Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

Did you know we have another daily podcast? It's called the Bible kneecap, like kneeling in prayer,

because your girl loves a pun. Anyway, it's a short prayer of response to what we've

read and recapped each day, and each episode is about 60 to 90 seconds long. To give you a taste

of it, we've uploaded a free preview of the Bible kneecap for you today, so be sure to look

for that in your feed. Today we meet our 12th and final judge, Samson. He may be the only one you've heard of

before. He's definitely the most famous, in part because his story is the most detailed in the book,

but also it might have something to do with the fact that he feels like the closest thing Christian

culture has to a traditional superhero. I hope today's reading helped paint things a little

more clearly because he's probably

the worst and most wicked of all the judges in the book. Not only that, but he probably doesn't

actually have big muscles like we usually imagine. I'll tell you why tomorrow when we wrap up this

story. As for today, the people of Israel have fallen into Sin again and are oppressed by the

Philistines

for 40 years. And according to 1017, this is all probably happening simultaneous to the stuff

we read about yesterday. Yesterday's battle with the Ammonites was happening in the Transjordan,

east of the Jordan River, and this stuff with the Philistines is happening along the Mediterranean

coastline of Israel, west of the Jordan River. First, we meet a man

named Manoa, and the angel of the Lord, who is likely God the son, shows up to tell Manoa's

barren wife that she's going to have a son. He says her son will play a role in helping rescue Israel,

and that she should raise him to live under the Nazarite vow. You may remember

the Nazarite vow from number six. The rules of the vow included not drinking any alcohol or even

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