way from the Lord, and could no longer
conquer their enemies, but the Philistines had conquered them, and had
been their masters for forty years, when the Lord sent Samson to
deliver them. He was not a wise man like Moses or Joshua, but he had
great strength, and the Lord used him against the Philistines.

Once a young lion came roaring against him, and he caught it and rent
it in two, as if it had been a kid. When he passed the same way
afterward he saw that the bees had built a nest in the body of the
lion, and it was full of honey. At his marriage feast--for he married
a Philistine woman--he made a riddle for the young men to guess:

"Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong, come forth
sweetness."

[Illustration: The young Samson]

They tried for seven days to guess the riddle, but they could not, and
then they told Samson's wife to find it out for them, or they would
burn her house. She begged him with tears to tell her, and at last he
told her of the honey comb in the body of the lion, and she told the
young men, so that at the end of the seventh day they said to Samson,

"What is sweeter than honey?" and "what is stronger than a lion?"

He saw that he had been betrayed, so he paid his debt, a suit of
clothes to each guest, and went home to his father's house. Afterwards
when he found that his wife had been given to another he tied
firebrands to the tails of three hundred foxes, and sent them among the
wheat fields of the Philistines so that the fields were set on fire.

Once the men of Gaza tried to kill him when he was within their city,
but he rose at midnight and took the city gates, with its posts and
bar, and carried them away on his shoulders to the top of the hill.
Again the Philistine lords had promised a great deal of money to a
woman, if she would get Samson to tell her what made him so strong, so
she begged him to tell her. Three times she thought she knew the
secret, and told the Philistines, but they could not bind him. At last
he was tired of her questions, and said to her plainly--that from a
child no razor had ever touched his hair. If it should be cut he would
be as weak as other men. Then she watched and cut his hair while he
slept, and the Philistines bound him and carried him to Gaza, where
they made him blind, and forced him to grind in the mills of a prison
house. The Philistines were glad because Samson was their prisoner at
last, and so they came together in