philistines!’ Then he pushed with all his might, and the house fell on the lords and all the people in it. So he killed more at his death than he had killed during his life.” (Judges 16:29) So he became the first suicide assassin of human history.
Whether we are preparing attacks with biological weapons, going to kill our enemies in an open fight or planning a suicide bombing – in any case “we rely on the same holy spirit that Samson did.” (The Watchtower, December 15, 2011, page 21) What a fine example he gave for Terrorists today!