When she arrived, she persuaded Othniel to ask her father for a field. As she got off her donkey, Caleb asked her, “What do you want?”

She answered him, “Give me a blessing. Since you have given me land in the Negev, give me springs of water also.” So Caleb gave her both the upper and lower springs.

She summoned Barak son of Abinoam from Kedesh in Naphtali and said to him, “Hasn’t the Lord, the God of Israel, commanded you: ‘Go, deploy the troops on Mount Tabor, and take with you 10,000 men from the Naphtalites and Zebulunites?

“I will go with you,” she said, “but you will receive no honor on the road you are about to take, because the Lord will sell Sisera into a woman’s hand.” So Deborah got up and went with Barak to Kedesh.

Jael went out to greet Sisera and said to him, “Come in, my lord. Come in with me. Don’t be afraid.” So he went into her tent, and she covered him with a rug.

He said to her, “Please give me a little water to drink for I am thirsty.” She opened a container of milk, gave him a drink, and covered him again.

While he was sleeping from exhaustion, Heber’s wife Jael took a tent peg, grabbed a hammer, and went silently to Sisera. She hammered the peg into his temple and drove it into the ground, and he died.

Jael is most blessed of women,
the wife of Heber the Kenite;
she is most blessed among tent-dwelling women.

He asked for water; she gave him milk.
She brought him curdled milk in a majestic bowl.

She reached for a tent peg,
her right hand, for a workman’s mallet.
Then she hammered Sisera—
she crushed his head;
she shattered and pierced his temple.

Sisera’s mother looked through the window;
she peered through the lattice, crying out:
“Why is his chariot so long in coming?
Why don’t I hear the hoofbeats of his horses?”

Her wisest princesses answer her;
she even answers herself:

When Jephthah went to his home in Mizpah, there was his daughter, coming out to meet him with tambourines and dancing! She was his only child; he had no other son or daughter besides her.

Then she said to him, “My father, you have given your word to the Lord. Do to me as you have said, for the Lord brought vengeance on your enemies, the Ammonites.”

She also said to her father, “Let me do this one thing: Let me wander two months through the mountains with my friends and mourn my virginity.”

“Go,” he said. And he sent her away two months. So she left with her friends and mourned her virginity as she wandered through the mountains.

At the end of two months, she returned to her father, and he kept the vow he had made about her. And she had never been intimate with a man. Now it became a custom in Israel

God listened to Manoah, and the Angel of God came again to the woman. She was sitting in the field, and her husband Manoah was not with her.

She must not eat anything that comes from the grapevine or drink wine or beer. And she must not eat anything unclean. Your wife must do everything I have commanded her.”

She wept the whole seven days of the feast, and at last, on the seventh day, he explained it to her, because she had nagged him so much. Then she explained it to her people.

“I was sure you hated her,” her father said, “so I gave her to one of the men who accompanied you. Isn’t her younger sister more beautiful than she is? Why not take her instead?”

The Philistine leaders brought her seven fresh bowstrings that had not been dried, and she tied him up with them.

While the men in ambush were waiting in her room, she called out to him, “Samson, the Philistines are here!” But he snapped the bowstrings as a strand of yarn snaps when it touches fire. The secret of his strength remained unknown.

She fastened the braids with a pin and called to him, “Samson, the Philistines are here!” He awoke from his sleep and pulled out the pin, with the loom and the web.

“How can you say, ‘I love you,’” she told him, “when your heart is not with me? This is the third time you have mocked me and not told me what makes your strength so great!”

Because she nagged him day after day and pleaded with him until she wore him out,

When Delilah realized that he had told her the whole truth, she sent this message to the Philistine leaders: “Come one more time, for he has told me the whole truth.” The Philistine leaders came to her and brought the money with them.

Then she let him fall asleep on her lap and called a man to shave off the seven braids on his head. In this way, she made him helpless, and his strength left him.

Then she cried, “Samson, the Philistines are here!” When he awoke from his sleep, he said, “I will escape as I did before and shake myself free.” But he did not know that the Lord had left him.

So he returned the silver to his mother, and she took five pounds of silver and gave it to a silversmith. He made it into a carved image overlaid with silver, and it was in Micah’s house.

But she was unfaithful to him and left him for her father’s house in Bethlehem in Judah. She was there for a period of four months.

Then her husband got up and went after her to speak kindly to her and bring her back. He had his servant with him and a pair of donkeys. So she brought him to her father’s house, and when the girl’s father saw him, he gladly welcomed him.

Early that morning, the woman made her way back, and as it was getting light, she collapsed at the doorway of the man’s house where her master was.

Citizens of Gibeah ganged up on me and surrounded the house at night. They intended to kill me, but they raped my concubine, and she died.