Empathy for the Devil

by J R Forasteros

  Delilah poured her strongest wine into two of her most beautiful cups. She gave one to Samson and raised her own. “May all the gods bless this Nazirite.”

  He roared with laughter again and drank deeply. Delilah refilled his cup again.

  That cup soon lay not far from his sleeping form, having been emptied many times before the beast finally collapsed into her lap.

  SHORN

  The shears slid over Samson’s skull; he was now as bald as a newborn. She knew her kinsmen were there by then. Doubtless they were hiding in the next chamber, waiting for her to cry out.

  Samson looked less beastly, and Delilah felt a twinge of pity. The Philistines would not be kind to him. Samson had humiliated them, emasculated them. Doubtless he would be humiliated, paraded before the people.

  Delilah thought of the lords of Ashkelon, slaughtered for their robes because the fox was outfoxed. She thought of her father’s vineyards, burned to the ground because this man could not be held accountable for his actions. And most of all, she thought of Kala, so innocent, so helpless, so frightened.

  Delilah whispered into the beast’s ear, “Wake up, Samson. Wake up!” He only stirred, so she slapped at his cheek, and he began to awaken. He knew immediately something was wrong, and his eyes widened as his hands felt for the locks that now lay on the floor. He turned eyes filled with horror toward Delilah. “What have you done?”

  “Samson,” she cried out, “the Philistines are here for you!” With that, a dozen men poured into her bedchamber. Samson threw himself at them, but he had told the truth; they easily overpowered him. He screamed and wept and shrieked.

  Before he was dragged from her room, they gouged out his eyes and placed bronze shackles on him.

  Delilah called for a slave to gather Samson’s locks and burn them. That night she slept deeply, her dreams untroubled.

  4

  I’m Not Like Everybody Else

  When the Light of the World Goes Dark

  I wish I’d known my friend Becky Brown in high school. Becky was on the board of the church where I served in Beavercreek, Ohio. As we left the church building on Sundays, she would debrief the sermon with me. One of her favorite turns of phrase, always delivered with a smile and a sendoff, was “Holy means different, not weird!”

  I was a weird kid in high school—partly due to adolescent awkwardness but partly because of the way I chose to inhabit my faith. I attended a public school, and I was committed to being a Christian in public. For me, this meant highlighting as often and as loudly as possible that I was a Christian. I argued with my biology teacher (who was a Christian) about evolution. I wrote papers and did projects on Christian themes. I wore Christian T-shirts that proclaimed loudly, “I BELIEVE!” My favorite read, “Don’t Fight Naked!” on the front and “Put on the Full Armor of God” on the back, complete with an illustration and a tiny Scripture reference.

  I had a chart proudly on display in my bedroom that helped Christian kids find church-approved music alternatives. Like Green Day? Try MxPx! Like 311? Try Pax217! Above all, I was a defender of truth, armed with my sword of the Spirit and stacks of apologetics books written specifically to help kids like me wage war, especially against godless science teachers who tried to force us to learn science.

  Ironically none of that made me holy. I was a loud, brash brand pusher. Just because I wore a cross instead of a swoosh didn’t mean I wasn’t playing the same consumerist game as the kids at my school who wore Starter jackets, Mossimo shirts, or FUBU apparel. (Did I mention I went to high school in the nineties?) None of these behaviors marked my character as different from any of the other kids at my school. The ways I was religious looked suspiciously like the students who played football or did theater or had any other hobby. Christianity was just my brand. I couldn’t imagine a holiness that was more than branding and behavior, so the faith I offered my classmates was nothing more than one more way to get through high school (and not a very appealing one). I could have learned a thing or two from Samson.

  HEY THERE, DELILAH

  Delilah is the presumed villain of Samson’s story. Her name is synonymous with the femme fatale, the woman who uses her sexuality as a weapon to destroy men. Her crime was seducing Samson to discover the secret of his great strength so the Philistines could destroy him.

  But the book of Judges is not particularly interested in judging Delilah’s actions.1 Compare Delilah to Jael in Judges 4:17-24. Like Delilah, Jael was not an Israelite. Like Delilah, Jael invited a man into her bedchambers. Like Delilah, she immobilized said man by means involving his head. (She drove a tent peg through his skull.) Judges intentionally tells the stories of these two women to highlight their parallels. But Jael is a hero, while Delilah is a villain. The only significant difference is that Jael killed an enemy of Israel, while Delilah betrayed Samson, Israel’s alleged champion.2

  Samson, on the other hand, seems at first to be an unambiguous hero. He’s Hebrew, one of the good guys. An angelic messenger announced that he was born to rescue God’s people from the barbaric Philistines.3 Samson had a superpower: impossible strength. He also had a secret weakness: his hair.

  But as we read his story, it’s hard not to see Samson through Delilah’s eyes. He is proclaimed to be Yahweh’s champion, but he never defended Yahweh’s honor. He was uncivilized, brutish, and cruel. He picked fights he knew he could win easily. He showed blatant disregard for all his God’s laws (except for his hair). He took whatever he wanted and was accountable to no one.

  If you feel a little conflicted about Samson, don’t worry. You’re supposed to. He isn’t meant to be read as a hero—quite the opposite. Samson was the last of the judges, which is the title the book of Judges confers on the various champions of Israel Yahweh raised up to rescue the Israelites from oppression. The whole book of Judges is one long downward spiral, and Samson was the rock bottom as far as judges go.4 His was a betrayal of Israel’s holy vocation, and for Judges, the ultimate sin. The book lays the blame for the tragedy of Samson and Delilah squarely on his shoulders. He’s at best an antihero, and he makes a strong case for villainy.

  Discerning the difference between the heroes and villains—between God’s people and the Philistines—should have been easy. But it wasn’t. Samson’s sin was that he refused to live into his divine calling. Instead he did what was right in his own eyes, and all Israel followed him.

  THE PHILISTINE PROBLEM

  Today philistine means “uncultured barbarian.” We’ve taken the Philistines’ biblical role as the enemies of God’s people as an excuse to assume they were backward, ignorant, and dangerous—little better than animals. But our image of the Philistines doesn’t match the historical record.5

  Exactly who the Philistines were is still a mystery. The best evidence we have is that they were a Greek seafaring people who fled the collapse of the Mycenean civilization around 1200 BCE.6 Mycenea was one of the great Bronze Age civilizations in the Mediterranean. It was technologically advanced, participating in a commercial civilization that spanned the Mediterranean. Scholars debate exactly why all these civilizations collapsed at nearly the same time, but collapse they did.

  The Philistines seem to be refugees who fled in waves to settle on the Canaanite Mediterranean coast. By Samson’s day, they’d probably been a presence in Canaan for around a century. They established a network of five key cities known today as the Philistine Pentapolis.7 They stood between Israel and the Mediterranean Sea, a recipe for a conflict as old as civilization.

  What made the Philistines so fearsome? In a word, technology. They had entered the Iron Age, and Israel had not. Iron is much harder than bronze. Israel’s swords and arrowheads could not pierce Philistine armor, while Israel’s soldiers were extremely vulnerable to Philistine weapons.8 Israel’s chariots broke down more frequently and could not accommodate difficult terrain as readily. In essence, the Philistines were using smartphones while Israel was using the telegraph.

  Far from being uncultured b
arbarians, the Philistines were civilized, educated, and well armed. They brought advanced technology and ancient beliefs and traditions to a land still embroiled in the aftermath of Joshua’s conquest. They seemed invincible—until Samson came along.

  No matter what the Philistines did, Samson defeated them. He took thirty lords of Ashkelon by surprise. He burned Philistine grain fields and vineyards, then killed the men who tried to stop him. The whole Philistine army massed against Samson, and he killed a thousand of them. Finally they tried to trap him in one of their great cities, but he ripped the gates apart, leaving the whole city vulnerable.

  For the first time in more than a century, the Philistines had met a foe against which their numbers and technological advantage did nothing. They turned to Delilah, who soothed then slew the savage beast.

  Though it’s possible Delilah was a Hebrew, her actions reveal her allegiance to be squarely with the Philistines. That coupled with Samson’s preference for Philistine women has led to a near consensus among scholars that she was a Philistine. As such, Delilah would have seen herself as cultured compared to the nearby Israelites. In her eyes, Israel was a barbaric collective of hill people still grasping for the technology and institutions her people had mastered a century or more before.

  Most surprising is that Delilah is named in the narrative. None of the other women are, including Samson’s mother, his wife, and the prostitute at Gaza. No men speak for Delilah, even when she conducts business. This indicates she was likely independently wealthy, which was out of the ordinary for Greek women but not unheard of.9 The only other fact we know about Delilah is that she is from the same valley as Samson and his Philistine wife: the valley of Sorek. She would have grown up hearing whatever stories of Samson the Strong Man circulated. Even if she wasn’t at Samson’s wedding, she would have known of it after Samson destroyed the region’s grain supply.

  Of all the women in the story of Samson, Delilah is the only one he is said to have loved. But we know nothing of her motivations. Though a minority of scholars and storytellers wonder if his love for her was reciprocated, most assume Delilah wanted nothing more than Samson’s destruction. Given his behavior in the story, it’s hard to fault her.

  MOON OF MY LIFE

  From a narrative perspective, Delilah functions as harbinger of the end for Israel. Her name sounds like the Hebrew word for night, while Samson is named for the sun. He is day; she is night. In the framework of Judges, he is good and she is evil—or that’s how it’s supposed to work.

  In the Jewish imagination, the boundaries God commanded between Israel and the surrounding nations are woven into the very fabric of creation. The seven days of the Hebrew creation story begin in a darkness described this way: “The earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep” (Genesis 1:2). The first three days of creation see Yahweh dividing, separating, forming. Yahweh spends the next three days filling those forms, so that the “formless and empty” becomes “formed and filled,” and God’s cosmic temple is ready for that first Sabbath rest.10 God’s final creation is the man and woman whom God commissions to rule as God’s image bearers.

  Later, at Sinai, God gives Israel a torah, a way.11 In a sort of cosmic wedding ceremony, God makes Israel a holy people—set apart from the world. The torah created the people in the same way, forming them with boundaries and separation.12 God intended this holy people to be a kingdom of priests (see Exodus 19:1-8).

  The parallels are intentional: God creates a world and a people by establishing boundaries and identity. God also creates a cosmic temple in Genesis 1 and a tabernacle in Exodus, which is cared for by humans created in God’s image and shaped by God’s torah. They are to be caretakers of creation and lights of the world. To be an Israelite is to follow God’s torah to show the whole world the way to God. Israel’s holiness is to be contagious.

  Judges is the story of how the holy people failed to be holy. The constant refrain in the book of Judges is that everyone did what was right in their own eyes. Rather than follow God’s torah, again and again they crossed holy boundaries to worship foreign gods.

  As a Nazirite, Samson was to be the embodiment of Israel’s holiness. Nazirite means “set apart.” We know little about the day-to-day functions of Nazirites in Israelite culture, but we do know that they embodied the separateness of creation and of God’s people. They were to abstain from wine. They were not to cut their hair. They were to be more diligent than the average Israelite about not eating unclean animals. Certainly they were not to marry foreign women.

  Samson did all these and more, crossing again and again the holy boundaries that marked God’s people as God’s. The sun of Israel didn’t shine God’s light into the world, so the world was dark, and everyone did what is right in their own eyes. When Delilah finally appeared in the story, she was the unmaker. Through her actions, the man who took everything he saw was blinded. The light of Israel’s sun went dark. Creation was unmade as God’s champion was defeated. But his own appetites defeated him, not an outside force.

  By the end of Judges, God’s people had ceased to be holy. All the boundaries had been crossed, and there was no way to tell who was a hero and who was a villain anymore. The creative fabric of God’s torah had unraveled, and Israel was effectively no more.

  Early in Judges, when Israel still shined God’s light into the world, a pagan woman named Jael saw that light and aided God’s people. By Samson’s day, the light was dark, so Delilah did exactly what we would expect anyone to do: she took care of her own people. She turned a profit. And as far as we are told, she felt no remorse. Why should she? She was never presented a better alternative.

  This was Samson’s failure: he refused God’s calling to be holy, to be like God and unlike the world around him. The sun of Israel was called from birth to shine the light of justice and freedom but refused to shine. So the people stumbled in darkness.

  HOLINESS IN THE REAL WORLD

  Discerning what a holy life looks like in our modern world is no easy task. The instructions we find in the Torah are culturally bound. Today we wear clothes of multiple fibers, eat shrimp and bacon, go for a run on Saturday, get tattoos, and participate in a host of other activities explicitly forbidden by the holiness codes (see, for example, Leviticus 11:12; 19:19-28; Exodus 16:27-30).

  That hasn’t kept us from making new holiness rules, of course. My denomination, the Church of the Nazarene, has a manual with a section called “The Covenant of Christian Conduct.” This covenant is our attempt to answer how we are to be holy in the world. For most of our history, our holiness code has been a list of don’ts: Don’t drink alcohol. Don’t dance. Don’t go to movies. Don’t go to the circus.13

  I have a love/hate relationship with our covenant. On the one hand, it’s important that holiness be a real-world experience. Holiness should not be confined to the sanctuary on Sunday morning or to a private prayer closet. Holiness is a public calling. I like that we put effort into imagining what holiness in the real world should look like.

  On the other hand, modern-day holiness codes like ours tend to focus on behaviors rather than character. Where are our injunctions to embody the fruit of the Spirit? How might our churches be different if, rather than endless debates about alcohol, we pursued self-control as a virtue? What if we spent more time imagining together what kindness looks like or how gentleness is different from weakness when it comes to employing our God-given power in the world? What if we held up joy as a virtue to be pursued? What if we trained Christians to be peacemakers at home, in cubicles, and even on social media? What if we insisted on loving our enemies and welcoming strangers and refugees as though they were our own family?

  Holiness is the key to our vocation. When we get holiness wrong, we cannot be the light of the world as God intended. But too often, rather than following God’s way, we imitate the world around us. We have our own schools, our own bookstores, and our own music. In other words, we’re not particularly holy. We do exactly what
the rest of the world does, but we use Christian as an adjective, slap it on packaging, and call it sanctified. We train up culture warriors intent on legislating morality, so we’re led not by pastors but by politicians who’ve grabbed us and use us for their own agendas. Rather than cultivating a reputation for looking like Jesus, we are known as hypocritical, judgmental, oblivious, shallow, antigay, and more interested in politics than in God.14

  No wonder, then, so few people outside the church see anything good about the Jesus we claim to represent. Like Samson, we present no compelling alternative for those weary of the ways of the world. Yet also like Samson, we have incredible potential. Jesus himself called us “the light of the world” (Matthew 5:14). And Paul promised that the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead—the same Spirit that gave Samson his fearsome strength—is alive and at work in us, making us into the church and making us able to represent God to the world (Romans 8:11).

  When I think of a holiness church, I think of the Bridge Café. My wife, Amanda, ran this little coffee shop on the campus of Wright State University for four years. It is owned and operated by the church we were part of in Dayton, Ohio. The church believed holiness is not fragile, but contagious.15They opened the café to create a space for university students to encounter Jesus.

  No crosses adorn the walls of the Bridge Café, and there are no Bibles on the bookshelves. Rather than rely on objects of faith, the church relies on the manager to create a space in which the students can experience faith. During our time there, the café hosted events for students like Open Mic Nights, Poetry Slams, and the famous Free Weiner Wednesday on Tuesday, when church members volunteered weekly to grill and distribute hundreds of hot dogs to hungry college kids.