The 9 Most Badass Bible Verses: #2 Judges 15:15-16
Samson could have dominated this list if we had let him. He was a sort of biblical superhero, who could basically call down the powers of the Lord to turn himself into a hurricane of ass kicking.
His whole story involves a feud with the Philistines, people who lived in part of what is now Israel and embraced the long tradition of going to war with the Jews. Or, specifically, the Philistines went to war against just Samson. And, they pretty much lost.
On this particular day, the Philistines had burned Samson's wife to death, and sent some men to capture him. Specifically, they sent 3,000 men. So, at that point, Samson either had the reputation as a world-class badass, or the Philistine army was the equivalent of those shitty battle droids from the Star Wars prequels that could only kill an enemy soldier by crushing him under a pile of their own corpses.
Either way, they didn't send enough. Samson tore apart the skull of a nearby dead donkey and grabbed one of these:
... Then killed a thousand men with it. A thousand.
What should be emphasized in this story was the bravery of the Philistine soldiers, specifically the ones in the back who kept charging even after seeing 700 or so of their comrades go down with shattered skulls. We're talking about guys who probably climbed over a pile of bodies 15-feet high to get to him.
If this story seems improbable, you can always claim mistranslation (for instance, in some versions of the story it's 20 Philistines instead of a thousand). We like to think they merely made the mistake of confusing a donkey's jawbone with that of a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Or, perhaps "donkey's jawbone" was mistranslated from the original Hebrew word for "minigun."
Runners up for this spot on the list included Josheb-Basshebeth, who according to 2 Samuel 23:8, "... raised his spear against eight hundred men, whom he killed in one encounter." Obviously he lost points for killing fewer men and for using an actual weapon to do it, which almost seems like cheating at this point.
There was also Anath in Judges 3:31, who "struck down six hundred philistines with an oxgoad." An oxgoad is a sharp stick you used to poke oxen. That started the Israeli tradition of killing large numbers of their enemies with farmyard tools, which continued through Samson and onto modern times, where the Six Day War of 1967 was won by a crippled Israeli peasant wielding a watering can.
Either way, the Philistines almost certainly remembered Samson as the worst thing that ever happened to them.
The rest of this great article is at cracked.com.
