In legend, all of Samson and Delilah’s time together is stolen, unsanctioned: they are having an affair, even though they are husband and wife (nowhere in the text does it say they are married, but most interpreters seem to assume that). This is a romantic fable full of forbidden-fruit possibilities, it is as sweet and insane as true love, as intense and sweaty as passion in its purest distillation, because to sleep with the enemy is to live outside the law. Since women traditionally mark this strange area upon which men assert their property rights—like deeded houses or branded cattle—Delilah embodies the failure of this male prerogative when it comes to regulating human emotions: though regarded by law as chattel, women in fact have free will within their pre-owned bodies and minds. Delilah can fall in love with Samson and no one can really do much to change that.
And there are many reasons why, if you were a Philistine satrap, you really might want to change that, or at least make advantageous use of a compatriot woman’s sway over Samson. Samson is a terrorist stirring up trouble on behalf of the Israelites’ struggle to cast off the yoke of the Philistines who rule them. His activities, on behalf of his cause, are the B.C. equivalent of planting a bomb in the public bazaar on a crowded shopping day or hijacking an El Al airplane to some Arabic emirate. Samson does things like take a thousand foxes, attach firebrands to their tails, and set them loose in a large field to set all the crops on fire; or else he makes a bet with thirty Philistine men, and when he loses—albeit unfairly—he makes good on his debt to them by slaying thirty men in another city and giving the garments of the dead to the men he lost to; or he picks up an ass’ jawbone that he finds lying at the side of the road and uses it to kill a thousand soldiers, all by himself. Assuming the current Middle East situation reigned back then, Samson would not only be part of the PLO, he would be the leader of Hamas. “He’s a man of the moment, he can’t see past the moment,” says Carol Fontaine, a professor at Andover Newton Theological School. “He is a Danite Terminator.” It is in fact his God-ordained duty to behave irrationally—he is meant to get the rebellion started, to “begin the deliverance of Israel,” as it is written in Judges; it is not for Samson to see the liberation all the way through. He is supposed to inspire and incite and then leave, he is meant to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater and watch as everyone scurries in chaos, he is intended to be a nomadic troublemaker, a Che Guevara of the Sinai Peninsula, or perhaps, in his more sanguinary moments, a Robespierre. So naturally, Samson is a wanted man in Philistia, as much a dangerous public menace as the World Trade Center bombers or Timothy McVeigh left loose would be to us today.
To be Delilah, to be in love with this dangerous man whose paranormal, supernatural strength makes him impossible to cage or contain, is to be in love with a deadly weapon. So the sixteen verses that have been passed down over time as a story of passion in the silky sumptuousness of Delilah’s desert tent—that conclude with her betraying Samson with a haircut that saps him of his strength and traps him, with blinded eyes, in a Philistine labor camp—is actually a great deal more complicated. That this Bible romance has become the basis and blueprint for each and every episode when a woman with her wiles drags down a good man who is just no match for her sexual trickery—whose mind is basically no match for the demands of his body—just shows that we are not careful in our examination of what he did to get into this mess.
When we speak of prostitutes who come forward with their salacious stories and “ruin”—I use quotation marks because in both cases these men have made comebacks—the careers of Jimmy Swaggart and Dick Morris, when we attribute the breakup of the Beatles to Yoko Ono or the suicide of Kurt Cobain to Courtney Love, when we see the cause of the Profumo Affair to be a young woman named Mandy Rice Davies (who is now an old woman, living in a council tenancy in England, obviously not the beneficiary of any of her powerful men), when we let Henry VIII believe that Anne Boleyn bewitched him into heresy (if she’s got such sorcery, it’s hard to figure how she ended up beheaded), when we let porn star T. T. Boy blame the wife for the suicide of his fellow on-camera fellatio-recipient Cal Jammer (née Randy Potes), and refer to Mrs. Jammer as “the wicked bitch” in The New Yorker, when we let any men in colonial-era Massachusetts blame their infidelities on women who must be witches (once again, somehow their power to arouse adultery was not adequate when it came to the hangman): every time we watch men of world events or minor characters in our own lives as they come completely undone over some girl, and we assume she manipulated and cajoled and coerced him into ruin and disaster, every time we believe that she brought him down, we are really letting him off the hook rather easily. If women are granted so much responsibility and credit and blame for the behavior of men that they sleep with, then that means we really do believe that any guy with a hard-on has truly cut off the blood flow to his brain—which, I have to say, is pretty much true, but usually men do come to their senses at some point. If men were truly sexuality’s simple serfs, then Gennifer Flowers would be sitting behind the desk of the Oval Office and Bill Clinton would be a lounge singer in the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock (maybe Hillary would be Vice President). I mean, if pussy power is so potent that it can be the ruin of a British administration, that it can cause John Lennon to make some seriously unlistenable albums and pose for some embarrassingly pale-assed pictures, and if it can make Samson—a man so strong that Samsonite luggage, indestructible even in the hands of a gorilla in a cage, is named for him—weak and wobbly-kneed and a slave to his lust, if men are this easy to manipulate, then why did it take us until 1920 to get the vote? Why are the majority of households with incomes below the poverty line headed by women? Why have they still not found a cure for menstruation? Why does Strom Thurmond continue to be reelected to the Senate? And why is it that they can put a man—many men—on the moon but we can’t get one woman elected into the White House?
Every time somebody says, about any situation of sexual politics, that she brought him down, the speaker must always be reminded that it’s a little like saying Rebel Without a Cause is a movie starring Natalie Wood: half of the story is missing. To see Samson as somehow less than complicit in his own destruction and disaster and disarray, to pin it all on Delilah—who may have been a luscious babe, but she was only a woman, and an ignorant Philistine (in the cultural-rube sense of the word), at that—is to give her responsibilities but no rights. It seems important to remember who is meant to be the star of this story, to keep in mind that this section of Judges is about Samson’s journey through a life of physical frenzy in which he only achieves maturity as a blinded, bound man, he only lives the life of the mind once he is metaphorically castrated when Delilah cuts off his hair: it is only when Samson is no longer enslaved to his dick or his whimsical muscleman games that he really grows up. This is a morality tale about emotional maturity, and Delilah is just an agent of God’s agenda for Samson. She’s got a bit part in his life, not unlike Marilyn Monroe, who had a minor role in The Asphalt Jungle; and yet she’s the only thing anyone remembers about that movie.
Women, you see, like any other group of people obstructed from paths to power, tend to get their action on the sly. And that is precisely why, on certain occasions, it does seem that there is no power like pussy power: men are so comfortably accustomed to being in charge, they forget how drooling and besotted they can become with some woman. It is only because men assume their centrality with the nonchalance and insouciance of those who’ve never even thought it might be otherwise—and I’m not sure that feminism has been able to make any real headway into this presumed privilege—that they are still able to get all astonished and flustered by the incursion of love into the safety of their sphere. Delilah can sidle from the margin to the center because Samson loved her and he thought that was the whole story; he thought his enemies were the Philistine soldiers who were anywhere but in Delilah’s bed. He mistook his will to power, he mistook his wondrous capacity to destroy armies of men with only a jawbone as a weapon, he mistook the command
he had over a ferocious lion that he tore apart with his bare hands—he mistook all these displays of dominance over his world for mastery of the whole man-woman thing. He has no notion of the pain that can be caused by a person who loves you very much. Samson is the first man in the Bible—and, by extension, in the canon of the Western world—to discover heartbreak and hurt, to be so infatuated by a woman that it is said “she made him sleep on her knees” (which may well imply the first recorded episode of cunnilingus). His life is so unexamined that he cannot see that his strength guarantees his safety on the battlefield, but nothing can help him if he is careless with his heart: Samson is scared of the wrong thing. The one thing a man can’t control—whether the source of his power is his money, his muscle or just being a man in a man’s world—has got to be the most frightening thing he can conceive of. And love is surely the wildest card life can deal to you: O.J. Simpson could not get Nicole under his control until he sliced her head off; all the rhinestones in Tennessee could not keep Priscilla at Graceland, even if Elvis was the King; and Bob Dylan could write “You’re a Big Girl Now” and “If You See Her, Say Hello” for his wife, Sarah, but the most beautiful and melancholy love songs that he could come up with could not save his marriage.
Love does not respond to the imperatives of the rest of life. Love is a bitch.
Samson and Delilah are the beginning of an ongoing onslaught of bad-woman stories, skimpy, scantily clad portraits that offer little detail, but just enough information for us to attach all kinds of nefarious traits to the woman. “In our culture the story of Samson and Delilah is the paradigmatic case of woman’s wickedness,” Mieke Bal, a professor at the University of Amsterdam, writes in Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Stories. “The combination of seduction, unfaithfulness, and treason is an unavoidable and fatal one. However strong a man is, and Samson was strong, he will always be helpless against woman’s strategies of enchantment. Once seduced, he will be betrayed. This is how the myth of Samson and Delilah is naturalized.”
In the rather brief text in the book of Judges, so little information is actually imparted that the assumptions attached to this story tell us far more about ourselves than they do about Samson or Delilah. “The characters have no development, no depth—they are types,” writes biblical scholar J. Cheryl Exum in her essay “Samson’s Women,” from the collection Fragmented Women: Feminist Subversions of Biblical Narrative. All we know is that Samson “loved a woman in the Valley of Sorek, and her name was Delilah”—the text says exactly that, though it never tells us if she loved him. But in any reading of the story, certain assumptions—mostly about Delilah—are pretty consistent. “Delilah is presented [by commentators] as beautiful at the moment when Samson’s falling in love with her is mentioned but as false, unreliable, and greedy when the transaction with the Philistines is concluded,” writes Bal in Lethal Love. “What interests me here, however, is the reaction of the readers (the authors of the [commentaries]) to events on which the Bible itself makes no comment.” In fact, Delilah’s looks are just such a thing. Despite a collective conclusion that Delilah was a sexy siren, Rita Hayworth in Blood and Sand or the astral, ethereal goldilocks goddess rising, Phoenix-like, from the foam of a half-shell in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, the text itself says nothing of the sort. Many times in the Old Testament a woman’s looks are sized up simply as “pleasing to the eye” (yefat mareah in the Hebrew original), while Rebecca is “fair to look upon,” Rachel is “beautiful of form and beautiful to look at,” and Bathsheba is described as simply “very good-looking”—but Delilah is not sized up at all. The book of Judges is equally mum on the subject of Delilah’s personal probity, though the Old Testament does not shy away from conveying a woman’s poor character, usually by calling her a “prostitute” or a “wayward wife,” with adjectives like “immoral,” “loud and defiant” and “brazen” most commonly applied to the biblical bad girls. (Interestingly, Jezebel is never characterized as evil, though she would be one of those rare incontrovertible instances; although perhaps the report early on that she’s made a project of “killing off the Lord’s prophets” gets the point across well enough.) In fact, the closest the text comes to commenting on Delilah’s morals is in introducing her with the phrase “her name was Delilah,” and not “Delilah was her name”: the former is the structure that the Bible uses to indicate a righteous person.
But the lack of biographical information given about such a viscerally vivid character has been duly noted. “Scripture is completely silent about Delilah’s age. Was she considerably younger than [Samson], or was she perhaps the same age?” asks Rabbi Gershon Weiss in Samson’s Struggle, an Orthodox Jewish reading of the strongman’s life. “It is usually assumed that [Samson] was primarily attracted to Delilah’s beauty. If this is true, however, why does Scripture never mention that she was beautiful, as it does in other cases? If Delilah was not beautiful, just what quality of hers did attract [Samson] to her?” But this brief story, free of modifiers, has its own life because, like Sophocles’ invention of Oedipus, its themes are those of fear and betrayal, and these are issues not just at the heart of toxic, politically vexed male-female relationships, but even in love that is basically sound and sane. While in previous chapters lust that is presumed to be love drives men to rape the over-ogled object of desire, and jealousy causes murder between two or more men who’ve gone berserk over one passive little woman, Samson and Delilah are the first couple in which the destruction takes place within their relationship, the distrust and desperation generated between their two bodies and minds causes all the trouble: this is the first ever incident of intimate terrorism.
Samson and Delilah earn their age-old romantic resonance by telling the story of a universal and usually unspoken fear, a desperate dread that taints our deepest attachments with a subtle blue shade of sorrow, and a creepy, constant fear that warns us to always watch our backs. Somewhere down deep in even the happiest couples, the stablest of relationships, is the horror of what we don’t—can’t—know about even the closest and most dear, about the lover we wed and the face we will wake up next to forever: all that is hidden and unknown and unpredictable and possible and probable when you join your life to another person’s, all the power you relinquish to someone who is that close, who can run amok with it and you any day, all the crimes committed with knives and guns and the teenage babysitter and worse, all the violations not even thought of by the Marquis de Sade—these are intimacy’s unmarked land mines. You go into a relationship for safety and security, and it’s easy to forget that this irenic quietude may shelter you from the teeming masses, but it also puts you at the mercy of one person. The most likely person to kill you is your wife, but that probably won’t happen. What probably will happen is a million little betrayals of varying degrees of pain, brought on by people you love, the only ones who really can hurt you. This fact should scare us, but instead it combines to make us panic about crime and build fortresses around our homes, and to avoid relationships altogether, rather than take a chance. Samson and Delilah is only the most crass and obvious case study to illustrate how the ones we love the most can so easily hurt us through abandonment, through a roving eye, through simple betrayal, through any and all of the vicissitudes that conspire to tear the delicate vellum of love apart.
Samson and Delilah offer the first example of what we now call sexual politics, the infant years of a he said/she said situation, the clear establishment of a man who gets in trouble and offers, by way of excuse, the insistence that she made me do it. It happens that in the text Samson never makes such an accusation, nor is there any courtroom drama that might reveal the characters’ differing versions of events. But without the benefit of even a bit of disputation, the story has been passed down as one in which a man lost his way while being led by his dick, which was in hot pursuit of some dame—and the presumption at the end of this gander-goose chase is that she made me do it.
In an earlier episode of potential sexual po
litics, Jacob’s daughter Dinah is raped by an uncircumcised heathen he-man sort named Shechem one day when she went out for a walk. In spite of the obvious rebellious forthrightness it took for a teenage virgin to go wandering about the town without a chaperone—despite the fact that this behavior could be seen as asking for trouble, and under the circumstances rightly so—Dinah is never accused of inviting rape. While the case is handled terribly—her twelve brothers view this violation as an affront to their manhood and to the family name, and take it upon themselves to massacre Shechem’s people and rape the women, tit for tat for tit—no one ever blames Dinah for it. In fact, Dinah quickly fades into pretext status, merely becoming the passive person that gives the men just cause for mayhem. It is not until Delilah, in her foreign exoticism, that a woman is held responsible for just being sexy. The rare, remote possibility that this facade of physical appeal can house a fatal weapon—like the pretty dolls that the Soviets would leave lying in public spaces in Afghanistan, brightly colored plastic toys that lured the starved, deprived children and blew up faster than their parents’ warnings not to touch the bomb—has become the excuse to distrust all women.
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