Judges 15:4
And Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and took firebrands, and turned tail to tail, and put a firebrand in the midst between two tails. And Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and took firebrands, and turned tail to tail, and put a firebrand in the midst between two tails.
Judges 15:4 belongs to the story of Samson, the promised son of Manoah who was named Samson and called from birth to be Israel's Nazarite judge and deliverer. His extraordinary physical strength lay not in his well-knit sinews but in his Nazarite consecration, symbolized by his unshorn hair. The verse falls at the time when he was entering manhood and should above all have been true to God to execute his divine mission, but instead he mingled on friendly terms with the Philistines near Zorah and formed intimacies that darkened his whole life and corrupted him. Seeking self-pleasing rather than the wisdom promised to those who seek first to honor God, he connected himself with the enemies of Israel by taking a young woman of Timnath for his wife simply because she pleased him well, against his God-fearing parents' dissuasion and in transgression of God's command, failing to ask whether he could better glorify God and fulfill the purpose of his life, and thus forfeiting a nobler and happier destiny.
The wife he had so taken proved treacherous to him before the marriage feast ended. Incensed at her perfidy, he left her and went to Zorah, then relented and returned only to find her given to another man. In anger he took revenge by wasting all the fields and vineyards of the Philistines with the foxes and firebrands. That destruction provoked the Philistines to murder her, although their own threats had driven her to the deceit with which the trouble began.
His history shows the danger of giving passion free rein. Unlike Joseph, who chose obedience to God and resisted temptation, Samson yielded to temptation and entered a path ending in shame, disaster, and death.