Lion's Honey

by David Grossman

  At the top of the mound, beside the graves, someone has placed a tiny cupboard containing bibles and prayerbooks. One small bible, with bus tickets stuck in its pages as bookmarks, opens at once to a wrinkled, frequently fingered page, stained with sweat and tears:

  ‘After that, he fell in love with a woman in Nahal Sorek, named Delilah.’

  * * *

  Who is Delilah? The Bible furnishes no answer, not even whether she was a Philistine like Samson’s other women. On the other hand, she is the first woman in the story who is identified by name, and the only one whom Samson explicitly loved. But where did he meet her? What did he see in her? There is no way of knowing. Nor how he courted her, and what was different this time, when he was actually in love, as opposed to the others. And most of all – what does the silence of the text suggest about the feelings of Delilah toward Samson?

  The biblical narrator, as we have seen, is reluctant to impart this sort of information. He is more interested in actions here, just as when he rushed from ‘the woman bore a son, and she named him Samson; the boy grew up, and the Lord blessed him’ straight to ‘the spirit of the Lord first moved him in the encampment of Dan, between Zorah and Eshtaol’, skipping over Samson’s childhood, purging the intriguing details about the education of this extraordinary child, about his childhood pleasures (Did he strangle snakes, like Hercules? Or battle a wild boar, like Odysseus?) and his friends, or rather, as we might expect, his utter loneliness. Nothing of this is known, and we are also unaware of any younger siblings, children born without any special mission, free of the burden of mystery, the ordinary children of ordinary parents.

  And so too in the Delilah story – not a single detail offers a temporary pause in some cosy biographical nook in between the name of the new love and the forward momentum of the plot: ‘The lords of the Philistines went up to her and said, “Coax him and find out what makes him so strong, and how we can overpower him, tie him up, and make him helpless; and we’ll each give you eleven hundred shekels of silver.”’

  Various works dealing with the story of Samson – in literature, painting, music, film24 – have tried to represent Delilah as a tragic figure, who had no intention of harming Samson and indeed was anguished over what happened to him after she turned him in. This sort of interpretation may be found, for example, in Van Dyck’s painting The Arrest of Samson, in which Samson casts a heartrending look at Delilah as the Philistines burst into the room, seize him and tear him away from her: Delilah’s face is turned toward him in a curious mixture of satisfaction over her success, yet pain and tenderness too. Her hand is extended toward his face in a gesture that at the same time suggests a wave of farewell, of renunciation, but also a gesture of compassion, a yearning to caress him one last time, a tender send-off as he embarks on a road of suffering.

  But the text as it stands does not lend itself to such a generous reading of Delilah’s deeds and character, indeed rejects it outright. Delilah’s entire behaviour does not even hint of love, and yet it is this cruel, treacherous woman whom Samson loves, and, as we have remarked, it may well be that note of treachery that he loves in her,25 which forces the reader to broaden and loosen the very definition of love: it is probably Delilah’s cruelty, her almost transparent passion to hurt him – a level of passion that he never found in his other women – which ties him to her with twisted bonds that turn out to be stronger than any that preceded them, and which therefore, for the first time, arouse his love.

  But the explanation of the compulsive need for betrayal is, in the end, so depressing, constraining, mechanical – and denying of Samson’s free will – that we seek, alongside it, another explanation, or wait a while and hope that the story itself will lead us to it.

  Delilah – motivated by the promise of a handsome payoff by the Philistines – ties Samson up and teases him with a sort of two-faced foreplay. On the surface, she is trying to determine, with Samson’s compliance, the secret to his strength and a means of binding him from which he cannot get himself free: ‘If I were to be tied with seven fresh bowstrings that were never dried, ‘I should become as weak as an ordinary man,’ Samson answers, stretched out to his full length on the mattress, maybe idly stroking his long braids – all seven of them – and suppressing a smile.

  Erotic amusements are a matter of taste, and being tied up with fresh tendons that have not been dried is apparently something Samson is into. Delilah at once passes the word about Samson’s fancy to the Philistine officers. They send the requested accoutrements up to her chamber, and she ties the damp cords around his body. And all the while, remember, ‘an ambush was waiting in her room’, a most glaring example of the confusion and boundary-violation that always attend Samson’s activities, indiscriminately mixing the intimate and the public, love and betrayal.

  Delilah finishes wrapping his body with the cords, and then, when he is tied tight, she says to him (in a sudden cry? a confidential whisper in his ear?) ‘Samson, the Philistines are upon you!’ Barely a moment passes, and Samson pops the tendons apart as easily as a ‘strand of tow’ (i.e., a fibre of flax) comes apart at a mere ‘touch of fire’.

  You deceived me, declares Delilah, and lied to me. With astonishing coldness, and even as she spins her web of deceit, she accuses him of lying. Her eyes are perhaps flashing toward the ‘ambusher’, then fixing on Samson: ‘Now, tell me true, how can you be tied up and restrained?’

  Samson – sprawled on his back? stretching with satisfaction? – suggests a new method: ‘If I were to be bound with new ropes that had never been used, I would become as frail as an ordinary man.’

  Haliti is the word he uses – literally, ‘I would become ill’ – which the medieval commentator Radak reads more moderately as ‘I would weaken.’

  Delilah wastes no time. She takes new ropes, thick and rough, ties him up and says again, ‘Samson, the Philistines are upon you!’ The ambusher is poised to attack, but Samson casually snaps these ropes too, as if they were threads.

  You deceived me, Delilah says again, you told me lies. How can you be tied up? Samson obviously realises that she is stubbornly repeating exactly what she said before, signalling her unwillingness to give up. ‘If you weave the seven locks of my hair with the warp-threads of a loom,’ he says, ‘then I will surely weaken’. We can only guess at the gleam in his eye and the timbre of his voice, but the words he speaks reveal something new: until now he has spoken to her in a different way. ‘If I were to be bound,’ he has said – twice – in impersonal, general terms, without specifying who would be doing the binding, or might harm him. But here he turns to her directly, with clear comprehension: ‘If you weave,’ he tells her, if you, Delilah, weave the seven locks of my hair …

  (And in the midst of this game that is not a game, and as sort of a momentary distraction from the terrible thing that will very soon happen, it is possible to muse over the fact that only now, towards the end of the story, is the reader informed that Samson had seven locks of hair. Something in this small new detail hints that Samson loved his hair, took good care of it, scrupulously separated and braided his tresses, lock by lock … And more: anyone who has grown very long hair knows how hard it is to take care of it on one’s own; and here, a moment before these glorious locks will be shorn by a woman, our thoughts drift to a different woman, Samson’s mother, who maybe helped him, during his childhood and youth, in braiding and combing and curling and washing – and perhaps did so even when he was grown up, in between his other women?)

  Samson falls asleep. Maybe he was exhausted by the lovemaking, maybe he is starting to crack. Delilah does not rest. She weaves his hair into a loom with a warp-thread and also pins it with a peg, to hold it firm, and says to him again, a third time, ‘Samson, the Philistines are upon you’, and Samson wakes up and in one motion pulls out the weave and the peg.

  Thus, in what seemed at first like love-play but which gradually turns bitter, he surrenders himself to Delilah and her cords and ropes and tendons. And here it
may be noted that Samson’s whole life story is an endless braid of knots and ropes: foxes tied together, new ropes with which he is bound by the men of Judah, damp bowstrings and locks of hair woven into a loom, and time after time we see Samson’s passion to tie and be tied, and also to be ensnared, and we may read this serpentine jumble of ropes – this tangled web – and wonder, how many ropes does a man need to replace one umbilical cord that was never properly spun?

  Three times Delilah cries out, ‘Samson, the Philistines are upon you’, and each time, nonetheless, Samson suspends his suspicion of her machinations, and continues to cooperate in her transparent plot. Over and over he recognises that she is using his answers in an attempt to harm him, yet he does not protest or accuse her.26

  But of course he is drawn not only to the treacherous Delilah but to the ‘ambusher’ who has been with them all along in the room, the stranger always hidden in the background, who in a certain sense needs to be there in order to complete, deep in Samson’s soul, the primal scene of his life, the moment he was traumatised in the womb: mother, child, stranger.

  And then, after Delilah has pestered and pressured him constantly – va-tiktzar nafsho la-mut, ‘he was wearied to death’.

  Nowhere else in the Bible does this phrase appear. The rabbis of antiquity found an original explanation for Samson’s anguish, commenting that Delilah ‘at the time of the consummation pulled away from under him’.27 Arguably such a gross rejection might make a man lose his lust for life, yet all the same, the unique biblical wording calls for an alternative explanation, another motive for Samson’s behaviour with Delilah.

  For it is also possible to see it this way: that all of Delilah’s banging on Samson’s door, her unrelenting interrogation, ‘What makes you so strong? And how could you be tied up and made helpless?’ – in other words, what’s your secret, who are you really, what kind of man are you inside that mystery and what would you be without it? – all this aroused feelings in Samson that no other woman had ever aroused. And thus, though he suspected her motives, she was the only woman who asked him the big, essential question of his life; the only one who knew the right question, and thus in effect asked him to hand over the keys to his secret, which other women were uninterested in, or perhaps feared. And therefore, amid the tempest of confused and conflicted feelings that her actions stirred in him, it’s conceivable that a small hope was aroused too, that Delilah would be the one who would succeed in wresting some sort of ‘answer’ from him, a solution to the riddle that was entrenched deep inside him and that even he had not managed fully to understand.

  Maybe somewhere deep in his soul, beneath the mountains of muscle, a voice told him that that it would be Delilah’s persistence that would succeed in salvaging the buried self that had never managed to be redeemed in any other way; the self that very much wants to be revealed, to give of itself, to remove all that blocks and separates it from the rest of the world; to cast off the burden of mystery and riddle and accursed alienation; and to be at last ‘like an ordinary man’ – and, if so, might Samson also become intelligible to Samson himself?

  For we have already recognised that an aura of discomfort always hovers around Samson, the enigma of the incompatibility and discord between his blessed divine mission and his earthy, material, corporeal (and often childlike) character and personality. Sometimes it is clear to the reader that Samson doesn’t know himself at all, doesn’t understand the role he fills in his own life story. But it is also possible – and this is truly a disturbing thought – that God, from the outset, had no interest in Samson’s being conscious of who he really was under the mantle of his mission, and what part he plays in the story, and what instrument he is in God’s hands (and it suddenly seems that the ‘use’ to which God puts him – shimush in Hebrew – is the hidden meaning of Samson’s name, Shimshon).

  In which case, Samson is revealed here in all his misery. A lonely man, forever tortured, enslaved by a God who has chosen him for a demanding mission – the salvation of Israel – a task for which his personality and character are too weak; a man who manages time and again to become entangled in personal feuds with the enemies of Israel, thus endangering, failing, and disappointing his people, as well as the God who sent him.

  And then it seems that Samson’s entire physical essence is no more than a huge set of muscles that metamorphosed into great iron doors, ‘city gates’ designed to protect a fragile, vulnerable, interior human kernel; or, in fact, intended to prevent that kernel, which was in such dire need of redemption and self-revelation, from cracking open and finally becoming ‘like an ordinary man’.

  How can a man be redeemed? What is the natural, most desirable way for a man to open slightly the oppressive doors that wall him in, and allow that vulnerable kernel to reveal itself, to give and perhaps also be received?

  ‘He fell in love with a woman.’

  And perhaps into that one word is compressed Samson’s small, bold, human, and bootless rebellion against the cruel use that the Lord has made of him. For as we know, in order for Samson to carry out his mission and strike the Philistines, God does not need for him to actually love a Philistine woman. To do his job all he needs is a prostitute, or a woman who is the ‘right one’ for him.

  But if, however, the bond with Delilah did arouse in Samson something totally new, and was not designed merely to satisfy his compulsive need to be betrayed, to experience intimacy that is violated by strangers who turn it to their own purposes, then here, for the first time in his life, Samson fulfils his independent will by exercising the highest freedom available to him as a human being – and not as a tool in the hands of God – namely, emotional freedom, the freedom to love.

  And if, on his part, this was true love, it may be surmised (perhaps only wishfully) that Samson allows Delilah to deceive him again and again because he is hoping against hope that he is mistaken; hoping that the next time he opens his eyes he will find himself in the room alone with his loved one, and the ambusher will be gone. The ambusher, whom Samson does not have to see in order to feel his eternal presence.

  But then, after she says to him for the third time, ‘Samson, the Philistines are upon you,’ he understands, without a doubt or the chance of self-deception, that there is no love here. That the woman he loves, the only one he has ever loved, will not give him what he needs more than anything. That the fate imposed on him from the womb will forever pursue him, even into places of the greatest intimacy, and worst of all – that there is no way he can rebel against this fate, and therefore, it appears, he will not have another love in his life.

  And probably because of this, more than for any other reason, ‘he was wearied to death’.

  And in simple words that he has been waiting all his life to utter, he reveals his secret to Delilah. And not only his secret, but kol libo, ‘his whole heart’, everything. Three times in two verses we find this phrase. And what is kol libo? ‘No razor has ever touched my head, for I have been a Nazirite to God since I was in my mother’s womb. If my hair were cut, my strength would leave me and I should become as weak as an ordinary man.’ There, he has told her everything.

  And when we hear the secret from his lips, and discover that this secret was kol libo – his heart of hearts – the thought arises that maybe it wasn’t just the content of the secret that had been so important to Samson, but maybe the very fact that he had one. Thus it was vital to Samson not merely as a ‘military secret’, so to speak, but because it belonged to him alone, and no one else (except his mother) knew about it; it was his most private property, which had not been stained by strangers or by the excessive ‘publicity’ of his life.

  Delilah senses at once that this time he is not deceiving her. There is the ring of truth here, and she summons the Philistine leaders and informs them that she has gotten to the bottom of the secret. They too can tell from her voice that this is really it. Again they come up to her room, and now bring the bundle of cash they have promised her.

  Thi
s, of course, is a moment of trial for Delilah too: when the Philistine leaders told her, ‘Coax him and find out what makes him so strong’, she no doubt heard the challenge to her female powers of attraction (‘See how strong you are’, in effect.) But now, the extent that Samson had been able to resist her charms has cast doubt upon her seductive skills, and it’s possible that she herself – maybe for the very first time – has begun to doubt her worth as a woman. The Philistine officers had surely begun to wonder about the long delay; and maybe even the ambusher in the room, who had repeatedly been a witness to Delilah’s disappointments, had registered his impatience with a glance. It’s therefore not hard to imagine that the erotic game between Samson and Delilah became more and more charged and tense for her too, and as her failures increased, so too did her personal stake.

  And so, if in her first two tries she speaks to Samson the deceiver with incredible restraint – and we can almost see her teeth clenched in anger and resolution as she declares, ‘You deceived me, you lied to me’ – after her third failure she erupts, in a deep and womanly growl: ‘How can you say you love me, when you don’t confide in me?’ She flings her rage and humiliation in his face, but also – maybe unwittingly – words that capture the very essence of his estrangement, and not only from her: Ve-libcha ein iti, as the Hebrew has it, you don’t confide in me, ‘your heart is not with me …’

  And maybe these were the words she repeated to Samson, constantly pecking at his elemental wound, the wound of his strangeness, and the words reverberated in the gaping void between his heart and those he loved; and maybe this was the ‘pestering’ that ultimately ‘wearied him to death’.

  Perhaps this is how it was. And because of this – and for no other reason – he has confided kol libo, nothing less than the whole heart that she had accused of estrangement and deception; everything that he had concealed and suppressed and hoarded inside for so many years. In one momentary lapse he gave it all to her, with that same sort of mad, breathless profligacy that sometimes afflicts the most diehard of misers; with the foolish innocence of one who believes that if he were to confide everything to another person, all at once, in a kind of instant transfusion, he would finally achieve a feeling of genuine intimacy.