Samson

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A childless woman of the tribe of Dan is at work in the field when a man of God stands before her. He tells her she will conceive a son, and lays a charge on the child before the child exists: no razor is to touch his head, for the boy will be a Nazirite to God from the womb to the day of his death. The mother is bound by the same rule from the moment of conception — she is to drink no wine and no strong drink and eat nothing unclean. When her husband Manoah asks the visitor his name, the answer is that the name is wonderful, beyond knowing, and the messenger ascends in the flame of the altar offering. The son she bears is Samson, the strongman of the Book of Judges, an Israelite hero whose immense strength is bound, by that lifelong vow, to his unshorn hair. His story occupies four chapters and ends in the collapse of a Philistine temple onto his enemies and himself — one of the bleakest closings given to any figure in the Hebrew Bible.

The threefold vow

The annunciation sets the terms of everything that follows. The Nazirite is one set apart or consecrated, and the discipline named over Samson has three prohibitions: no wine or product of the vine, no contact with the dead, no razor to the head. In its ordinary form, recorded in the legal material of the Torah, the vow is temporary and chosen — a layperson sets himself apart for a fixed span, then at its end shaves his head and offers the hair on the altar. Samson’s is the rarer kind: lifelong, imposed before birth, not a season of devotion but a permanent condition of being. The hair that is never to be cut is the visible sign of a consecration that runs the whole length of his life, and the unshaved head becomes the seal on which his strength depends. The wider architecture of such renunciatory discipline — the setting of the body apart by abstention — belongs to asceticism in its many traditions; here it is narrowed to a single hero and a single forbidden act, the razor.

The vow is the hinge of the whole account, and Samson breaks it by degrees. The three prohibitions are not equally guarded by the narrative. He feasts at his own wedding — the Hebrew word for the feast suggests a drinking-banquet, brushing the first prohibition. He scoops honey from the carcass of a lion he has killed, touching the dead and eating from it, and shares it with his parents without telling them its source — the second prohibition broken in secret. The third, the razor, he guards to the last, because it is the one whose breach is fatal. Each violation loosens his bond with the God who is the real source of his power until only the hair is left, and then the hair is taken too.

The cycle of feats and betrayals

What lies between the annunciation and the temple is told as a cycle of feats and betrayals, the strong man undone again and again by the women and riddles of the border country. On the road to Timnah he is set upon by a young lion and tears it apart bare-handed as easily as a man might tear a young goat, the spirit of God rushing on him; he tells no one. Returning later, he finds bees and honey in the carcass and makes of it a riddle for the thirty Philistine companions at his wedding: out of the eater came forth meat, out of the strong came forth sweetness. The riddle is a wager, and the Philistines cannot solve it until they threaten his bride and she weeps the answer out of him. He pays the wager by killing thirty men of Ashkelon for their garments — the first of the killings, and the pattern is set: a trick, a betrayal through a woman, a slaughter in return.

The feats grow. When the men of Judah, fearing Philistine reprisal, bind him with new ropes and hand him over, the cords melt off his arms like burnt flax; he seizes the fresh jawbone of an ass and strikes down a thousand men, and names the place for the jawbone. Spending a night in Gaza, he rises at midnight, takes hold of the doors of the city gate with its two posts and the bar, and carries the whole of it on his shoulders to the top of a hill facing Hebron. These are the deeds of a hero who is also a wrecker — there is no campaign, no command, no people gathered behind him. He is a one-man border war, judging Israel for twenty years by the simple fact of being unkillable.

Delilah and the temple

The last and fatal betrayal comes through Delilah, a woman of the valley of Sorek whom the lords of the Philistines pay to learn the secret of his strength. Three times he lies to her — bind me with fresh cords, with new ropes, weave my locks into the loom — and three times he breaks free, the lie testing how close the truth lies. Worn down by her daily pressing until he is sick to death of it, he tells her the whole of it: no razor has ever come on his head, and were he shaved his strength would leave him. She lulls him to sleep on her knees, has a man shave the seven locks of his head, and when she cries that the Philistines are upon him he wakes and does not know that the strength — and with it the presence of God — has departed. They seize him, put out his eyes, bring him down to Gaza in bronze fetters, and set him grinding at the mill in the prison house: the unkillable man reduced to the labor of an ox or a slave.

But the hair of his head begins to grow again after he is shaved. At a great festival to Dagon, the grain-god the Philistines hold as the giver of their victory, they bring the blind Samson out to make sport before three thousand on the roof and below. He asks the boy who leads him to set his hands against the two pillars on which the house stands, prays once more for strength, and bows with all his might. The temple comes down on the lords and the people, and the dead he kills in his death are more than those he killed in his life. His brothers come down and carry him up and bury him between Zorah and Eshtaol, in the burying place of Manoah his father. The text frames the act as both suicide and victory, a single motion that is at once the hero’s end and his greatest feat.

The folklore reading

Modern scholarship reads the cycle as folklore worked into Israel’s larger account of the period of the judges, the figures called up in moments of crisis between the settlement of the land and the rise of the kings — the era that runs toward the monarchy of David. Samson sits oddly among the others. The deliverers before him lead armies; he leads no one. James Crenshaw, in his study of the saga, reads him as a hero whose tragedy is built into the structure of the tale — the secret betrayed and the vow ignored — a man of riddles undone by the riddle he cannot keep, his real failure the surrendered consecration rather than any lapse of muscle. The recurring shape is the strongman saga: prodigious feats, the wedding riddle and the trick, the dangerous foreign woman who learns what she should not, set against the long border conflict with the Philistines of the coastal plain and the older religious world of Canaan behind them.

Gregory Mobley situates Samson among the wild men of the ancient Near East — the liminal hero who lives at the edge of the settled order, hairy, solitary, given to sudden violence, kin in type to Enkidu of the Epic of Gilgamesh before Enkidu is civilized, and to the Greek Hercules with his lion and his labors and his death by a woman’s hand. These are analogues, not identities: the comparison illuminates the type without making Samson a borrowed Herakles or a Hebrew Enkidu. Across all of it the Nazirite frame supplies the theological spine. The strength is never quite his own. It is held on the condition of an uncut head, and the story turns on a sacred prohibition rather than on the body — a power on loan from a God who can withdraw it, and does. In this the wild and erotic hero is bent to the larger argument of Judges, which measures every deliverer against fidelity to the God who raised him.

The solar reading

A separate and contested afterlife belongs to the nineteenth century. The comparative mythologists of the solar school proposed that Samson was a sun-hero in eclipse. The Hebrew form of his name, Shimshon, stands close to shemesh, the word for sun; his seven locks were glossed as the sun’s rays, their shaving as the quenching of light, his blinding as nightfall, his death and the regrowth of his hair as the sun’s descent and return. The fullest version was Heymann Steinthal’s essay “The Legend of Samson,” published in 1877 as an appendix to Ignác Goldziher’s Mythology Among the Hebrews and Its Historical Development — a program that aimed, on Hebrew ground, to resolve the heroes of scripture into figures of the sky as the broader school had resolved the gods and heroes of Greece and India. Steinthal’s essay in Russell Martineau’s translation of Goldziher can be read as it stood at the high tide of the method.

That school’s wider claims did not survive. The folklorist Richard Dorson chronicled its eclipse — the long duel between Friedrich Max Müller and his critic Andrew Lang that ended only with Müller’s death in 1900, and the satire that finally undid the whole enterprise by demonstrating, on the same method, that Müller himself was a solar myth. Susan Niditch, whose 2008 commentary on Judges sets the text and its translation alongside its folklore, notes the shemesh etymology and the solar parallels while declining the old verdict: the resemblance to a sun-hero is part of the texture of the legend, not its key. Few now treat the solar reading as established history. It persists less as explanation than as one of the more durable interpretive afterlives the figure has been given, alongside his long career in art — the shaving and the blinding and the toppled temple painted and engraved for centuries — in oratorio, and in moral example.

Research and afterlife

The standard modern point of entry is Susan Niditch, Judges: A Commentary (Old Testament Library; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2008), which prints a fresh translation and reads chapters 13–16 as folklore set to theological purpose. James L. Crenshaw, Samson: A Secret Betrayed, a Vow Ignored (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1978) remains the classic literary monograph on the saga’s riddles and tragic form. Gregory Mobley, Samson and the Liminal Hero in the Ancient Near East (Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 453; London: T&T Clark, 2006) sets Samson among the wild-man heroes of the region. For the solar reading at its source, Ignác Goldziher’s Mythology Among the Hebrews and Its Historical Development, translated by Russell Martineau (London: Longmans, Green, 1877), carries Steinthal’s Samson essay as its appendix; for the school’s collapse, Richard M. Dorson, “The Eclipse of Solar Mythology,” Journal of American Folklore 68 (1955), traces the Müller–Lang controversy and its end. Behind these stand the comparative figures the saga keeps drawing toward — the lion-killing labors of Hercules, the wild man Enkidu of Gilgamesh, the singer Orpheus torn apart by women — and the biblical neighbors the legend lives among: the consecrated and the doomed, Lot led out of Sodom, the line of Seth running back to Adam, the gods of Canaan the deliverers are forever set against.

What the older and newer readings share is a sense that the story is about a strength held on loan and forfeited — given under a condition, spent against the condition, and recovered only at the cost of the one who held it.

→ Related: Asceticism · Orpheus · Lot · Seth · Judges · Dagon · Hercules · Gilgamesh · David · Canaan · Mythology