Lion's Honey (2 page)

Then went Samson to Gaza, and saw there an harlot, and went in unto her.

2
And it was told
the Gazites, saying, Samson is come hither. And they compassed
him
in, and laid wait for him all night in the gate of the city, and were quiet all the night, saying, In the morning, when it is day, we shall kill him.

3 And Samson lay till midnight, and arose at midnight, and took the doors of the gate of the city, and the two posts, and went away with them, bar and all, and put
them
upon his shoulders, and carried them up to the top of an hill that
is
before Hebron.

4 ¶ And it came to pass afterward, that he loved a woman in the valley of Sorek, whose name
was
Delilah.

5 And the lords of the Philistines came up unto her, and said unto her, Entice him, and see wherein his great strength
lieth
, and by what
means
we may
prevail against him, that we may bind him to afflict him: and we will give thee every one of us eleven hundred
pieces
of silver.

6 ¶ And Delilah said to Samson, Tell me, I pray thee, wherein thy great strength
lieth
, and wherewith thou mightest be bound to afflict thee.

7 And Samson said unto her, If they bind me with seven green withs that were never dried, then shall I be weak, and be as another man.

8 Then the lords of the Philistines brought up to her seven green withs which had not been dried, and she bound him with them.

9 Now
there were
men lying in wait, abiding with her in the chamber. And she said unto him, The Philistines
be
upon thee, Samson. And he brake the withs, as a thread of tow is broken when it toucheth the fire. So his strength was not known.

10 And Delilah said unto Samson, Behold, thou hast mocked me, and told me lies: now tell me, I pray thee, wherewith thou mightest be bound.

11 And he said unto her, If they bind me fast with new ropes that never were occupied, then shall I be weak, and be as another man.

12 Delilah therefore took new ropes, and bound him therewith, and said unto him, The Philistines
be
upon thee, Samson. And
there were
liers in wait abiding in the chamber. And he brake them from off his arms like a thread.

13 And Delilah said unto Samson, Hitherto thou hast mocked me, and told me lies: tell me wherewith thou mightest be bound. And he said unto her, If thou weavest the seven locks of my head with the web.

14 And she fastened
it
with the pin, and said unto him, The Philistines
be
upon thee, Samson. And he awaked out of his sleep, and went away with the pin of the beam, and with the web.

15 ¶ And she said unto him, How canst thou say, I love thee, when thine heart
is
not with me? thou hast mocked me these three times, and hast not told me wherein thy great strength
lieth
.

16 And it came to pass, when she pressed him daily with her words, and urged him,
so
that his soul was vexed unto death;

17 That he told her all his heart, and said unto her, There hath not come a razor upon mine head;
for I
have been
a Nazarite unto God from my mother’s womb: if I be shaven, then my strength will go from me, and I shall become weak, and be like any
other
man.

18 And when Delilah saw that he had told her all his heart, she sent and called for the lords of the Philistines, saying, Come up this once, for he hath shewed me all his heart. Then the lords of the Philistines came up unto her, and brought money in their hand.

19 And she made him sleep upon her knees; and she called for a man, and she caused him to shave off the seven locks of his head; and she began to afflict him, and his strength went from him.

20 And she said, The Philistines
be
upon thee, Samson. And he awoke out of his sleep, and said, I will go out as at other times before, and shake myself. And he wist not that the L
ORD
was departed from him.

21 ¶ But the Philistines took him, and put out his eyes, and brought him down to Gaza, and bound him with fetters of brass; and he did grind in the prison house.

22 Howbeit the hair of his head began to grow again after he was shaven.

23 Then the lords of the Philistines gathered them together for to offer a great sacrifice unto Dagon their god, and to rejoice: for they said, Our god hath delivered Samson our enemy into our hand.

24 And when the people saw him, they praised their god: for they said, Our god hath delivered into our hands our enemy, and the destroyer of our country, which slew many of us.

25 And it came to pass, when their hearts were merry, that they said, Call for Samson, that he may make us sport. And they called for Samson out of the prison house; and he made them sport: and they set him between the pillars.

26 And Samson said unto the lad that held him by the hand, Suffer me that I may feel the pillars whereupon the house standeth, that I may lean upon them.

27 Now the house was full of men and women; and all the lords of the Philistines
were
there; and
there were
upon the roof about three thousand men
and women, that beheld while Samson made sport.

28 And Samson called unto the L
ORD
, and said, O Lord God, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God, that I may be at once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes.

29 And Samson took hold of the two middle pillars upon which the house stood, and on which it was borne up, of the one with his right hand, and of the other with his left.

30 And Samson said, Let me die with the Philistines. And he bowed himself with
all his
might; and the house fell upon the lords, and upon all the people that
were
therein. So the dead which he slew at his death were more than
they
which he slew in his life.

31 Then his brethren and all the house of his father came down, and took him, and brought
him
up, and buried him between Zorah and Eshtaol in the buryingplace of Manoah his father. And he judged Israel twenty years.

‘Samson the hero’ is what every Jewish child, the first time he or she hears the story, learns to call him. And that, more or less, is how he has been represented over the years, in hundreds of works of art, theatre and film, in the literatures of many languages: a mythic hero and fierce warrior, the man who tore apart a lion with his bare hands, the charismatic leader of the Jews in their wars against the Philistines, and, without a doubt, one of the most tempestuous and colourful characters in the Hebrew Bible.

But the way that I read the story in the pages of my bible – the Book of Judges, chapters 13 to 16 – runs against the grain of the familiar Samson. Mine is not the brave leader (who never, after all, actually led his people), nor the Nazirite of God (who, we must admit, was given to whoring and lust), nor just a muscle-bound murderer. For me, this is most of all the story of a man whose life was a never-ending
struggle to accommodate himself to the powerful destiny imposed upon him, a destiny he was never able to realise nor, apparently, fully to understand. It is the story of a child who was born a stranger to his father and mother; the story of a magnificent strongman who ceaselessly yearned to win his parents’ love – and, therefore, love in general – which in the end he never received.

There are few other Bible stories with so much drama and action, narrative fireworks and raw emotion, as we find in the tale of Samson: the battle with the lion; the three hundred burning foxes; the women he bedded and the one woman that he loved; his betrayal by all the women in his life, from his mother to Delilah; and, in the end, his murderous suicide, when he brought the house down on himself and three thousand Philistines. Yet beyond the wild impulsiveness, the chaos, the din, we can make out a life story that is, at bottom, the tortured journey of a single, lonely and turbulent soul who never found, anywhere, a true home in the world, whose very body was a harsh place of exile. For me, this
discovery, this recognition, is the point at which the myth – for all its grand images, its larger-than-life adventures – slips silently into the day-to-day existence of each of us, into our most private moments, our buried secrets.

There is a point in the Samson story – the moment when he falls asleep on Delilah’s lap – that seems to absorb and encapsulate the entire tale. Samson withdraws into his childish, almost infantile self, disarmed of the violence, madness, and passion that have confounded and ruined his life. This is, of course, also the moment when his fate is sealed, for Delilah is clutching his hair and the razor, and the Philistines outside are already relishing their victory. In another moment his eyes will be plucked out and his power extinguished. Soon he will be thrown into prison and his days will be ended. Yet it is now, perhaps for the first time in his life, that he finds repose. Here, in the very heart of the cruel perfidy that he has surely expected all along, he is finally granted perfect peace, a release from himself and the stormy drama of his life.

In those days, apparently the end of the twelfth and beginning of the eleventh centuries BCE, there was not yet a king in Israel, nor any central authority. The neighbouring nations of Midian, Canaan, Moab, Amon, and Philistia took advantage of the weak Hebrew tribes and launched campaigns of conquest and pillage against them. Every so often there would arise, in one tribe or another, a person who would know how to lead his tribe, sometimes several joined together, into retaliatory battle. If he won, he would become the leader and judge, and be called
shofet
. Such were Gideon and Jephthah, Ehud the son of Gerah, Shamgar the son of Anat, and Deborah, the wife of Lapidot. Thus the Israelites swung cyclically between periods of oppression and redemption that corresponded, as recounted in the Book of Judges, to their sins and their atonement. First they would worship idols, then God would muster the murderous neighbours as punishment. They would cry out to Him in their affliction, and He would elect from among them a person who would save them.

In the midst of this turbulence lived a man and woman of the tribe of Dan. They lived in Zorah in the Judean lowlands, an especially violent region, as in those days it was the boundary between Israel and the Philistines. For the Israelites, it was the first line of defence against the Philistines; for the Philistines, it was the essential first step in any attempt to conquer the Judean hill country. The man was called Manoah, but the woman’s name is not known. It is said of her only that she was ‘barren and had borne no children’, which is enough to suggest that, along with the hardships of the frontier, their marriage had also been filled with pain.

But anyone familiar with the semiotics of biblical storytelling also knows that the very mention of a barren woman almost always foreshadows a momentous birth. And indeed, one day – during one of those periods when ‘the Israelites again did what was offensive to the Lord’ – when the woman is alone, without her husband, an angel of God appears before her and tells her: ‘You are barren and have
borne no children; but you shall conceive and bear a son.’ And immediately he gives her a list of instructions and warnings, and also good news: ‘Now be careful not to drink wine or other intoxicant, or to eat anything unclean; for you are going to conceive and bear a son; let no razor touch his head, for the boy is to be a Nazirite to God from the womb on. It is he who shall begin to deliver Israel from the Philistines.’

She goes to her husband and says, ‘A man of God came to me.’ And the reader’s ears prick up, because the woman does not use the same word as that of the biblical narrator – ‘an angel of God
appeared
to the woman’ – but rather ‘came to me’, a charged phrase rich with double meaning, which more than once in the Bible refers to the act of copulation itself.

The husband’s ears probably prick up too, and his wife quickly describes the stranger. ‘He looked like an angel of God, very frightening,’ she explains. ‘I did not ask him where he was from, nor did he tell me his name.’ And between her words one can hear,
it seems, a note of apology – so frightening was the man’s appearance that she didn’t have the nerve to ask where has was from, or even his name.

And the husband, Manoah, how does he respond, and what does his silence say? Maybe he furrows his brow in puzzlement, trying to fish out a question from the confusion so suddenly thrust upon him by his wife, but she doesn’t wait for him to ask, and quickly, anxiously, continues to pile on new information: The man of God told me ‘you shall conceive’, and promised I would have a son and commanded that I not drink wine or liquor, or eat anything unclean, because the boy would be a Nazirite from the womb until his dying day …

There, she has told him everything. She has freed herself from the burden of the encounter and the extraordinary news, yet the text does not tell us a thing about any emotion that flows between them, nor of any smile or tender glance. And this should come as no surprise, since as a rule the Bible rarely records the feelings of its heroes. The Bible is a history of actions and events, and leaves to us, to
each and every reader, the task of speculation, an exciting task but one that carries the risks of exaggeration and fantasy. Nevertheless, let us dare to do, in the pages that follow, what many generations of readers before us have done, men and women who have read the spare biblical text according to their faith, the conventions of their age, and their own personal inclinations, and attached meanings and conclusions (and sometimes wishes and delusions) to every word and syllable.
1

And so, with necessary caution, but also with the pleasure of guesswork and imagination, let us try to fix in our mind’s eye the encounter between the man and his wife, she speaking and he listening, she going on at length and he not saying a word. And there is no knowing what is welling under that silence, excitement and joy perhaps, or maybe anger at the wife who converses so freely with a strange man; and we may also wonder whether she, as she speaks, looks him straight in the eye or averts her gaze downward, away from the husband to whom, for some reason, an angel
did not appear. And even if only a small part of what we have pictured actually took place, there is no doubt that the news they have received will shake them both to the core, will stir up his deepest feelings about her longtime barrenness and startling pregnancy, and maybe also hers about him, about the weakness and impotence that, it would seem, are hinted at in this brief scene.

And we, peeking in, are so captivated by this highly charged family moment that we almost fail to notice that what the wife reports to her husband is not quite the same as what she had been told. Two central details are missing: she does not mention that a razor must not touch the head of their unborn son, nor does she tell her husband that this son ‘shall begin to deliver Israel from the Philistines’.

Why does she omit these crucial details?

One might argue that in her excitement and confusion she simply forgot the matter of the razor. She was doubtless quite agitated; and perhaps assumed that Manoah would be aware that, if the
boy was to be a Nazirite, the well-known restrictions would apply, including the prohibition against the cutting of hair. But how to explain the second omission? How can it be that a woman withholds – even conceals – from her husband such significant information regarding their future son, news that would surely give him satisfaction and pride, and perhaps a measure of compensation for all those bitter, barren years?

To comprehend this, to understand
her
, we need to go back and read the story through her eyes. Recall that the biblical text does not even reveal her name. The word ‘barren’ is all that is said of her, and is even redoubled: ‘barren and had borne no children.’ And this emphasis suggests that she had been waiting long years for a child who never arrived. She has probably given up on the possibility that she will one day have a child. And it is quite likely that the ‘title’ ’
akara
, ‘the barren one’, has been conferred upon her by others, in the family, in the tribe, in all of Zorah. And who knows, maybe even her husband, in moments of anger, flung at her now
and then the searing epithet ’
akara
, and between them, too, the word became her name, the barb that stings her every time she thinks about herself and her fate.

And now, this same ‘childless one who has not given birth’ is suddenly graced by the appearance of an angel who brings her the news that she will bear a child. Yet at this very instant, as her dream is fulfilled and her joy is boundless, the angel adds: ‘For the boy is to be a Nazirite to God from the womb on. It is he who shall begin to deliver Israel from the Philistines.’

And she plunges into a dizzying maelstrom of thoughts and emotions.

A son will be born to her. To
her
. Until this moment she knew nothing of this, of course. The angel knew about it first and told her the news. And perhaps at the moment of the telling she feels an unfamiliar twinge inside (angels know that revelations work best with concrete proof). And she is doubtless very proud that her son will be the one to save the Israelites: what mother wouldn’t be proud
to produce the saviour of his people? But maybe, in a hidden corner of her heart, her happiness is less than complete.

For another recognition, painful and still repressed, is beginning to gnaw at her: she has not conceived her own private, intimate child, but rather some ‘national figure’, a Nazirite of God and the redeemer of Israel. And his uniqueness is not something that will develop slowly, over the years, so that the two can grow comfortably together into their roles – to be a saviour’s mother is also a position of responsibility – but instead this is happening now, suddenly, already, in a fixed and inexorable manner: ‘For the boy is to be a Nazirite of God from the womb on …’

She tries to understand. This child, this long-awaited child, at the moment he has been given to her, has begun to sprout within her, has already been touched, it turns out, by some other, strange entity, and this means – and here she feels a sharp, alien sting – that he will be a child who will never be hers alone.

Does she understand this immediately? There is no way of knowing. The whole episode has surely overwhelmed her, and it is perfectly possible that at this moment she is filled only with joy over the pregnancy, and pride over the special boy who will be born to her – to
her
, and not to all those in the village and the tribe who saw her only as ’
akara
, the childless one … But we may surmise that, deep down, Samson’s mother knows, with a deep womanly intuition – a knowledge that has nothing to do with any religious faith or fear of God – that what has been given to her has also been taken away in the same instant. The moment of her greatest intimacy – within herself, as a woman – has been confiscated and made into a public event, shared with strangers (including we who interpret her story after thousands of years), and for this reason, in an instinctive gesture of distancing and denial, she pushes away part of the disturbing news.

And here we are reminded of another woman of the Bible, whose fate was the same as that of Samson’s mother: Hannah, who tearfully prayed and vowed
that, if a son were born to her, she would give him to God as a Nazirite, and following that vow, Samuel was born, and she was obliged to turn him over to Eli the high priest. Both these tales of extraordinary pregnancies carry with them the uncomfortable implication that God has somehow exploited the despair of these mothers, who thirsted so avidly to conceive and give birth that they were willing to accede to any ‘suggestion’ regarding the destiny of their child, even – in the language of our own day – to serve as ‘surrogate mothers’ for God’s great plans.

The wife of Manoah goes to her husband and tells him about the encounter, and we have already observed that her report sounds almost apologetic and overly detailed: ostensibly revealing all, but in fact omitting much. It is worth mentioning here that any number of commentators on the story – including poets and playwrights, painters and novelists
who over the years have explored the character of Samson – have hinted that Samson was born of a liaison between his mother and the ‘man of God’. Others, notably Vladimir Jabotinsky in his wonderful novel
Samson the Nazarite
, went so far as to raise the possibility that Samson was the product of a romance between his mother and a flesh-and-blood Philistine.
2
According to this reading, the business of the ‘man of God who came to me’ was simply a cover story that she invented in order to explain away her embarrassing pregnancy to Manoah. This hypothesis, of course, adds extra spice to the saga of Samson’s complex relations with the Philistines. But we, tempted though we are, will trust instead the version given by Samson’s mother, since we shall soon discover that, even if she spoke the whole truth, her great, fateful betrayal was not, in the end, at the expense of her husband.

For, after she announces to Manoah that they will have a son, she recites to him the second bit of the angel’s message – which, it will be recalled, she quotes with less than complete accuracy. She omits
to mention the prohibition of hair-cutting; likewise the boy’s future role as national saviour. ‘The boy is to be a Nazirite of God from the womb’, she says, and concludes with a few words of her own: ‘until his dying day’.

And this is surely a strange addendum: a woman, who has just learned that she will bear a child after long years of infertility, tells her husband what will be expected of their son – and then speaks of
his
dying day?

Even someone who is not a parent, who has never experienced that special moment at which the expectant couple gets the good news, knows that on such an occasion there is nothing farther from their hearts and minds than the ‘dying day’ of the unborn child. And even if many anxious parents are preoccupied, even to the point of obsession, with the dangers and disasters that lie in wait for their children, they are nonetheless not inclined, on the whole, to imagine their youngster as an elderly person, decrepit, nearing the end – and certainly not as dead. To construct such a mental picture
requires a strenuous, almost violent act of estrangement that would appear antithetical to the natural instincts of parenthood.