In other words – not love, or lust, or romance, and above all not free will: Samson is drawn to the Philistine woman because God is looking for an excuse to strike the Philistines who are oppressing the Israelites. This is the sole motive the Bible offers for the desire that Samson feels. But this presentation of events cannot prevent the reader from wondering about the role of Samson the man in this story. For he himself surely does not experience his feelings of love as someone else’s ‘pretext’ – not even God’s – and his strong and immediate reaction to the woman from Timnah proves that he, the man, the flesh-and-blood Samson, seeks and needs love! Is he in any way capable of understanding that this burning love is not entirely ‘his’, and that he is merely a political and military tool in God’s hands? Is there any man who could understand such a thing? Is there anyone who could endure the knowledge that, just as he was not his parents’ ‘natural child’, so too now, as a man, his natural desire for a woman has been confiscated, or else installed in him?
And as we raise these questions, a sad possibility becomes increasingly apparent: that the hero of our story is a man who does not know, and perhaps will never really understand, that God, even before his birth, has nationalised his desires, his love, his entire emotional life.
‘Get her for me as a wife,’ Samson half-asks, half-demands of his parents. It is interesting to note that, in contrast with the typical biblical scene in which a son asks his father to bring him a particular woman as a wife, here Samson takes his request to both his father and mother. And from here on, they will almost always be mentioned together, the father and the mother, as again and again the biblical storyteller makes it clear that Samson’s mother is at least as important as his father.
And they also answer him together, in one voice (‘His father and mother said to him’), what parents typically say to Samsons in such situations: ‘Is there no one among the daughters of your own kinsmen and among all our people, that you must go and take a wife from the uncircumcised Philistines?’ In other words – why don’t you marry one of our own?
For it is not only that Samson chooses to marry a foreigner, the daughter of another people, but that this particular people, the Philistines, are among the worst and bitterest of Israel’s foes: with the advantage of iron weapons they repeatedly engage in the conquest and enslavement of the tribes of Israel, while preventing them from developing iron-smithing of their own, ‘for the Philistines were afraid that the Hebrews would make swords or spears’.12 Indeed for the past forty years, as is told in the beginning of our story, they have dominated and provoked the Israelites. And it is also known that the tribe of Dan, Samson’s tribe, dwells in the borderlands and finds it hard to build a homestead there, as it is continually embattled with stronger nations, the Philistines and others. These continued struggles have exhausted the tribe, depleted it and stripped it of cultural, political, and social influence within the Israelite nation.13 (In this light it is possible to read as somewhat unrealistic the blessing of Dan by his father Jacob before the patriarch’s death, the expression of both a hope and a wish: ‘Dan shall govern his people as one of the tribes of Israel.’ After which Jacob adds, perhaps with a heavy sigh: ‘I wait for your deliverance, O Lord …’)14
This is the larger national context in which the relationship between Samson and the Philistine woman begins to blossom. But no less fascinating is what happens here between the young man and his parents: first of all, they are confused, because they know (or at least his mother does) that Samson is destined to save his people from the Philistines, so what is he doing with a Philistine woman? Next, when they say to him, ‘Is there no one among the daughters of your own kinsmen and among all our people, that you must go and take a wife from the uncircumcised Philistines?’ there is a clear echo of blame and complaint: ‘Why can’t you be like everyone else?’ We may read this with a smile, as it sounds like one of those tired lines so many of us have heard from our parents (and sworn never to say to our children), but the Samson story is anything but a comedy. It is a tragic tale; not least because the strangeness of this child, his difference from his parents, is so sharp and clear-cut that it sometimes seems that he and they belong to two entirely different dimensions of human existence, realms that are separated by an unbridgeable chasm. And therefore, that trite parental line is uttered here with incurable, heart-rending anguish.
For it can be assumed that by now Samson’s parents have gathered that, with every step he takes, his strangeness and otherness will become more and more pronounced, that it will become clear to one and all that he, in a sense, is made of different ‘stuff’ – from some alien, unknowable essence that infiltrated him even in the womb – on account of which he will never, in all likelihood, be able to connect naturally and harmoniously with his family or his people.
And even though they know well – having been the ones, after all, who were given the news – that Samson, by his nature, cannot be ‘like everyone else’ or like other human beings, they blurt out the plaintive question because it is so hard for them, as parents, to finally come to terms, without hesitation, with the grand divine plan that confiscated their son and made him what he is. They feel, both of them, the pain of the umbilical cord so roughly torn, which will stay sundered forever.
One can imagine that at this moment – as his parents try to protest his decision – Samson looks straight into his father’s eyes. He wants to make it clear to him, with that look, just how ‘right’ this woman is, in his opinion. Facing him is the indecisive, fearful Manoah. Manoah, ever suspicious of this son who hatched so suddenly in his nest, like the chick of a strange bird, unexpected and dangerous. Manoah – a man so utterly unlike his energetic, obsessive, determined, brave, and excitable son, Samson. According to the text, Samson does not respond to his father’s and mother’s question. We don’t know if this is because he is indeed so determined, or whether that pained parental query – ‘Is there no one among the daughters of your own kinsmen and among all our people, that you must go and take a wife from the uncircumcised Philistines?’ – triggers, for a second, an unsettling sensation, the vague glimmer of possibility that the reason he is so attracted to this Philistine girl may not be so obvious, or entirely ‘natural’.
Again he says to Manoah: ‘Get me that one, for she is the right one for me.’ This time, Samson only addresses his father. Possibly he does so because he senses that Manoah is weaker and more easily swayed. But it may also be that he feels compelled to avert his eyes from his mother, for when he speaks about a woman who is ‘the right one’, he is incapable of looking straight at the woman who was a senior partner– if an unwilling one – in ordaining his tangled, troublesome destiny.
Samson and his father exchange duelling glances. This is a decisive moment in Samson’s personal history. Other difficult struggles await him, but this is the first time he has had to rebel openly against his father’s authority (and his mother’s). Without a doubt it has been abundantly clear to everyone, even before this situation, that Samson is not the same as other people. Stories told within the family and spread among the tribe have buttressed this impression, stories about the unusual circumstances of his conception and the exalted task for which he has been chosen. His long hair, too, which has never been cut, has singled him out before one and all as sui generis. But this, now, is the moment when Samson declares himself not merely different, but also to be someone who is closer in his soul to the foreigner, the enemy.
* * *
They are on their way. Samson, his father and his mother have set out from Zorah towards the woman from Timnah, on trails that wind through dry brambles and late-summer fields of dusty stubble.
Long-legged Samson walks in broad strides, drawn towards Timnah by a powerful force. Ordinary mortals would find it hard to keep pace with him. His parents doubtless need to stop now and again and catch their breath; here, for example, on a hilltop at the southwest crest of the Zorah ridge, overlooking the valley of Nahal Sorek, they stand,
take a breath, wipe their sweaty faces. In those days the area was thickly wooded – ‘as plentiful as sycamores in the Shephelah plain’15 was once a simile for abundance – but today the trees are sparse, the hills exposed. The sycamores have been replaced by pines, planted by the Jewish National Fund, which in the thick air of a Levantine sirocco look almost grey. Below, in the plain, lies the city of Beit Shemesh, with its roads and rooftops and industrial zones, and the flat drainage basins of the surrounding streams, sparkling like mirrors, and something flaming red-orange in the distance – maybe a tree has caught fire in the searing hamsin wind, or maybe it’s just burning garbage – and Samson’s back disappears over the saddle of the ridge, into the valley, down to Timnah.
And here, at the entrance to the vineyards of Timnah, a roaring lion appears before him, one of those that were indigenous to the Land of Israel in those days, but have since become extinct. The divine spirit then descends upon Samson: quick as a wink he tears the lion apart ‘as one might tear a kid asunder’. He does so with his bare hands, ‘but he did not tell his father and mother what he had done’.
Two things cry out here for interpretation: how is it possible that his parents didn’t witness the battle? This puzzle can be solved with perfectly simple explanations: he was walking faster than they were; he knew a shortcut but they were on the main road; or maybe, while his parents walked through the vineyards of Timnah, he circumvented them so as not to transgress the Nazirite prohibition against any contact with grapes.16
The second question is more difficult: he is walking along with his parents, tears a lion limb from limb with his bare hands, and says nothing. Why is he silent? Out of modesty? Or perhaps he considers the event insignificant? Hard to believe, not only because the feat itself is so extraordinary, but because it will quickly become apparent that Samson keeps replaying it in his mind, and even boasting about it.
Then maybe he is silent because he senses that the episode with the lion doesn’t ‘connect’ with his relationship to his parents, or with his relations with human beings in general? In other words, it’s possible that Samson senses that the battle with the lion is some sort of sign, part of a secret code in which he communicates with that ‘divine spirit’ within him; a sort of sign-language through which God reconfirms the special bond between them, and instructs him to stay the course and trust the impulses that guide him, even when they contradict his parents’ wishes.
Because what he has done to the lion is so vastly beyond any human scale, is it possible that Samson is simply wary of involving his parents, so as not to give them further proof of just how different he is, and alien to them? For someone like him understands too well that every additional piece of evidence will distance his parents from him a little more, and each of these progressive acts of distancing – even as they are vital signs of his uniqueness – are deeply painful, cutting him off bit by bit, culminating in utter exile.
And it’s also a possibility that what he has discovered about himself, while battling the lion, has frightened him: the hidden superhuman power that has burst out and revealed itself to him for the first time has, perhaps, also shocked him and created a partition between Samson and his new, larger-than-life self that does not fully belong to the human race.
And perhaps someone seen by his parents as a stranger when he was still in the womb, who even then was deprived of full parental approval, is fated to be forever a little suspicious of himself. Wary of a strange and inscrutable aspect of his being, an aspect that is – exactly like the angel who brought his parents the news – ‘miraculous’, mysterious and unknowable, and therefore a continuing source of wonder and doubt. And it’s possible to go a step further, and gather that someone who is thus sentenced to self-doubt is likely to be uncertain not only about whether he is the legitimate child of his parents: there also remains that faint, lingering doubt as to whether he is a ‘legitimate’ member of the human family altogether, whether he is ‘like other people’, and this corrosive uncertainty is something he can never shed. There will always be a stranger inside him, a hidden, hostile passenger – perhaps even a fifth column, a saboteur.
* * *
He arrives in Timnah, and again meets the Philistine woman, and no doubt quietly looks her up and down, to confirm that she is to his taste (and also pays close attention to his parents’ reactions to her). And again the narrator emphasises, after this encounter too, that ‘she pleased Samson’, she was ‘right’ for him. Meanwhile the reader, who knows that this new love is nothing other than a divinely selected pretext for striking back at the Philistines, contemplates the sad disparity between Samson’s romantic impulses and what God intends to make of them.
When Samson, ‘after a while’, comes back to marry the woman, he returns to see ‘the remains of the lion’. He doesn’t merely return, but ‘turned aside to see the remains’ – in other words, he has detoured from his path to his future wife in order to look once more at the dead lion.
It’s not difficult, of course, to empathise with him, to understand his need to go back and relish the hour of glory that remains sealed secretly inside him. But one can also imagine that he goes there because, as the days have passed (and ‘days’ here might well mean a whole year), even he himself has begun to doubt whether indeed this great thing actually happened to him, or whether it was only a dream. Or does he simply feel a need to return to the place where he scored his grand victory, in order to reconfirm his manliness before he goes to the woman?
And then, as he stands before the dead lion, he sees ‘in the lion’s skeleton a swarm of bees and honey, and scooped it into his palms’.17 Samson, a grown man – nowhere in the text is he described as a giant – stands in wonder at the sight. Before his eyes, bees buzz around the skeleton. Honey has accumulated inside the lion. Samson extends his hand – without fear of the bees – and scoops honey into his mouth, and it touches the reader’s heart as he reaches out so simply, innocently, spontaneously: he sees, he wants, he takes … And just as he killed the lion with his bare hands, so too does he scoop out the honey from inside it, not with a ladle or into a jar, but with his hands, and then ‘ate it as he went along. When he rejoined his father and mother, he gave them some and they ate it; but he did not tell them that he had scooped the honey out of a lion’s skeleton.’
Take a look at him: a he-man with a little licking boy inside. (How astonishing and poignant, this gulf between enormous physical strength and an immature, childlike soul.) He walks and eats, walks and licks, till he gets home to mum and dad, and gives them the honey, ‘and they ate it’, apparently straight from the palms of his hands. What a marvellous, sensual scene!
But would it be too much to imagine that Samson, walking and licking the honey, begins to discern something entirely new? Something that will be woven into the fabric of his life from now on, which breaks through as Samson heads home, a private revelation of sorts that is bound up with the sight of the lion’s skeleton and the taste of the honey, and also the linkage of these sensations with the feelings aroused in him by the woman to whom he is going …
For it is likely that when Samson saw this remarkable sight, the honey in the lion, he was pierced by a new, almost prophetic intuition, something born inside him as he absorbed the immense symbolic significance of such a powerful image. Something connected in an altogether new way with perception, with a way of looking at reality, indeed something akin to a world-view.
He looks at the lion and the honey pooling inside it. Certainly he is strongly affected: after all, this image will figure in the riddle he will soon pose at his wedding party. He sees the extraordinary scene that he himself created: it was he who killed the lion. Because of him the bees built their hive there and made their honey, the sweet honey that now fills his mouth … and as his senses blend one into the other, is it not probable that he becomes spontaneously excited over something that is a powerful sight, oddly beautiful, utterly unique, and that also radiates a sense of deep, hidden, symbolic mea
ning?
How to define such a moment? We have already called it ‘revelation’. But may we cautiously add that this is also the moment at which Samson, the consummate strongman, suddenly discovers the way in which an artist looks at the world?
And if it seems peculiar, at this stage of the story, to describe Samson as an artist, it is from this moment onward, from his encounter with the lion’s honey, that he will display a clear tendency to mould reality – whatever reality he may come in contact with – and stamp it with his own unique signature, and, one might add, his style.
And even if Samson is not an artist in any traditional or classical sense, it is possible that at this moment, facing the remains of the lion, he senses that there is a clue hidden here for him. A clue that leads to a new and unfamiliar dimension of reality, or at least a new way of seeing it that is more than just passive observation, but contains the powers of creation and renewal – triggered in him, perhaps, by the humming of life inside the skeleton – and through which he can mitigate, without sacrificing his singularity, the strange loneliness into which he was born.
He goes on his way, honey dripping from his palms, heads home to mum and dad, a giant child, hiding secrets, feeding them from his hands, ‘but he did not tell them that he had scooped the honey out of a lion’s skeleton’. In other words, even now he does not tell them how he tore the lion apart, or where he got the honey. And no less amazing: they don’t ask him a thing. Maybe they are afraid to ask. Afraid of an answer that might expose the yawning chasm between them.
Because they keep silent, he does too. Maybe he hopes that something will become clear to them, without words or even a hint on his part. That they will guess (the way kids always hope their parents will find them out): they’ll float some theory, say, regarding the source of the honey, or they’ll make a joke about the unusual scent of this sticky stuff, and along the way, with sudden, sharp intuition, they will also guess something about Samson himself, about their son’s true self, which has been hidden or withheld from them.
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