Samson and Delilah | Scrolls and Embers Bible Stories

There are judges in Israel's story who lead armies, and judges who lead almost no one but themselves. Samson is the second kind, a man given strength enough for a nation, who could never quite master the one life he had been given to steward. In the days when Israel was under the hand of the Philistines for forty years, there lived in Zorah a man named Manoah, of the tribe of Dan. His wife was barren, and had borne no children. The angel of the Lord appeared to her and said she would conceive and bear a son. No razor was to touch his head, for the boy would be a Nazirite to God from the womb, set apart in a life of consecration. And he would begin to deliver Israel from the hand of the Philistines. She ran and told her husband. Manoah prayed that the man of God would come again and teach them how to raise the child who was to be born. The angel returned, confirmed every word, and when Manoah offered a sacrifice, the angel ascended in the flame of the altar before their eyes. Manoah and his wife fell on their faces to the ground, astonished and afraid that they had seen God. The woman bore a son and called his name Samson. The child grew, and the Lord blessed him, and the spirit of the Lord began to stir him at Mahanahdan, between Zorah and Eshtael. He grew into a young man of extraordinary strength, though nothing in his bearing announced it. He looked like any other son of Zorah. It was only when strength was needed that the difference showed itself sudden and overwhelming, as though something had been loaned to him rather than earned by him. From the beginning, his story would be less about strength restrained than strength spent carelessly, again and again, on the wrong causes and the wrong company. Samson went down to Timnah and saw a young Philistine woman there. He returned and told his father and mother he wanted her for his wife. His parents objected. Was there no woman among the daughters of his own people that he must go to take a wife from the uncircumcised Philistines? But Samson insisted, Get her for me, for she pleases me well. His father and mother did not know that this was from the Lord, who sought an occasion against the Philistines, for at that time the Philistines ruled over Israel. Even Samson's stubbornness, it seems, could be folded into a larger purpose he never suspected. On the road to Timnah, passing through the vineyards, a young lion came roaring toward Samson. The spirit of the Lord came mightily upon him, and he tore the lion apart with his bare hands as one would tear a young goat, though he had nothing in his hand. He told neither his father nor his mother what he had done. Some time later, returning to marry her, he turned aside to look at the lion's carcass, and found a swarm of bees and honey in it. He scraped the honey into his hands and ate as he went, and gave some to his parents, without telling them where it had come from. Already the pattern of his life was forming, gifts too large to fully explain, kept mostly to himself. Samson made a feast at Timnah, as was the custom for young men, and thirty companions were given to be with him. Samson said to them, Let me pose you a riddle. If you can tell me the answer within the seven days of the feast, I will give you thirty linen garments and thirty changes of clothing. If you cannot, you will give the same to me. They agreed. Out of the eater came something to eat, he said, and out of the strong came something sweet. It was the lion and the honey, folded into a puzzle only he could answer. For three days they could not solve it, and grew resentful of the wager they had accepted so quickly. On the fourth day the companions came to Samson's bride. Entice your husband to explain the riddle, they said, or we will burn you and your father's house with fire. Did you invite us here to take what is ours? She wept before Samson the rest of the seven days, saying he only hated her and did not love her, for he had not told her the riddle he had told the sons of her people. He answered that he had not even told his own father and mother, why should he tell her? She wept until the seventh day, and because she pressed him hard, he told her, and she told the sons of her people. Before sunset on the seventh day, the men of the city said to him, What is sweeter than honey, and what is stronger than a lion? Samson answered, If you had not plowed with my heifer, you would not have found out my riddle. The spirit of the Lord came mightily upon Samson, and he went down to Ashkelon, struck thirty of the men there, took their garments, and gave the changes of clothing to those who had explained the riddle. His anger burned, and he went back to his father's house. Samson's wife was then given to the companion who had attended him at the wedding, as though the marriage had never happened at all. What had begun as a private wager over a riddle had already cost thirty lives at Ashkelon, and a marriage undone by betrayal, a pattern of strength answering insult with far greater violence that would only deepen as the story went on. After a time, in the season of wheat harvest, Samson went to visit his wife, bringing a young goat, meaning to go into her. Her father would not allow it. I gave her to your companion, he said. Is not her younger sister better? Take her instead. Samson answered, Now I shall be blameless toward the Philistines, though I do them harm. He went out, caught three hundred foxes, took torches, turned the foxes tail to tail, and put a torch between each pair of tails. He set the torches alight and let the foxes loose into the standing grain of the Philistines, burning up the shocks, the standing grain, the vineyards, and the olive groves together. The Philistines asked who had done this, and were told it was Samson, because his wife had been given to his companion. So the Philistines went up and burned her and her father with fire. Samson said, Since you have done this, I will surely take revenge on you, and then I will cease. He attacked them and struck them down, a great slaughter, and went down and lived in the cleft of the Rock of Edom. The Philistines went up and camped in Judah, demanding Samson be bound and handed over. Three thousand men of Judah came to the Rock of Edom and said to him, Do you not know the Philistines rule over us? What have you done to us? He answered, As they did to me, so I have done to them. Bind me, and I will not resist, he said, so they bound him with two new ropes and led him up from the rock, delivering him toward the Philistine camp. As Samson came to Lehi, the Philistines came shouting to meet him. The Spirit of the Lord came mightily upon him, and the ropes on his arms became like flax burned with fire, and his bonds melted off his hands. He found the fresh jawbone of a donkey, reached out and took it, and with it struck down a thousand men. Afterward he was very thirsty, and cried out to the Lord, You have given this great deliverance by the hand of your servant, and now shall I die of thirst and fall into the hand of the uncircumcised. God split open a hollow place, and water came out of it, and when he drank his spirit returned and he revived. He judged Israel twenty years in the days of the Philistines. Samson went to Gaza, and the Gazettes were told, Samson has come here. They surrounded the place and waited all night at the city gate, quiet, planning to kill him at daybreak. But Samson lay only until midnight. Then he rose, took hold of the doors of the city gate and the two posts, pulled them up together with the bar, put them on his shoulders, and carried them to the top of the hill facing Hebron. It was less a rescue than a demonstration, he could walk into and out of the very heart of Philistine territory carrying its own gates on his back, and there was still nothing they could do to hold him. Strength like that made him nearly impossible to trap by force, which is precisely why what finally undid him was never force at all. After this, Samson loved a woman in the valley of Sork, whose name was Delilah. The lords of the Philistines came to her and said, Entice him, and see where his great strength lies, and by what means we may overpower him, that we may bind him to afflict him. Each of us will give you eleven hundred pieces of silver. It was an enormous sum, and it did what force never could. Where Philistine armies had failed to catch him at Gaza's gate, a bargain over silver, made in a private house in Sork, would finally reach him. He had survived a lion, thirty avenging men, a burning field, three thousand of his own countrymen binding him, and an entire city waiting in ambush. He would not survive being asked, patiently, again and again, by someone he loved. Delilah said to Samson, Tell me where your great strength lies, and how you might be bound to afflict you. Samson said, If they bind me with seven fresh bowstrings, not yet dried, I shall become weak. The Lord brought her seven fresh bowstrings, and she bound him. Men lay in wait in the inner room. She cried, The Philistines are upon you, Samson. He snapped the bowstrings as a thread of toe snaps when it touches fire, and his strength was not known. Delilah said, You have mocked me and told me lies. Now tell me the truth. He told her, If they bind me tightly with new ropes never used, I shall become weak. She bound him with new ropes and cried the same alarm. He snapped them off his arms like thread. She asked a third time, and he said, With the seven locks of my head into the fabric on the loom. She wove it, fastened it with a pin, cried the alarm again, and he pulled away the pin, the loom, and the fabric altogether, and his secret was still his own. Delilah said to him, How can you say you love me, when your heart is not with me? You have mocked me three times and have not told me where your great strength She pressed him daily with her words and urged him, until his soul was vexed to death. He told her all his heart, No razor has ever come upon my head, for I have been a Nazarite to God from my mother's womb. If I am shaved, my strength will leave me, and I shall become weak like any other man. Delilah saw that he had told her all his heart. She sent and called for the lords of the Philistines, saying, Come up once more, for he has told me all his heart. And the lords of the Philistines came up to her, bringing the silver in their hands. She lulled him to sleep on her knees, and called a man to shave off the seven locks of his head. She began to torment him, and his strength left him. She cried, The Philistines are upon you, Samson. He awoke from his sleep and said, I will go out as before, at other times, and shake myself free. But he did not know that the Lord had departed from him. The Philistines took him and put out his eyes, and brought him down to Gaza, bound with bronze shackles, and he became a grinder in the prison house, turning the mill among slaves. It was the lowest any judge of Israel had ever fallen, blind, chained, laboring in the dark, in the very city whose gates he had once carried away on his shoulders. The Philistines had triumphed, and their lords gathered to rejoice and to offer a great sacrifice to their god Dagon, saying, Our god has delivered Samson our enemy into our hand. But in the prison house, unseen in the dark, something had already begun to change. The hair of his head, shaved on Delilah's knees, began to grow again after it had been shaved. Nothing in the text says he prayed in those months at the mill, only that the hair grew and the grinding continued, day after day, a small and hidden return of what he had spent so recklessly, patient in a way strength alone had never taught him to be. The Philistine lords gathered in the house of their god, thousands of men and women, and the rulers of the Philistines, to offer sacrifice and to make merry, saying, Call Samson, that he may entertain us. They called Samson out of the prison, and he entertained them, and they stationed him between the two central pillars on which the temple stood. He said to the young man who held his hand, Let me feel the pillars on which the house rests, that I may lean against them. The house was full of men and women, all the lords of the Philistines were there, and about three thousand men and women were on the roof watching Samson entertain them. Samson called to the lord and said, O lord god, remember me, I pray, and strengthen me, I pray, only this once, that I may at once take vengeance on the Philistines for my two eyes. He took hold of the two middle pillars on which the house rested, one with his right hand and the other with his left, and said, Let me die with the Philistines. He pushed with all his strength, and the house fell on the lords and on all the people who were in it. So the dead he killed at his death were more than he had killed in his life. His brothers and all his father's household came down, took him, and brought him up and buried him between Zorah and Eshtael in the tomb of Manoah his father. He had judged Israel twenty years. A man of enormous gift and repeated failure, whose last act of faith came only after everything else had been stripped from him, sight, freedom, hair, dignity. What remained, in the end, was a single prayer, and a strength that returned not because he had earned it back, but because it had never truly been his to begin with.