‘What is sweeter than honey’, the Philistines answer him, ‘and what is stronger than a lion?’ Those who answer now are not only the ‘companions’ but ‘the townsmen’. In other words, not only has his intimate secret been revealed, but it has spread beyond the wedding feast to the whole town of Timnah and become common knowledge among its residents. Samson steams with fury: ‘Had you not ploughed with my heifer, you would not have guessed my riddle!’ he roars, hurling an accusation thick with sexual overtones. (Though even in his fury he manages to wax poetic.) He is enraged, of course, filled with natural human anger, at the companions who managed, in the end, to outfox him; but what burns him more is his wife’s disloyalty, since for the first time in his life he had dared to bring someone else close to an interior place which had previously belonged to him alone, a place of sweetness inside the raw power, and it was there, of all places, that he was betrayed.
For no sooner had he told her his secret, and perhaps attained a rare moment of confessional grace, than their intimate space was suddenly filled with total strangers. One can only imagine the intense pain that overcame Samson, that penetrated the nameless, inarticulate core of his being, down into a primal, intimate moment, when the ‘meeting-place’ of mother and foetus had been invaded by a stranger.
But there is, perhaps, another possible reason for this terrible fury, which will fuel his future acts of revenge and mass murder.
Let us try to imagine the conversation between his wife and the companions: according to the biblical text, she came and ‘explained the riddle to her countrymen’. But did she reveal to them a bit more than that? Did she also tell them about the deeper truth she had just discovered about Samson? It is of course difficult to tell if she herself had grasped the full significance of the revelation granted her by Samson. Something in the wording of the Philistines’ answer to Samson gives the impression that, even after hearing what she said, they still don’t know much. Not about Samson, nor about the major event hinted at by his riddle. It would seem that they got from his wife only an essential synopsis of what happened, something about a dead lion and honey, and with what little they have, they challenge him and pretend they know more than they actually do.
This is only conjecture. But if there is anything to it, this raises the possibility that it was the very brevity of the Philistines’ answer, their too-clever, laconic response, that more than anything ignited Samson’s wrath.
For it is likely that when he hears the words ‘What is sweeter than honey and what is stronger than a lion?’ from their lips, Samson senses that the secret he holds so dear, the secret that expresses his uniqueness, his chosenness, has been sullied and diminished, turned almost into a joke, into something that can be distilled into a glib one-liner that sounds like a jingle; instantly transforming a treasure into worn-out currency, cheap gossip that any ‘townsman’ can pass along to his pals, even if he doesn’t actually understand what is concealed within it.
In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: ‘And those who live the mystery falsely and badly (and they are very many), lose it only for themselves and nevertheless pass it on like a sealed letter, without knowing it.’21
These profound words, read against Samson’s life, illuminate it in ways that alternate between irony and pathos: Samson himself contains a secret, a mystery, but he also often ‘lives that mystery badly’ (as in the case of the harlot from Gaza, whom we will meet anon). He himself acts sometimes like one who has been sentenced to pass along the mystery ‘like a sealed letter’, that is to say, to carry out the divine plan that chose him, without his understanding it fully, a mystery moulded inside him from the womb.
Either way, one thing is certain: that a person will always, always feel deeply humiliated when his secret is tossed about among strangers who do not understand, who are unworthy. This is what Samson was sure to feel when he heard the answer to his riddle from the ‘companions’, rejoicing in his distress. And since we are speaking of Samson, it may be added that this was, perhaps, the feeling of an artist whose life’s work has been displayed in public and has received a blank reaction, devoid of understanding, and even derisive.
Burning with anger and humiliation he goes down to Ashkelon, the Philistine city, and there kills thirty men.
One wonders why Samson went all the way to Ashkelon, a distance of some forty kilometres, instead of, say, to the Philistine city of Ekron, a mere five kilometres from Timnah. Why did he prefer to travel dozens of kilometres in Philistine territory? And maybe the answer is contained within the question, and Samson felt a need to penetrate as deep as he could into Philistine existence, to rub up more and more against the foreigners, the mockers, the haters?
He cuts down thirty innocent people, who had the bad luck to run into him in the streets of their city. He steals their clothes and brings them to the thirty companions. Just as they had cut him to the quick, he does the same to thirty strangers. He slays them and ‘skins’ them, in effect – a thoroughly vile act that attests, in its way, to Samson’s tendency to confuse, in a frightening manner, exterior and essence, the secret and the strange.
Following the collapse of his marriage, and the blow dealt him by the world, Samson returns, like a child, to the house of his mother and father. And let us remember: he has married, he has left his parents’ home – and he returns yet again, to lick his wounds, to be consoled a bit at the parental hearth. But before long, at the time of the wheat harvest, he goes back to Timnah. Again the umbilical cord is stretched, again he attempts to separate from his parents and return to his Philistine wife.
Clasped to his breast he carries a baby goat, a peace offering, and attempts to visit the woman, but this turns out to be impossible: her father has already given her to another man: a ‘companion’, apparently one of the mere’im from the wedding feast, the very men who had forced his wife to reveal his secret. Her father offers Samson, as was the custom in those days, her younger sister, who is, in his words, ‘more beautiful than she’, but Samson is already smouldering with anger: ‘Now the Philistines can have no claim against me for the harm I shall do them,’ he says, and goes off to exact his revenge.
* * *
‘Samson went and caught three hundred foxes. He took torches and, turning the foxes tail to tail, he placed a torch between each pair of tails. He lit the torches and turned the foxes loose among the standing grain of the Philistines, setting fire to stacked grain, standing grain, vineyards, and olive trees.’
This act of Samson’s is also terribly barbaric and cruel. But what grand, well-crafted, indeed aesthetic revenge it is!
Just think what kind of effort a man must invest in order to catch three hundred foxes, tie them in pairs to one another, tie torches between them and then light them, and then send them out into the fields.
But no less impressive than the physical undertaking are the planning, the idea, the inventiveness. The Bible, of course, abounds in grossly violent and brutal acts. (It would be interesting to compile a full catalogue of the types of mayhem and revenge that were commonplace in those days among Israel and its enemies, from the dismemberment of corpses and the slaughter of hundreds with a cattle prod, to the massive harvest of foreskins.) In contrast to all these, Samson takes a most original revenge that includes a manifestly artistic dimension. (In the language of modern art we would say that Samson’s exploit of the burning foxes constitutes a performance.) This is a demonstration not only of the man’s physical strength, but also of his style, which will continue to be stamped upon all his deeds, large and small, upon his every gesture and contact with the world.
But if indeed there is, in Samson, something of the artist, this is significant not only for the content of his expression but also its form: a feat like this is hardly the product of mere whim. Much thought has been invested, with a precise intention in mind: Samson, after all, could have tied a torch to the tail of each individual fox, and dispatched it to set fire to the stacked and standing grain, an
d thus dealt the Philistines a far heavier blow! But such a deed, apparently, would not have satisfied his deep impulse, his ‘artistic’ need to draw upon something private and singular in everything he does.
Let us again read the story he’s telling us here, written in letters of foxes and fire. He ties the foxes in pairs. He fixes a flaming torch between them. We can feel what happens to the foxes at this moment, the crazed running as they try to break free of the other fox, their twin, whom they think is the one that is burning them. All of a sudden each is transformed into a dual being, all afire, that cannot be saved from itself. Each fox tries to escape in a different direction but drags his double, his opposite, his nemesis, along with him.
This is apparently what bursts from the depths of Samson’s soul as his hidden ‘artistic signature’, which he heaves with all his strength at the world. His doubleness, the fire raging within him, the powerful urges that tear him to shreds, the pairs of conflicting forces warring inside him always: monasticism and lust, the super-muscled frame and artistic-spiritual heart; the murderous cruelty that erupts from him, versus the poet within; the recognition that he may only be the tool of a ‘divine providence’ that utilises him as it sees fit, alongside powerful flickerings of free will and the urge for personal expression. On top of which is his determination to keep his secret to himself, together with the blatant and desperate need to reveal himself to one other intimate soul.
Is it any wonder that he requires no fewer than three hundred foxes to express all this?
The foxes, living torches, run around in the fields, sowing fiery devastation, destroying all the gathered crops (this was, recall, ‘the season of the wheat harvest’), and they also die in the process, as a prophecy of sorts thrown out by Samson, though he cannot now interpret it: ‘Let me die with the Philistines.’
* * *
The Philistines take revenge upon the person whom they believe brought this disaster upon them, namely the woman from Timnah. They go there and burn her and her father. Fire for fire. Samson pays them back and ‘smote them leg as well as thigh, a great smiting’. Thus from one minute to the next this strange war of one man against a whole nation becomes increasingly problematic. For here is a man destined from his mother’s womb ‘to deliver Israel’, but it turns out that this ‘deliverance’ never deviates from the massive destruction of Philistines.
Here it is essential to recall what may have been forgotten in the heat of the narrative: that Samson was a Judge. A national leader who judged his people for twenty years. A strange judge, to be sure: when did he have the slightest contact with his own people? When did he deal with their issues or sit to adjudicate between them? After all, as anyone who has read the story knows, Samson’s life and works are always directed outside, toward the Philistines, with whom he falls in love and shares a banquet table, upon whom he takes revenge and makes war (and thus he often seems to the reader to be a character more ‘Philistine’ than Jewish).
Nevertheless, his tale earned a place in the Bible, where it is told at length and in detail; and if at times the Jewish tradition has read Samson pejoratively – owing to his aggressiveness, his roguish behaviour and skirt-chasing – he is also inscribed in the Jewish consciousness as a national hero and a symbol. Perhaps this is because, despite everything, in the deep structures of his personality – his loneliness and isolation, his strong need to preserve his separateness and mystery, yet also his limitless desire to mix and assimilate with gentiles – Samson expresses and implies qualities that are ‘Jewish’ indeed.
And this too, of course: Jews throughout the ages took pride in the tales of his heroism and yearned for the physical strength, bravery, and manliness that he represented. They esteemed, no less, his ability to apply force without any restraints or moral inhibitions, an ability which history withheld from the trod-upon Jews for millennia, until the establishment of the State of Israel.
In Hebrew, he is almost always referred to as ‘Samson the hero’, and elite combat units of the Israeli army have been named after him, from ‘Samson’s Foxes’ of the 1948 War of Independence to the ‘Samson’ unit created during the first Palestinian intifada in the late 1980s (not to mention a chain of body-building clubs called the ‘Samson Institute’, set up in the 1960s, by a muscle-bound rabbi named Rafael Halperin).
Yet there is a certain problematic quality to Israeli sovereignty that is also embodied in Samson’s relationship to his own power. As in the case of Samson, it sometimes seems that Israel’s considerable military might is an asset that becomes a liability. For it would seem, without taking lightly the dangers facing Israel, that the reality of being immensely powerful has not really been internalised in the Israeli consciousness, not assimilated in a natural way, over many generations; and this, perhaps, is why the attitude to this power, whose acquisition has often been regarded as truly miraculous, is prone to distortion.
Such distortion may lead, for example, to ascribing an exaggerated value to the power that one has attained; to making power an end in itself; and to using it excessively; and also to a tendency to turn almost automatically to the use of force instead of weighing other means of action – these are all, in the end, characteristically ‘Samsonian’ modes of behaviour.
To this may be added the well-known Israeli feeling, in the face of any threat that comes along, that the country’s security is crumbling – a feeling that also exists in the case of Samson, who in certain situations seems to shatter into pieces, his strength vanishing in the blink of an eye. This kind of collapse, however, does not reflect one’s actual strength, and often carries in its wake an overblown display of force, further complicating the situation. All of this attests, it would seem, to a rather feeble sense of ownership of the power that has been attained, and, of course, to a deep existential insecurity. This is connected, without a doubt, to the very real dangers lying in wait for Israel, but also to the tragic formative experience of being a stranger in the world, the Jewish sense of not being a nation ‘like other nations’, and of the State of Israel as a country whose very existence is conditional, whose future is in doubt and steeped in jeopardy, feelings that all the nuclear bombs that Israel developed, in a program once known as the ‘Samson Option’, cannot eradicate.
* * *
After smiting the Philistines, Samson goes and establishes residence in the cave of the rock of Etam, which would appear to be located near the town of Etam in the territory of the tribe of Judah.22 There he sits by himself, in apparent retirement from society after being disappointed in mankind.
Except that now the Philistines get ready to take their revenge. They head for Judah and prepare themselves for battle. The men of Judah, frightened by the Philistine mobilisation, come to ask why on earth the Philistines are preparing to make war upon them, and the Philistines explain: ‘We have come to take Samson prisoner, and to do to him as he did to us.’
Three thousand men of Judah proceed apace to Samson’s dwelling place in the cave of the rock of Etam. Samson, it will be recalled, is not a member of the tribe of Judah, and he is about to bring down upon them a war that does not ‘belong’ to them. ‘You knew that the Philistines rule over us’, they say to him anxiously, ‘why have you done this to us?’ Three thousand men stand around him filled with trepidation, and Samson, with simple, stubborn logic, replies: ‘As they did to me, so I did to them.’
Three thousand men steal glances at one another. One can almost hear the uneasy throat-clearing. ‘We have come down to take you prisoner’, they finally dare to tell him, ‘and to hand you over to the Philistines.’ And across the gulf of centuries one can sense the plea gurgling in their voices: Don’t make it harder for us, just come quietly and we’ll finish this filthy business in a dignified fashion …
This episode is one that’s easy to skip past in the Samson story, since it doesn’t stand out amid the other dramatic events that are painted in such bold colours. But we, who read Samson’s story with keen interest in the frequent shi
fts he makes among friend, foreigner, and foe; we, who sense how Samson is fated over and over to agonise over the riddle of his strangeness in relation to his parents (and his people, and in fact the whole human race); we will dwell a while on this brief passage.
They stand before him bewildered. They are astounded by the extreme loneliness that radiates from this man who has nested in a rock. A man whose boldness may already be legendary among the tribes of Israel, but who also evokes fear and anger because of his repeated provocations of the vengeful Philistines. And not only fear and anger does he bring out in these men: for he, alone, dares to do what they, in their multitudes, do not dare do. And maybe somewhere in their hearts, in a tiny corner that remains free, not enslaved or exhausted from the weight of Philistine conquest, they can guess that one day, in the annals of their people, it will be Samson – not they – who will be the symbol of resistance to occupation and tyranny.
We have come to take you prisoner, they mumble, to hand you over to the Philistines … there is almost no doubt that at this moment they hate Samson no less than they despise the Philistines. Were they not terrified of him, they would surely overrun him themselves and do the Philistines’ work for them. And here, amazingly enough, Samson doesn’t even argue with them. Only this does he ask of them: ‘Swear to me that you yourselves will not attack me.’ And they indeed promise not to hurt him, only to take him prisoner and turn him over to the Philistines; ‘we will not slay you.’
The exchange between Samson and the men of Judah is described rather gently, even compassionately. Something in the conversation almost tugs at the reader’s sleeve and implores him or her to pay attention to what is going on: the men of Judah are careful not to harm Samson. Even as they are furious with him, they take pains to maintain a respectful, even worshipful, distance. The reader, who has already caught a glimpse of Samson’s inner life, knows that he is likely to experience this distance not only as a sign of respect but also as an expression of estrangement and avoidance. Samson knows well this attitude towards him, the degree of respect, the awe that pushes him again, as always, into loneliness and isolation.
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