* * *
When the Philistine lords arrive, Samson is sleeping. ‘She lulled him to sleep on her lap’, says the Bible, and we have already remarked that a moment before Delilah removed his locks Samson became like a child. It is as if he is returning to his origins, foetally curled on his ‘mother’s’ lap.
Samson’s eyes are closed, but under his eyelids there may well be a parade of memories and images: a long, tempestuous, arduous journey, with Samson marching, step after step, to the place it all began, where it all became twisted together – mother, child, betrayal.
And here may be found something of an answer to the question we posed earlier – why would Samson want to re-enact, again and again, precisely the most damaging feeling he had ever experienced, which had poisoned his life from the start? Or in other words, why do human beings compulsively repeat destructive experiences, re-creating in the course of their lives the dysfunctional relationships and the self-defeating situations that arouse their worst, most toxic feelings?
Is this not – among other reasons – because it is precisely there, at the epicentre of humiliation and alienation and misunderstanding, that a person feels the most ‘himself ’ as he ‘really is’, in other words, as he was at the origin of his life, at the very beginning? He may have been hugged, swaddled in love and warmth, rocked gently to sleep on lap or breast, but it was there too that he was branded – if not out of malice – and scarred, imprinted with the consciousness of existential strangeness, the bitter feeling of being accidental or alien, even, in a sense, within his own private, intimate biography.
There, in that place, Samson’s mother uttered the terrible words, ‘until his dying day’, or some other devastating remark that parents make, sometimes off-handedly, about their child. There they sealed his fate, for his whole life, and it is for this very reason, it seems, that he is compelled to go back there, because that is where the grim foundational drama of his existence takes place. There, in a strange way, he most feels the fire of being of alive, even as it burns him again and again. There too, within us all, sadly flickers the eternal flame of self-recognition as men and women who are, in the end, separated and isolated from one another, mysterious and even ‘unknowable’ to others – even perhaps to ourselves – and therefore, also, endlessly lonely.
Samson is asleep, exhausted. Possibly he is filled with unexpected relief after giving away his secret, and no longer needing to steel all his muscles to defend it. His journey is over. Now he can be like other men. ‘My strength would leave me’, he has explained, as we recall, just a moment earlier to Delilah, ‘and I should become as weak as an ordinary man’, kechol ha-adam.
‘As every other man’, he literally said. But earlier, when Delilah had bound him, he said to her – twice – that he would weaken ke’achad ha’adam, like any other man, the word achad meaning ‘one’, as if still wanting, unconsciously, to retain his individuality. Now he forfeits this too, and reveals to her how he can become like every man, tasting these words for the first time.
But maybe it is not a weakness, an illness, to be like everyone else. Maybe this is what Samson, in his heart of hearts, has wanted his whole life. And so too, in Lea Goldberg’s poem ‘Samson’s Love’:
‘… And perhaps even he didn’t know
Of his prophet and Nazirite’s test,
How the simplest riddle of all
Was the breakable heart in his breast.’28
* * *
Delilah summons ‘a man’ – apparently the one who had waited in ambush in the room – but it is she herself, and not the man, who cuts off the seven locks of the sleeping Samson’s hair. Maybe she does it in order to spare him a bit of the humiliation of being shorn by strangers. Or maybe this way she is in fact humiliating him all the more. And maybe this is her way of saying goodbye and thus to experience again, distilled into a single action, the strong feelings that flowed between them. Thousands of years later, it is possible to imagine her shifting expression as she performs the deed, with an erotic touch on one hand and overtones of castration on the other, and perhaps the thin smile of a woman whose charms have not failed her.
His strength has already slipped away, but he is still asleep and unaware of this. She begins to taunt him. She cries out again, for the fourth time, ‘Samson, the Philistines are upon you!’ He awakes and says to himself, ‘I will break loose and shake myself free as I did the other times.’ He flexes his muscles as he had done previously, and then discovers that ‘the Lord had departed from him’.
The Philistines in the room immediately gouge out his eyes. The eyes that had been so alert, impassioned, hungry, restless. ‘Samson followed his eyes’, commented the rabbis of the Talmud, ‘which is why the Philistines gouged them out.’29 Just as he uprooted the gates of Gaza, now they pull out the gates of his face and soul. Who can begin to imagine what Samson is going through? One can only assume that it is not only the physical agony of the gouging that consumes him, not only the rage and pain over his lover’s betrayal. Samson is now prey to a sensation he has not known since the day he was first moved as a youth by the spirit of God: his enormous strength is gone. His body does not respond as before. Now it too is foreign to him. His body has also betrayed him.
* * *
His eyes plucked out, bound with bronze chains, Samson is taken by the Philistines to Gaza, where he is put to work as a mill-slave in the prison. Now, trudging endlessly around the grindstone, he spends his days looking inward, perhaps beginning to see what he could not see before he became blind: the whole spectacle of his life, the manipulative destiny that denied him free choice or the right to protest, or a single minute of tranquillity.
Circling and grinding, stripped of his special secret, his crown of Nazirite glory, and of any superhuman strength greater than that of his muscles alone. In the sunset of his life he learns the limits of his power and maybe also his own true essence, freed at last from the gusts of the great, tyrannical bellows known as the ‘spirit of the Lord’. Quite likely he can, now and then, even revel in a simple sense of self, of being someone tolerable and altogether human, someone that was stolen even before he was born.
(And it may have been a bit of a relief, when Delilah removed the weight of those seven long locks of hair that had never been cut, that cascaded down his face and surrounded his body and which undoubtedly had further detached him from the world at large.)
Thus pass his days. His hair is starting to grow back and with it his strength. According to the narrative, Samson is deep into his work at the grindstone. And yet it may well be that the grinding had another aspect entirely: the verb ‘to grind’ in Hebrew carries a clear sexual connotation, which may be found as early as the Book of Job – ‘May my wife grind for another, and may others kneel over her’30 – and continues into vulgar Israeli slang. Perhaps this was the origin of the legends that cropped up over the years about how Samson spent his last days: the Talmud tells how ‘everyone brought his wife to him to the prison that she might bear a child by him’.31 This suggestion, titillating at first, quickly translates into another means of abusing and humiliating Samson by turning him into a stud bull. What we have here, in the end, is a cruel and grotesque extension of the great curse of his life, the curse of strangeness.
One day they take him out of the prison and bring him before a jubilant crowd. The Philistine nobles gather to offer a great sacrifice to their gods and to rejoice that Dagon has delivered Samson into their hands. Samson stands before them. They look at him with amazement. Apparently even in defeat he gives the impression of being a wonder of nature, eliciting all the more kudos to Dagon for having triumphed over him.
After they have feasted their eyes on him, he is returned to jail and the Philistines continue their celebration. And then, well into their cups, they demand that Samson return and ‘dance for us’. They bring him back from the prison. ‘And he danced for them.’ Here too, there are those who interpret this as some sort of ‘sex show’, as
the Hebrew verb here, letzahek, is used now and again in the Bible to describe a sexual act.32 In any event, Samson is certainly humiliated and ridiculed in full view of the merrymaking Philistines.
He hears the carousing Philistines but cannot see a thing. He is the only Israelite amid three thousand Philistines, men and women, ‘watching Samson dance’. One boy stands beside him, holding him by the hand and leading him. Samson, the inveterate warrior, immediately senses an opportunity. He asks the boy to place his hands on the pillars. ‘Let me feel the pillars,’ he says, using a rare locution, hamisheni, that implies a warm caress – in chilling contrast to what Samson is about to do. The boy places his hands upon the pillars. Samson’s fingers now make their final contact with the world, disconnecting from the actual, tactile sensation and recollecting instead everything they had they previously touched, men and women, lion and foxes, honey and ropes and rock, the jawbone of an ass, cool spring water and a prostitute and the gates of a city, and Delilah.
‘O Lord God,’ cries Samson bitterly, ‘please remember me, and give me strength just this once, O God, to take revenge on the Philistines, if only for one of my two eyes.’ It is the shattering cry of one who knows that his God has abandoned him, and who has come to realise that he has failed abjectly in performing the mission for which he was created. Samson in this hour addresses God with three different, holy Hebrew names, as if he is trying to enter the heart of God through all of its gates, to reach a place where a portal will be opened into a most personal, intimate deity, the one who chose him and took him when he was still in the womb, the one whose spirit had empowered Samson all his life. He does not know, of course, whether God will answer his prayers this time, as He did in the Rock of Etam, when Samson nearly died of thirst. Indeed a much fresher memory is the moment he said to himself, ‘I will break loose and shake myself free as I did the other times’, only to discover to his dismay that Delilah had shorn his hair and depleted his power, and that his God had left him.
With a mixture of uncertainty, desperation, and hope he grabs hold of the pillars with all his strength, embracing one with his right arm and the other with his left, ‘the two middle pillars that the temple rested upon’. What runs through his mind now, as he is about to die? Is it possible that the contact with the two pillars conjures the memory of his parents, his father and mother, and with it his longstanding, incessant pain over never really having parents at all? Maybe he is also pierced by the recognition that there was always a pair between whom he stood, yearning to embrace them, two and only two, without any foreign presence: the pillars of this temple, two foxes with a burning torch, the gateposts of Gaza.
He brings about his own death, as the Hebrew has it, in a bayit, a house, a home. He, who from birth, indeed from the womb, was exiled in effect from any kind of home; whose entire private life had been hijacked; who never had a home of his own and never really belonged either to his own people or to the people into whose midst his urges had propelled him. He, who slept with many women but had no child of his own; he, whose umbilical cord had been severed, as it were, at both ends, now stands in the middle of a house that ‘rests upon’ – nachon in Hebrew – two pillars. But nachon also means ‘proper’: at last – how ironic – bayit nachon, a proper home.
‘O Lord God,’ cries the blind Samson, ‘please remember me, and give me strength just this once …’ He pulls the pillars with all his strength and only then, as they begin to crack and move, does he learn that his God has not abandoned him after all. He crashes the house down upon the Philistine lords and all the other people within. ‘Those who were slain by him as he died’, it is written, ‘outnumbered those who had been slain by him when he lived’, and in the echo chamber of our own time and place there is no escaping the thought that Samson was, in a sense, the first suicide-killer; and although the circumstances of his deed were different from those familiar to us from the daily reality of the streets of Israel, it may be that the act itself established in human consciousness a mode of murder and revenge directed at innocent victims, which has been perfected in recent years.33
And only after his death is he truly brought home. ‘His brothers and all his father’s household came down and carried him up and buried him in the tomb of his father Manoah, between Zorah and Eshtaol.’ There is no way of knowing whether these were actual ‘brothers’ who were later born to the same parents, or other relatives, or simply members of his tribe. But it would appear that his whole extended family gathers around him now, only now. With pity and concern they come down and carry him up and bury him in a place where, at last, he will find perfect peace.
Samson is gone. For a moment all is silence, and then the thought arises that the rabbis of old were on the mark when they connected the word lefa’amo – referring to Samson’s miraculous empowerment – with the image of a ringing bell, pa’amon, declaring that ‘the divine spirit’, the Shekhinah, ‘kept ringing in front of him like a bell’.34 For it is as if a bell has suddenly fallen silent, a bell that began ringing from the moment the spirit began to arouse Samson. All his life Samson seemed like a giant bell in the hands of a celestial providence that would strike and tinkle it at will, with a strange mix of tones that sometimes sounded like music but more often a grating, violent cacophony. An unfortunate bell, swung back and forth with unrelenting force, whose tintinnabulations echoed from the towns of the tribe of Dan to the cities of the Philistines.
But before he perished, at the precise moment that he was engraved in memory, myth, and art, Samson embraced the two supporting pillars and brought them down, the columns, the house, the Philistines, himself. And for one last instant – as in all of Samson’s astonishing exploits – the whole thing boils down to one sharp, penetrating statement: Let my soul die as it had always lived. Without being truly close to another soul, alone, among foreigners who sought without surcease to injure it, ridicule it, betray it. Let my soul die with the Philistines.
Notes
1. The Bible, of course, presents the story of Samson as a ‘drama of fate’, and less as a ‘drama of character’. Nonetheless, the way the story’s actors, Samson in particular, are drawn cannot help but lead the contemporary reader – armed with the qualities and sensibilities of our own time – to the collision and interaction of ‘fate’ and ‘personality’. Moreover, as the story develops, it turns out that it may, in fact, be Samson’s personality that prevents him from realising the destiny for which he is meant.
2. Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky (1880–1940) was a Russian-born Zionist leader whose novel Samson the Nazarite was serialised in the Russian Zionist journal Razsvet in 1926, published in book form in 1927, and translated into English in 1930. It served as the basis for Cecil B. DeMille’s 1949 film Samson and Delilah.
3. Babylonian Talmud (BT), Tractate Berachot 61a.
4. Professor Yair Zakovitch of the Hebrew University, in his book The Life of Samson, points out that Manoah here calls his wife ‘the woman’, implying alienation, stemming perhaps from suspicion; and that Adam, who becomes estranged from his wife Eve after she seduces him into eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, says to God: ‘The woman You put at my side – she gave me of the tree, and I ate.’ Zakovitch, Hayei Shimshon (‘The Life of Samson’ [Hebrew: Jerusalem, 1982]), p. 49. In this connection, let us note that the Jewish-Roman historian Josephus Flavius, in his monumental work Jewish Antiquities (V:276), asserts that Manoah was ‘madly enamoured of his wife and hence inordinately jealous’. Translated by H. St. Thackeray and Ralph Marcus (Cambridge and London, 1958), Vol. V, p. 125.
5. Zakovitch (p. 70) points out that the biblical text does not provide the derivation of Samson’s name, a rarity among major biblical figures. He contends that the biblical narrator wished to avoid any association of Samson and the sun, a linkage with strong pagan connotations.
6. BT Sotah 10a.
7. Josephus Flavius, Jewish Antiquities V:285. Trans. Thackeray and Marcus, Vol. V, p.129.
8. BT Sotah 10a.<
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9. Jerusalem Talmud, Sotah 7b.
10. Zohar I:194a.
11. One finds in Jewish sources an ambivalence toward the phenomenon of the Nazirite. There are those who saw it as a state of great spiritual elevation, which not everyone is capable of achieving. Thus, the prophet Amos: ‘And I raised up prophets from among your sons and Nazirites from among your young men’ (Amos 2:11); and in the Talmud, Rabbi Eleazer. But there were also those who regarded extreme asceticism and isolation as sinful – for example, the rabbis Eleazar HaKappar and Samuel (see BT Ta’anit 11a.).
12. I Samuel 13:19.
13. It is interesting to mention, in this context, the hypothesis of the archaeologist Yigael Yadin, who raised the possibility that the tribe of Dan was closely related to the sea people known as the Danai, so much so as to complicate Dan’s inclusion as one of the tribes of Israel. See Isaac Avishur, ‘Dan’, Encyclopaedia Judaica 5: 1255–9; also Yigael Yadin, ‘And Dan, why did he remain in ships?’, Australian Journal of Biblical Archaeology,1 (1968): 9–23.
14. Genesis 49:16, 18.
15. I Kings 10:27.
16. In his commentary on the Book of Judges, the nineteenth-century rabbinical scholar Malbim wrote that ‘apparently this was the time of the grape harvest, and as they reached the path through the vineyards Samson changed course, in accordance with [the ancient dictum] “Go around, we say to a Nazirite, do not go near a vineyard.”’
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