The Tragedy of Samson - 4

Samson had now exercised rulership over Israel for twenty years without having made any contribution to the moral or religious progress of his people. The period was one of stagnation. Israel remained uneasily under the yoke of her Philistine masters, although it is very probable that while Samson lived the Philistines left them more or less alone, probably contenting themselves with the exacting of a certain amount of tribute in kind - wheat, olives, grapes, cattle, and so on. It was probably not as heavy a bondage as they had known in earlier times, and for that the credit went to Samson. It was not a time of religious revival; Israel in the main went on worshipping other gods and no voice was raised in the land calling them back to the God of their fathers.

The blame for this has to be laid at the door of the ruler. Samson had every possible advantage fitting him for the role of a national religious leader as well as political ruler. His Nazarite upbringing and early training coupled with unusual physical attributes could have marked him out as a leader whom all would follow. Had the power of God been behind him he would have been irresistible; but God can work only through men who are utterly and sincerely devoted to him, and Samson was not. He was too much a slave to his own fleshly desires and passions. It is impossible to read the story without realising that the women in Samson's life were the cause of his undoing and his failure to achieve what otherwise would have been a memorable destiny. Now after twenty years of unchallenged rule we find him entangled with yet another woman, Delilah of Sorek in Judah, forty miles from his home village of Zorah and not far from Etam where he had taken refuge from the pursuing Philistines twenty years earlier.

The nationality of Delilah is not known. She was not necessarily a Philistine ‑ living in Judah so far from Philistine territory it is in fact unlikely that she was a member of that race. It has been thought that she was probably an Israelite, but there is something that does not ring true in the idea of any Israelite woman, however abandoned, betraying the hero of her nation to the unbelieving Philistines. It is perhaps more likely that she was an Amorite, a daughter of the people which inhabited Canaan when the children of Israel first entered the land, and whom Israel never succeeded in completely driving out. Traces of Amorite descent still linger in even the present inhabitants of the land. The Amorites, like the Philistines, were exceptionally tall and well built, usually having fair hair and blue eyes; it is quite possible that Samson, himself a giant among his fellows, would feel a natural preference for the tall Amorite and Philistine women as against the more slightly built Hebrews. At any rate, we are told quite frankly and brutally that "Samson loved a woman in the vale of Sorek named Delilah". There is no intimation that he was married to her or had any intention of marrying her. The setting of the story lends colour to the supposition that he visited her whenever he saw fit and interspersed such times of dalliance between periods of attention to such of his duties as ruler in Israel that he chose to discharge. He had long ago given up any apprehension that he stood in any danger from the Philistines. Twenty years' confidence in what men would today call his "good luck", and reliance on his personal strength and agility, had built that impression firmly in his mind. As for the things of God, it is evident that he never gave them a thought.

Samson's infatuation for this woman did not go unnoticed. Such things rarely do. In this case it proved the subject of interested discussion in very high quarters indeed - no less than the councils of the five "lords of the Philistines". This word "lords" is the Hebrew "seren", describing an official rank amongst the Philistines which denoted a member of the quinvirate, or ruling executive of five, which governed affairs in the Philistine colony in Canaan. Samson had proved too elusive for all their efforts of twenty years past but they still wanted to get him in their power. His personal prowess had hitherto defied their schemes; could they get at him through this woman? Samson was neither the first man nor the last to be brought to ruin that way.

The upshot of all this was a visit to Delilah by duly accredited representatives of the five rulers. For information leading to successful apprehension of the hero they would each contribute the sum of eleven hundred keseph ("pieces of silver" in the Authorised Version). Five thousand five hundred silver keseph amounted to a sum that would have the purchasing power of about six thousand pounds sterling, or seventeen thousand dollars, in our day. Such a sum of money must have represented a big temptation. True, no scope for spending it or even a fraction of it could possibly have existed in the primitive villages of Judah. However the emissaries would not have been slow to point out that life could be very different in any of the five Philistine cities, Gaza, Askelon, Ashdod, Lachish or Gath. All were on or near the seacoast and replete with all the luxuries, the pleasures, and the vices also, of the Cretan civilisation from which they had sprung. They might well have pointed out that a smart girl like Delilah was wasted in a backwoods village like Sorek and upon a country-bred Hebrew like Samson. With her looks and money she could enjoy life and see life to the uttermost in the Philistine cities or even, perhaps, travel to Crete and move in the highest of Cretan society. There is nothing fantastic or impossible in all this, for human nature is much the same in all ages, and these arguments have been advanced, and accepted, in similar circumstances a myriad times in the world's history.

Delilah accepted the proposition. She agreed to betray the man who, for all his faults, trusted her, and to learn from him the secret of his great strength and how that strength could be nullified. One incidental evidence which might indicate that Delilah was not of Samson's own people is the fact that a Hebrew woman, unless profoundly and improbably ignorant of the Mosaic Law, would have known the Nazarite secret without having to worm it out of the man.

One would have thought that Samson, after a similar disastrous experience at his marriage twenty years earlier, would have been proof against a repetition. He would by now be at least in his early forties and, presumably, wiser in the ways of men, and women, than he had been in those past days. But there is no indication that he was any wiser, or at any rate more discreet. Perhaps the guileless blue eyes of the fair-haired Amorite damsel persuaded him that she was incapable of the villainy once perpetrated by his dark-eyed Philistine love. More likely it is that he had become reckless in the conviction that he was invulnerable, and that come what may, the Philistines could never capture him. So whilst fully aware of the danger of revealing his secret he was prepared to "play with fire" in a spirit of bravado, purely to torment the Philistines with false hopes which would not be realised. So to Delilah's tearful entreaties he responded with an entirely fictitious story, to the effect that if he could be bound with seven green withs (the stem of a rush-like plant) that had never been dried, his strength would go from him and he would become like any ordinary man. Delilah, being after all, only a simple country girl, believed him, and next time Samson visited her she had a suitable party of Philistines concealed in the chamber where she waited to receive him. Samson probably had a shrewd idea they were there, especially when Delilah proposed a pretty little piece of play-acting in which she would bind him with seven green withs just to see if his strength really would go from him. The giant probably assisted in adjusting his bonds, and stood there laughing as Delilah, believing that her fifty five hundred keseph were as good as in her purse, called out the pre-arranged signal "the Philtstines be upon thee, Samson". Even as his would-be captors burst forth from their hiding-place he had snapped his bonds "like a thread of tow in the fire" and was gone, laughing uproariously at the joke.

It was not long before the moth was again fluttering around the candle, to be met by more tears and reproaches. There was probably a certain amount of comforting to be done, and in order completely to restore friendly relations Samson indicated to Delilah that the real trouble was that the green withs had snapped unexpectedly. What were actually needed were two new ropes that had never been stretched. This sounded reasonable enough; it may be imagined that Delilah, in consultation with her advisers, took a few lessons in knot tying. It was not desired that the fiasco of the last occasion be repeated. It was then necessary to wait until Samson's next visit was due; it does not seem however that he allowed affairs of State to interfere too much with pleasure, so that before very long the Philistines again lay concealed in Delilah's room - but with no better result than before.

This was discouraging. Delilah would have a hard time explaining to the Philistines that all this was not her fault; she was doing her best. She was probably told she had got to do better; there may even have been threats of possible unpleasant consequences in the event of failure. At any rate, perhaps with some misgiving, she approached her admirer once again.

Samson was getting reckless. Mischievously, as his eyes fell upon the loom standing in the corner of the room ‑ a loom was a very necessary implement to every woman in those days ‑ he suggested that an effective method of curbing his strength would be to weave his long hair in with the web of the partly made cloth even then standing on the loom. Delilah would look at the loom and realise that a man whose hair was woven in with the cross-threads to make a piece of cloth, tightly stretched on the loom, would be quite unable to break free unless he scalped himself. The more Delilah considered the idea the more foolproof she felt it to be. The loom was a heavy timber construction and once securely fastened to that a man's enemies could easily make short work of him.

The next step was to persuade Samson to act the part he had facetiously suggested. He may or may not have demurred a little. Some thought may have crossed his mind that he could conceivably tempt his good fortune too far. Perhaps Delilah intimated to him that the continued granting of her favours would be dependent upon compliance with her wishes, and he, infatuated man that he was, would comply rather than risk losing the object of his desires.

So it came about that on a set night the hopeful captors crouched in their hiding place while the loom creaked and turned as Delilah steadily wove her lover's luxuriant hair with her balls of yarn into the strangest cloth ever woven by an Amorite woman. When it was finished the weaving lay wound tightly around the roller (the "beam" of the Authorised Version narrative) which Delilah thoughtfully locked with the "pin" to avoid any possibility of unrolling. Samson must have presented a pitiable and undignified sight with his head drawn close up to the roller, around which his hair was now wound, and his body sprawled across the woodwork of the loom. What more fitting a picture could. there be of a man who had become a complete slave to his own weaknesses? Could the writer of the Book of Proverbs, a couple of centuries later, want any better inspiration for his pen-picture of any man caught in the same kind of snare? "With her much fair speech she caused him to yield, with the flattering of her lips she forced him. He goes after her straightway, as an ox goes to the slaughter or as a fool to the correction of the stocks; till a dart strike through his liver; as a bird hastens to the snare, and knows not that it is for his life" (Prov. 7. 21-23).

So, for the third time, the Philistines sprang out expecting this time that there could be no escape. But they had still under-estimated their quarry's strength. With one mighty heave Samson wrecked the loom, tearing free the roller with its roll of cloth into which his hair had been woven, together with the broken pin and such parts of the loom as could not be detached from the cloth, and was away. The account does not record how, on arrival home, he explained the peculiar condition of his hair and perhaps his beard, ostensibly sacred to God, but now inexplicably and inextricably woven in with some woman's weaving material. Neither does it say how many women of Samson's household laboured, and for how long, to disentangle the yarn from the hair and restore his flowing locks to their usual luxuriance. In any case Samson's own people must by now have become well used to his eccentricities and only a few of the older ones who had regard for the God of Israel and remembered the circumstances of Samson's birth, would shake their heads sadly and look hopelessly at one another.

Here in this story is enshrined all the tragedy of a man who flirts with temptation and whose successive escapes from serious consequences only encourage him to live even more dangerously. In a sense it is the story of mankind, fallen into sin. Only utter disaster and heartbreak at the end brings him to a consciousness of his own folly and the true means of reformation and eventual happiness. So it was with Samson; so it is with all men who tread this way.

At this stage the Philistines apparently lost interest and went home. The attempt to capture Samson with the help of Delilah was written off. But Delilah had no intention of giving up so easily. The promised reward still dazzled her. So she resumed her efforts with Samson and began to wear down his resistance. He was apparently seeing a great deal of her now, for "it came to pass when she pressed him daily with her words, and urged him, so that his soul was vexed unto death, that he told her all his heart. .. ." Wearied by her importunity, and lacking strength of character to resist, he at length imparted the fatal secret. "There hath not come a razor upon my head, for I have been a Nazarite unto God from my birth".

With that admission Samson signed his own death warrant. Delilah's instinct told her that this time he had revealed the truth. Maybe she waited a while to lull any suspicion on Samson's part that she might make use of the information. His utter blindness to possible consequences is almost incomprehensible except on the supposition that he relied again on his own physical ability to extricate himself from any difficulty into which Delilah might seek to involve him. He was now altogether entrapped in the snare of his own folly and he could not escape. Delilah was clever enough and unscrupulous enough to know how to hold and keep him. The expression in Judges 16. 19, "she made him sleep upon her knees" is almost identical with an ancient Sumerian allusion which would indicate that Delilah held him in an intimate embrace from which he had neither strength nor will to loose himself. Devoid of all feelings of modesty or shame, she held him thus fast whilst her confederate deftly shaved the luxuriant tresses from the head of the unheeding giant, oblivious to all but his passion. The task completed, triumphantly and cruelly she jerked him back into consciousness with the familiar words "The Philistines be upon you, Samson".

This tragic highlight to the story demands more careful consideration than any other part of the narrative. Samson, shorn of his locks, found himself suddenly bereft of the mighty strength which had so long been his and in which he had trusted. He himself had apparently believed that the secret of his strength lay in his standing as a Nazarite, the symbol of which was his long hair. And the symbol meant more to him than the reality. It would seem that he could break every law of God and every aspect of his vow without considering his status as a Nazarite imperilled but he must retain his long hair. Samson's tragedy was to hold to the symbol whilst rejecting the reality behind the symbol, and that has been the tragedy of a great many Christians and has led them into excesses as great, or greater, than those of Samson.

Must it then be assumed that the removal of the hero's "seven locks of hair" was in fact the actual cause of his loss of vital strength? As a medical or physical reason the idea is absurd. It has also to be noted that nowhere in the story of Samson, or elsewhere in the Bible, is unusual physical strength said to be inherent in the Nazarite's long hair. Samuel was a Nazarite but no indication is given that he was of other than ordinary physique. The idea that the strength was in his hair rests entirely on Samson's own testimony and represents only his own belief.

If then Samson's physical strength was not affected by the shaving of his head, to what must be attributed the fact that at this moment his strength evidently did desert him, and at last he fell into the power of his enemies? What was it that happened in the instant he said "I will go out and shake myself, as other times before. And he wist not that the Lord was departed from him."?

He had betrayed his God. That was the terrible realisation which smote Samson with all the force of a sledge-hammer blow as he leapt up and realised that the hair in which he had taken such pride was gone. He was no longer a Nazarite and God was departed from him. It had been so long since he had given any thought to the things of God that he had become quite unable to distinguish between the reality and the symbol. Whilst he kept his unshaven locks he gloried in the strength which he believed they conferred on him and cared not one jot about the remainder of God's commands. Now he had lost that which had been his glory. In one moment of acute self perception he saw himself as he was, a man whose persistent self indulgence had separated him from God and blinded him to the calling of God and at the end had betrayed him into the hands of the enemies of God. The bitterness of that moment deprived him of all power to resist, and as his exultant enemies led him away securely bound, he went with them passively, helplessly, a broken-hearted and despairing man. His own foolishness and wickedness had led to the loss of that which made him a man of God and with that loss he had lost all. God had departed from him and he would never again possess strength with which to outwit and overcome his enemies. Bitter thoughts possessed his mind as he trudged wearily into Gaza and through the cheering crowds, who came to gloat over the capture of the man who had been their scourge for twenty years.