It will be recalled that these are his own people who are doing this to him. Members of his people, whose judge – whose leader – he is. It never occurs to them to object, even in a token manner, to the Philistines’ demands and to risk their lives for him. Nor do they offer, for example, to arrange his escape from their territory and find ways to placate the Philistines. They want to hand him over, and do not conceal their eagerness to be rid of the ongoing danger that he embodies. And he is doubtless aware of this, of their motives and their enthusiasm, but does not come to them with complaints: ‘Swear to me that you yourselves will not attack me’ – no more than this does he ask of them at this critical moment. For he knows that they cannot kill him, that he is stronger than all of them combined, but he apparently has a touching, almost pathetic need to hear from them – from their very lips – this soothing, protective promise, these exact words, ‘we will not slay you’. As if with these words they, his brothers, can lighten the eternal burden forced upon him by his mother, when she announced his death even before he was born.
They tie him up with two new ropes. Those who have read the entire Samson story will recall that when Delilah asks him, later on, how he can be tied up and made helpless he mocks her and says ‘new ropes’; and when she ties him up he snaps them off his arms like thread.
But here he allows the men of Judah to tie him with the same kind of ropes. He stands among them, perhaps taller than them all, permits them to wrap him in their web, feels the bonds of betrayal tightening around his flesh, lets them hand him over to the foreigners.
And this passivity raises the impression that Samson is almost enjoying this, taking strange, bitter, convoluted pleasure from the whole affair. As if he were taking part in an utterly private ritual, in which the men of Judah are mere puppets on a string; and what manipulates these strings are Samson’s deepest, most elemental needs, the need to relive, again and again, the experience of being betrayed by those close to him, the compulsion to re-enact, over and over, that primal event of being handed over to strangers, of being given up.
And then, after draining from the encounter with his countrymen every drop of that foul nectar that apparently fuels his soul, he reverts to his familiar acts of force and violence: It occurs when the men of Judah take him away from the rock, and lead him to the Philistines who stand in formation at a place called ‘Lehi’, which in Hebrew means ‘cheek’ or ‘jaw’.
Even someone who wasn’t there can conjure in his mind the sight of three thousand men of Judah in a long Lilliputian parade, carrying Samson, bound by ropes, like a giant statue. When the Philistines see him they cheer wildly, victoriously, but when they go to seize him, the spirit of God once again comes over Samson. His body is so inflamed with the passion for revenge that the ropes around his arms disintegrate ‘like flax that catches fire’. He reaches out and finds, just by chance, the fresh jawbone of an ass, with which he smites a thousand Philistines.
When he finishes the job, again the poet bursts from the bully: ‘With the jaw of an ass’, he declaims, ‘Mass upon mass!/ With the jaw of an ass/ I have slain a thousand men.’ And we too, amid the horrific slaughter, find enough poetry within ourselves to remark that this ‘trademark’ mode of expression, and Samson’s creativity and ingenuity, are enshrined in the very weapons he uses – foxes, an ass’s jawbone, bare hands against a lion, exclusively ‘organic’ materials, natural and original.
He is very thirsty ‘as he finished speaking’ (and it is not entirely clear whether this is from the exertion of wiping out a thousand men, or from composing his little poem). He calls out to God, ‘You yourself have granted this great victory through Your servant; and must I now die of thirst and fall into the hands of the uncircumcised?’ And this cry pierces the heart, because Samson is so weak and vulnerable here: he almost sounds like a boy sobbing to his father, and also like someone achingly despondent over the failure of the ‘grand plan’ that he never presumes fully to understand, knowing only that he serves it as a vessel or an instrument.
Let us tarry a bit longer over this last outburst of his, and again contemplate his sudden, sharp transition from superhero and mass murderer to a near-child: in the blink of an eye, and with astonishing ease, it’s as if the warrior’s spine has snapped, and he crumbles, crying desperately for the embrace of a caring, compassionate parent.
Samson’s cry is also surprising because, for an instant, there is a parting of the curtain and it turns out that Samson speaks directly to God. Speech like this attests, of course, to a special relationship with multiple implications, nothing of which has been heretofore vouchsafed by the biblical storyteller. And even if it will in no way alter Samson’s well-known destiny, this revelation is a bit comforting, as it lessens somewhat his isolation among his brethren, among his fellow man.
But it may well be that within Samson’s plea lies another, very human, drama, having to do with his relationship with God: perhaps Samson understands that the affliction of thirst is a divine punishment for the arrogance he exhibited in his victory speech by suggesting that it was he alone, he and the jawbone of an ass – without God’s help – who slew the Philistines. Now, on his hands and knees on the rock, fainting from thirst, Samson promises his God that he knows well who brought about the victory: ‘You yourself have granted this great victory through Your servant,’ he gasps, and God accepts the ‘thank-you’ that includes regret and apology, and splits open ‘the hollow which is at Lehi’, and water gushes from it.
* * *
And after all this – ‘Samson went to Gaza, where he met a whore and slept with her.’
There are, as is widely known, various reasons why a man goes to a prostitute; but before we speculate about Samson’s motives, and even before we remind ourselves that he is a Nazirite (for in Samson’s case it’s easy to forget this, since he is one of those Nazirites who is not forbidden contact with women) – perhaps we should ask why he went to Gaza at all? Why to this Philistine city, of all places, whose residents surely want him dead?
How to make sense of Samson’s bizarre compulsion to mingle with Philistines? To mingle his flesh with theirs, to mangle them with his fists: indeed all his contact with them is tangled up with the body, flesh and fluid, wrestling and writhing, piercing and penetrating. Those inclined to do so can infer here, among other things, a dimly perceived wish on Samson’s part that his intensive contact with others, especially foreigners, will grant him something that may be missing from the root of his being: a feeling of actual, physical existence and of its tried and true boundaries.
For nowhere in Samson’s universe is there a single person who resembles him even a little. In this sense, Samson lives and functions in a vacuum. Within this void materialises his identity – elusive, defying definition, filled with contradictions, legendary, miraculous. It is not hard to imagine the confusion that reigns in such a soul, which is in constant need of ‘signals’ from the outside world and other people in order to define its limits. Small wonder, then, that a man like this is drawn again and again to rub up against another being that is utterly foreign and at first glance seems to inhabit a sharply defined, almost one-dimensional space. When he is in contact with this other being he can feel – apart from satisfaction over fulfilling his divine mission – its boundary, the fence that separates him from it, and thus he can feel his own limit and maybe even his definition. And therefore, it is to Gaza that he goes, to the Philistine city, to be among foreigners, others, the different ones, to brush up against them, to tangle and wriggle with them, to kill and love them and then kill them again …
And another notion arises, that maybe Samson has an inner need to divide up his existence among people and places that are very different and removed from one another. That is, to compartmentalise, to spread himself around as much as possible, in order to protect the secret that is the heart and focus of his life. And therefore, out of a survival instinct of sorts, Samson must always be in motion, staying only a short while in any on
e place – Zorah, Eshtaol, Timnah, Ashkelon, Judah, Hebron, Nahal Sorek – and leaving abruptly, revealing a little bit and concealing more, thus creating a reality in which people everywhere will know only ‘a part of Samson’, only one piece of the mosaic, and maybe this will make it harder for them – the strangers who only catch a glimpse of him – to understand the whole picture and to unravel, once and for all, the riddle of Samson.
(And as one reads the descriptions of Samson’s motion, frequent, forceful and slightly mad, one may get a flash of his mother striding briskly through the fields, on her way to tell Manoah about her meeting with the angel. ‘The woman ran in haste,’ reads the text, and it’s as if she imprinted upon the embryo within her the power, the momentum, and the sheer pleasure of that fast running …)
If Samson’s trip to Gaza seems curious, his visit to the prostitute seems easier to explain. Samson is alone at the moment. He has no wife. When we recall that, as soon as he became energised by the divine spirit, he went off to seek love, we can only imagine the depth of his loneliness and anguish now, in the aftermath of his sojourn in the cave of the rock of Etam. But it is certainly also possible that Samson goes to the whore because of the bitter disappointment of his previous – and sole – experience with a woman, his wife, the girl from Timnah who was given to another. And if so, with all due respect to Samson’s robust sexual urges, his turning to a prostitute also signifies a loss of hope in finding true love and in the possibility of entrusting his secret, the keys to his soul, to another person worthy of trust.
Furthermore, contact with a prostitute means giving something precious and very personal to a total stranger, to someone who has no real interest in the essence of the person she or he is having sex with. This is the off-putting element of prostitution, and also, of course, the key to its appeal: the radical intersection of the most intimate and most impersonal, the most private and the utterly public, the sperm and the stranger.
Viewed this way, it is clear why Samson would choose this option: when he sleeps with a whore, he again exposes his ‘mystery’ to a complete stranger. Again he flirts with that need he has, to give without giving himself away, to pose a riddle but withhold the solution. Yet again he can be in the midst of the most intimate act, the act of knowing, and remain unknown, undeciphered.
For this would appear to be what Samson is always looking for – that point of elusive, dubious contact that never offers full satisfaction, or solace, or genuine closeness. And least of all, love. Which never provides what he needs most – to be given fully to another, and to be received by that person in a way that enables full self-disclosure, so that, perhaps, he may be healed at last of the remoteness he has felt since birth.
Why does he behave this way? Why does he never try to redeem himself with the help of another ‘appropriate’ soul, who might be truly responsive to his deep need, and cure him of his dreadful core experience of strangeness?
We can broaden the question to inquire why, so frequently, do people undermine themselves in the very areas where they need the greatest salvation? This is the case for individuals, yet also for societies and nations, which so often seem fated to repeat, with depressing regularity, the most tragic choices and decisions of their history. And in Samson’s case, too, this destructive force is definitely at work, which is apparently why he manages all his life to be true to the distortions imposed on him by others, and is again and again alienated from his own vital and authentic needs – the need for genuine love and acceptance, the yearning for relationships of honesty and trust.
Which is why Samson goes not only to a whore but to a whore from Gaza. In other words, to a place doubly alien, and moreover to a woman who he is sure will immediately turn him over to her countrymen; in any case a visit that will surely lead to his falling into the hands of the Philistines, who for quite some time have been raring to take revenge for everything he has done to them.
And indeed when the Gazans learn that Samson is to be found at the house of the prostitute, they gather at once and lie in wait for him at the gates to the city, through which he will have to pass on his way out of town. They lie there in silence all night, intending to capture him at daybreak and kill him. But Samson stays with the woman only until the middle of the night; then he rises, goes to the city gate and surprises the ambushers. It would seem that he guessed the Philistines’ plot and therefore left the whore earlier than expected in order to take them by surprise. And if so, this lends credence to the speculation that it wasn’t just the whore he was after, but also the experience (and even the ‘joy’) of fear, tension, and humiliation bound up in the very act of making love to her – not merely because of her expected disloyalty, but also, perhaps mainly, from the knowledge that at the heart of their sexual intimacy, strangers are also present.
These strangers are in fact far away at this moment, but they are very much present in their intentions and in the air of conspiracy that spills into the room where the two are making love. And this way Samson gets to seize the two electrodes of feeling that he courts incessantly: powerful intimacy, together with the penetrating recognition that the borders of secrecy and privacy surrounding him and the woman are open to one and all, and that their sexual union has been violated from the first. This way he reconfirms to himself the recognition that has in large degree shaped his life and determined his path, and will continue to make him miserable till his last day, namely, that intimacy – all intimacy – is, by definition, polluted.
‘At midnight he got up, grasped the doors of the town gate together with the two gateposts, and pulled them out along with the bar. He placed them on his shoulders and carried them off to the top of the hill that is near to Hebron.’
And though, as we noted, it is never said that Samson was a giant, here he seems gargantuan. As he does in the famous illustration by Gustave Doré, ‘Samson Carrying Away the Gates of Gaza’, in which Samson is seen climbing a hill (apparently approaching Hebron; there are no such hills in the Gaza area).23 The sky above him seems to open, and he is showered with celestial radiance. But Samson himself does not see this light; he nearly collapses under the weight of the huge gate, which separates him from the light, and the image is one of a being who is half-godly and half-human, suffering and afflicted.
Here too, as in all of Samson’s exploits, is a feat the like of which is nowhere else to be found in the Bible, and which again is a kind of extravagant, significant performance: a stranger comes to the city, and when he leaves he takes with him its gates, the very thing that divides the inside from the outside. He penetrates the boundary of the city and confiscates the barrier that creates the distinction between the locals and outsiders or enemies. This too, of course, carries a symbolism that is anything but foreign to Samson’s internal discourse, but here it is framed from a new angle: in the uprooting of the gates can be discerned not only Samson’s familiar, even reflexive intention to hurt and humiliate the Philistines; but also, if you will, an echo of defiance, even a unique protest on Samson’s part against the violation of his own intimacy.
And thus, from the sight of this man ripping out the gates and bearing them off on his back, the reader may derive mild comfort from the thought that, even if Samson’s great mission of battling the Philistines has been imposed on him from above, and if his whole life is a journey determined in advance, here Samson manages to muster a few sparks of free will, as yet again he finds a uniquely self-expressive mode of carrying out his task.
* * *
In the woods, on the way to Tel Zorah – the mound that is believed to mark the spot of the biblical Zorah – can be found yellow signs pointing to the ‘Grave of Samson and Manoah’, an irresistible spur to curiosity. The mound, of greyish brown rendzina soil, is covered by an assortment of thorns and sparse yellow stubble. At the crest is a patch of concrete and two graves, a modest tomb of sorts fashioned of stone blocks with a pair of little blue domes. On one of these is written, ‘The Righteous Judge of Israel, Samson the Her
o, of Blessed Memory, Who Judged Israel as Did Their Father in Heaven’. Also inscribed is the day of Samson’s death: the 24th of Tammuz. ‘The Righteous Manoah’, it says, in the calligraphy used by scribes of Torah scrolls, on the other dome, ‘of Blessed Memory, Who Saw an Angel of God Face to Face’. Incidentally, Samson’s mother, whose encounters with the angel were closer than her husband’s, merited neither a grave nor a monument in the family plot.
These, of course, are not the actual graves of Samson and his father. No one knows who, if anyone, is buried here. The monument suddenly appeared in the late 1990s, its provenance unclear. But the spot was quickly sanctified by believers, who come here, singly and in groups, lighting little oil lamps at the foot of the graves, praying for cure from illness, brides and grooms for their children, success in business, babies for their barren daughters. At midnight, one may find Hasidic Jews of the Bratzlaver sect who have come to pray for redemption and mourn the destruction of the Temple.
Nearby is the mouth of a large cave. The concave receptacles of an olive press are carved in the stone. Once a donkey walked here in an endless circle, turning a round millstone – which today lies here, broken – that pressed the oil from the olives. A large square wine-press is also carved out of the stone floor. From its size it would seem to have been one of the main wine-presses of the region, and since grapes needed to arrive at the press as soon as possible after being picked, one may gather that the terraces at the foot of Tel Zorah once teemed with grapevines.
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