Lion's Honey

by David Grossman

  With all that, despite the heavy silence, or maybe because of it, there is also something mischievous, full of joie de vivre and even humour, to be found in this family moment, which has no parallel anywhere in the Bible: They say nothing, do not ask, he doesn’t tell, and nevertheless it is so appealing to imagine Samson waving his hands high, and his parents, doubtless smaller than he is, jumping at him with mouths wide open and tongues hanging out, and Samson howling with glee, playing with his parents, touching them and dancing for them and laughing with them like any normal person, with the honey dripping, flowing down a cheek, sliding to the chin, being licked up, as the laughter swells to the point of tears …

  With these drops of honey he is telling them something that apparently he can tell them no other way. And – incidentally – it was so urgent for him to tell them this that he forgot where he was going: he had, we recall, been on his way to Timnah! What had happened to him, that all of a sudden he turned around and headed home, to father and mother? Did he suddenly forget he was on his way to take a wife? (And here, of course, the words of Gersonides again ring true: Samson was ‘like a bell that strikes this way and that’.)

  And in this spontaneous, almost instinctive action, we can clearly see the extent to which he oscillates between the desire to leave his parents and build a life as a mature adult, and his yearning to be with them, to win their approval again and again. The umbilical cord that connects them will continue to stretch and contract throughout the entire story. And maybe precisely because that cord, from the beginning, had joined Samson and his mother in so unorthodox a fashion, the bond was never susceptible to being cut in a natural way. And already here we wonder – is this not the ambivalence that will prevent Samson, throughout his life, from ever falling in love with a woman who can truly sever that umbilical cord and tie him to herself in a natural manner, as man is tied to wife?

  But this question will be asked in due time. Meanwhile, Samson is still with them, with his parents, and they are eating the honey from his cupped hands. And as we said, for Samson it is perhaps the very honey that was scooped from inside the lion, this ‘lionised’ honey, which makes concrete what he never knew how to put into words, what he always yearned to explain to his parents: that they should understand that he – despite the destiny that was decreed in the womb, which cut him off from them and appropriated his life for some hidden divine purpose, and notwithstanding his huge muscles and incomparable strength – he still very much needs their understanding, their love, their repeated approval. ‘Here, look,’ he is saying in effect to them, as they suckle his fingers, ‘look what I have inside, under all these muscles, muscles like a lion’s, and under this mane I am forbidden to cut; and under this mission, too, which has been imposed upon me, this regal fate to which I have been sentenced. Look inside me. Just once, look deep inside me, and you will finally see that “out of the strong came something sweet”.’

  And his father and mother continue to lick the honey from his hands, but now, as the playfulness and laughter start to fade, the old uneasiness begins to gnaw at them. They can’t look straight at him because he, it would seem, was never quite right with them. Of course they sense his need and desire to be close to them – a simple, homey, familial closeness – and they, too, want to be with him, and sense his love for them, and wish, like every parent, to love their child with all their hearts; but there is always that barrier. Something that gets in the way. Something that doubtless makes him someone worthy of pride, but not fully understood. Important, but not quite loved.

  And there is also their clear realisation that he will not accept their authority. Not in the matter of the Philistine woman he insists on marrying, nor apparently in any other matter, because he is subject to the authority of a power greater than theirs. And they know painfully, even with a sense of shame, that he is fated to make his way alone in life, along his own path that resembles no other, and that they can’t teach him a thing. Nothing in their lives or experience has prepared them to be the parents of such a person. Even this honey – which came from God knows where – they taste half-heartedly, sensing that a secret is dripping out here but unable to fathom it any more than they can decipher what their son is trying to tell them.

  And precisely because of their limited understanding of him, we get a strong feeling that Samson wants to calm their anxiety about him and the oppressive mystery hidden within him. He envelops them in sweetness and tries to bind them to him with the sticky honey, and he pleads with them to believe in him and trust him and be completely certain that he is really theirs, that they are really his parents despite the abnormal circumstances surrounding his conception, and that he, in his strange way, is loyal to them.

  For there is betrayal in the air. It is unspoken, undefined; nor is it necessarily a ‘typical’ betrayal, of the sort commonly imputed to Samson’s birth – his mother cheating on his father with the mysterious stranger – but possibly deeper and more destructive. For if you have a child who is suffused, even in his mother’s womb, with a sense of strangeness – perhaps there was a flinching, an instinctive rejection as fleeting as a single contraction of the uterus around the embryo – and if there is always wonder and fear and even suspicion of the child and what may erupt from him: if all these hover in the family air, there is a permanent feeling of betrayal. To be more specific, a sense of being betrayed. Hidden, deep, mutual. None of them wanted it, of course, but so it was decreed, for all three. And Samson will live with this feeling all his life, and all his actions will be dedicated to understanding this feeling at close range, or grieving over it, or replaying it over and over.

  Three people in the world. A couple whose son was ‘nationalised’ even before his birth. A son who is born, in effect, an orphan. How difficult is Samson’s twofold, self-contradictory mission in life: to be himself, with all his unusual inclinations, and at the same time, to be faithful to the parents from whom he differs so much. We’ll leave them for now: all the honey in the world cannot sweeten the moment.

  * * *

  Samson goes back down to Timnah, to get married. This time he goes there with his father alone, and we wonder, was this the custom, or did his mother decide, for some reason, not to participate in her son’s wedding ceremony? And if so, how should we interpret this blunt gesture? Is this her way of protesting against Samson’s decision to disobey her and marry the Philistine woman? Or perhaps she refused to give her consent to the marriage because she felt, with her sharp motherly intuition, that nothing good would come of this, not necessarily because of the bride but because her son, Samson, for subtle reasons she cannot express in words but recognises nonetheless, is not the marrying kind?

  ‘And Samson made a feast there, as young men used to do.’

  Here, muses the reader, here at last Samson is trying to do something ‘like everyone else’. But it turns out that even this simple wish is destined to go bad quickly: when the Philistines see him, they choose thirty mere’im, ‘companions’, to accompany Samson during the wedding feast. Why they do so, we do not know, but it would seem that his appearance, his obvious strength, and perhaps also an air of disquiet and wildness that he carries with him always, prompt them to surround him this way, to prevent any trouble. The narrator does not say who these companions are, but it is fairly obvious that a man like Samson has no friends, not even at his wedding, but rather mere’im (the very sound of which, implying the Hebrew word ra – evil – does not bode well).

  No sooner does the wedding feast begin than Samson sets his guests a challenge: ‘Let me pose you a riddle,’ he says. ‘If you can give me the right answer during the seven days of the feast, I shall give you thirty linen tunics and thirty sets of clothing; but if you are not able to tell me it, you must give me thirty linen tunics and thirty sets of clothing.’

  And when they agree to the conditions, he poses the riddle: ‘Out of the eater came something to eat/ Out of the strong came something sweet.’

  In point of fact, a
lmost every time Samson opens his mouth a surprising bit of poetry pops out. After all, as his actions testify, he is a man who inspires fear and repulsion: a bully capable of unlimited mayhem and destruction, who leaves a trail of blood wherever he goes, a kind of Golem, in effect, who has been planted in the world and operated as a lethal weapon of divine will.18

  But, suddenly, a riddle. Clever, subtle, lyrical.

  He could have entertained his guests with a demonstration of the power of his enormous muscles. Or executed some amazing physical stunt, nothing dangerous, like collapsing the pillars that supported the building, but definitely a feat that would have left them open-mouthed.

  But instead he poses a riddle. And no ordinary riddle, but rather one that he knows there is no chance of them solving: for this is not a riddle whose solution is based on something they already know, or a puzzle of logic that they can think through. Which means that he asks them a riddle that, as far as they are concerned, has no solution.

  Three, five, seven days they get caught up more and more in the trap he has set for them. The party goes on, but the atmosphere grows foul. There is a mystery in the air and little by little it becomes greater than the riddle itself, until the attention of the reader cannot fail to turn from the riddle to the one who asked it, and his motives.

  For seven full days Samson circulates among his guests, toys with their unknowingness, their curiosity, their mounting anger. Now and then he listens to their clumsy attempts to solve the riddle and shakes his head again and again, politely, with mild mockery and undisguised pleasure. Owing to the Nazirite prohibition, he does not drink the wine served to the guests. They of course do not refrain from drinking, but rather try to drown their frustration and rage, and Samson’s abstention from the collective boozing only intensifies their antipathy toward him. In short, one can assume that within the first day or two the Philistines were fed up with the riddle, and surely from the outset had no intention of plumbing the depths of this bizarre stranger’s soul. The whole situation infuriates them – not least the thirty linen garments and sets of clothing they will have to pay him.

  ‘Out of the eater came something to eat/ Out of the strong came something sweet.’

  It would seem that that there are few things that can make a person crazier than the unabating abuse of an unanswerable riddle. (The case of Samson’s riddle is probably the only place in the Bible where even a consummate Jewish patriot can identify greatly with the Philistines.) And as for Samson, one can truly feel how he secretly derives profound pleasure from what is happening. From their inability to solve the riddle, and from the intimate, quasi-erotic friction – as perceived by the riddler – between those who seek the answer and the elusive answer itself.

  And perhaps –

  Perhaps he asks them an impossible riddle like this precisely because a man who lives his whole life with a big riddle inside – a mystery that he too cannot solve – feels a great compulsion to create puzzlement in any way possible? For after three, five, seven days like these, the riddle-maker himself turns into a riddle, into a large vessel containing a bubbling secret, straining to explode …

  And maybe this is what motivates Samson, and not only in this instance. He goes through life like a walking enigma, marvelling over his secret, his riddle. He enjoys approaching the dangerous brink of being found out by others. Yet, on second thoughts, the word ‘enjoys’ is inaccurate: more likely he is driven to this, compelled to confront this feeling, this bitter-tasting knowledge that he is impenetrable, that he cannot be released from his strangeness, nor from the mystery within.

  On the seventh day the companions are sick and tired of the whole thing. In no uncertain terms they say to Samson’s wife: ‘Coax your husband to provide us with the answer to the riddle; else we shall put you and your father’s household to the fire.’

  ‘During the seven days of the feast,’ reads the text, ‘she continued to harass him with her tears.’

  In other words, on top of the ‘companions’’ growing rage, Samson all week long has endured an earful of his wife’s weeping! For seven days she has been crying and pestering him to tell her the answer, and he keeps silent. This woman, who pleased him to the point that he ignored his parents’ entreaties not to marry her – suddenly he is prepared to cause her such anguish, indeed to abuse her.

  But why? Is it because he is trying to tell her, this first woman in his life, that even she will never know him fully? Or perhaps these seven days are a kind of exhausting initiation rite that he has set up for himself, a private ceremony of boundary definition, setting the limits of his willingness to allow another person, even a loved one, to enter the sanctum sanc-torum of his soul, the place where his secret is hidden?

  ‘You really hate me, you don’t love me,’ she wails bitterly. ‘You asked my countrymen a riddle, and you didn’t tell me the answer …’

  And for a moment, on reading her words, it seems that in the complaint of the young bride there is a faint echo of something much broader and more complicated than a family quarrel, a hint of a riddle many times greater and more complex: namely the conundrum of the Jewish people as perceived by the nations of the world from antiquity until our own time, the wonderment and suspicion that have accompanied – and still often accompany – the Jew in his contact with other people, and the aura of mystery, otherness, and isolation that surrounds him, in their view. But let us leave such deep reflections aside and return to the young man and woman, to their first spat, which goes on for a whole week and is soaked in tears and nagging and stubborn refusal, until in the end the husband runs out of patience and snaps at his wife: ‘I haven’t even told my mother and father, and I should tell you?’

  And the narrator perhaps did Samson a favour by not recording his wife’s response.

  ‘Hence a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, so that they become one flesh,’ says the Book of Genesis,19 and indeed the very meaning of marriage is, among other things, that a man departs from his parents and chooses a woman to be his intimate partner. But from the sound of Samson’s words one gathers that, for him, the matter is not so clear-cut, and there is a certain looseness and ambiguity in the practical implementation of leaving the parents and becoming ‘one flesh’. ‘If I haven’t revealed the secret to my parents’ – he says, in effect, to the woman he has just married – ‘then it goes without saying that I won’t tell you!’ In other words, in the midst of his wedding feast, Samson declares with heavy-handed childishness, with rather infantile condescension, that his parents still take priority for him in all that concerns closeness and intimacy.

  But in the end, after all her nagging, or maybe because of the very ordinary human temptation to boast a bit to his wife, Samson’s resolve falters and he tells her the answer. The text doesn’t say exactly what he tells her, nor, more importantly, how he tells her: does he show off as he describes his fight with the lion? Or is he modest? And does he convey only the dry facts, or in the heat of storytelling does he add a few colourful details, describing, for example, the extraordinary sight – the honey glistening amid the lion’s sun-bleached ribs, the buzzing swarm of bees …

  And if he in fact tells her everything, what happened to him during the fight and how he felt afterwards, as he stood before the carcass, and the taste of the honey and the humming of the bees, is he telling her this in the hope of igniting a new spark of attraction? Does he hope she will understand what his parents did not?

  And what happens next? Does she look at him with astonishment, with wonder? With confusion, or maybe revulsion? And maybe a new, wild arousal toward this man of hers, whom she suddenly realises is far more than he seems? Does she sense that with these words he is handing over something extra, not only the answer to this particular riddle, but also a clue to the solution to the riddle that is him?

  And if so many questions pile up here, it’s because this is, after all, a fateful moment for Samson: even if he only gave her the barest hint of what lies behind th
e riddle, this is the first time he has exposed something of his miraculous, hidden side to anyone, and has spoken of the event that he had not even revealed to his parents.

  But the woman, torn every which way by simultaneous pressures both internal and external, is not equal to the task of secret-sharer. Scared to death of her countrymen, she tells them the answer.

  Let us, for a moment, wishfully consider the possibility that this woman, whose name we do not even know, was in fact worthy of the trust Samson placed in her. What would have happened next, and what might Samson’s life have looked like later on, if she had been able to look straight into him, to see him as he really was? To fathom what had befallen this foreigner even before he was born: a state of eternal non-belonging. To see a man who tears a lion apart with his bare hands and then melts before the sheer poetry of the honey in its carcass. To embrace the miraculous possibility that his greatest wish is that one person love him simply, wholly, naturally, not because of his miraculous quality, but in spite of it.

  And although it is not stated explicitly that Samson loved this woman, what is written about her was apparently very important to Samson: she looked ‘right’ to him. Yesharah, reads the Hebrew, twice, from the word meaning ‘straight’ or ‘honest’. In other words, there was something in her that seemed honest to him. And if so, she seemed like a person who was free of the innuendo and duplicity he had encountered from others throughout his life. This ‘straightness’ of hers promised him the possibility of peace of mind, of tranquillity. From the way she looked at him he got the feeling that he was at last accepted for what he was, and quite likely it was mainly because of this that the woman from Timnah was the one he first chose.

  Yet she too betrayed him, immediately. In fact, he could have foreseen it. From the first he should never have pushed her into the bind of dual loyalty – to him and to her people. Nonetheless, this is exactly what he did, and in effect clear-headedly ‘invited’ her betrayal, condemned her to betray him. And thus arises the troubling suspicion that this is just what he wanted.20