Lion's Honey (4 page)

Zorah today is a kibbutz, located not far from a
tel
, or mound, that almost certainly sits atop the archaeological remains of the biblical settlement. Its founders, members of the socialist ‘United Kibbutz’ movement and veterans of the legendary Palmach fighting force, settled there towards the end of 1948, in the midst of the War of Independence that had broken out when the armies of four Arab countries invaded the newborn State of Israel. During this war, as in the wars in the time of the Judges, the Judean lowlands were of great strategic importance and therefore a focus of the warring forces.
When the Israeli army drew near the Arab village of Sar’a, most of its inhabitants fled, and the ones who remained were expelled. All became refugees, most of whom ended up in the Deheishe refugee camp not far from Hebron, where their families reside to this day.

It is mid-October 2002. A hot, gloomy day in the lowlands. The radio reports heavy traffic at the Samson Junction, between Zorah and Eshtaol. A dirt path winds away from the main highway into a forest, leading the hiker into the abandoned gardens of Arab Sar’a. There, hidden in a small grove, suddenly appear two figures, a mother and son, Palestinians who have come from Deheishe to harvest the olives from trees that once belonged to their family. The woman vigorously shakes the branches of the tree and beats at them with a stick, and her son, a boy of about ten, swiftly and silently gathers the black hail of olives on a sheet spread out beneath the tree.

Here, roughly three thousand years ago, in this same brown, rugged landscape, amidst olive and oak
trees, terebinths and carobs, the wife of Manoah lay down to give birth. Here she gave the boy his name,
Shimshon
, which in Hebrew connotes ‘little sun’, and perhaps also a conflation of
shemesh
and
on
– sun plus strength, virility.

There is, of course, great similarity between Samson and other ‘sun-heroes’ such as Hercules, Perseus, Prometheus and Mopsus, son of Apollo.
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In the Talmud, Rabbi Yohanan sought to ‘purify’ Samson of any hint of paganism: ‘Samson was called by the name of the Holy One, Blessed be He, as it is said, ‘For the Lord God is a sun and a shield’ (Psalms 84:12) … as God protects the entire world, so too Samson in his time protects Israel.’
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Whereas the first-century Judeo-Roman historian Josephus Flavius, in his
Jewish Antiquities
, asserts that ‘Samson’ means ‘strong’, adding that ‘the child grew apace and it was plain from the frugality of his diet and his loosely flowing locks that he was to be a prophet’.
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‘The boy grew up, and the Lord blessed him’, the Bible tells us, and the Talmud comments, ‘He
was blessed
b’amato’
, the word
amah
(literally, ‘cubit’) being a euphemism for penis: ‘His
amah
was like that of other men’, continues the Talmud, ‘but his seed was like a fast-flowing stream’.
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Even if this rabbinic commentary ventures fancifully far afield, Samson’s subsequent deeds do substantiate the general thrust of its assumption. And no less important than this particular divine blessing is what comes thereafter: ‘The spirit of the Lord began to move him in the encampment of Dan, between Zorah and Eshtaol.’

What exactly is this divine ‘spirit’ that begins to ‘move’ the lad? Was it a sense of mission, a calling, or an interior burst of inspiration?
Lefa’amo
, reads the Hebrew, from the root ‘to beat’ or ‘throb’, a clear echo of the human heartbeat, which pounds louder as one’s emotions are stirred. Indeed this sound, persistent and agitated, will surge from Samson’s body and soul at every stage of his life. The Jerusalem Talmud, attempting to give concrete physical expression to Samson’s arousal, declares that, when the holy spirit came upon him, each of his footsteps was as
great as the distance from Zorah to Eshtaol, and the locks of his hair would ring like a bell –
pa’amon
in Hebrew, from that same root – and the sound would carry for that distance as well.
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The
Zohar
or ‘Book of Splendour’, the central work of Jewish mysticism, offers an appealingly vivid description:
‘Lefa’amo
. The spirit would come and go, come and go, and never properly settle within him. And it is therefore written, “The spirit of the Lord began to move him,” for this was the case from the beginning.’
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The medieval commentator Gersonides, in another play on words, interprets Samson’s arousal from the hero’s rational point of view: ‘One time (
pa’am
) he would decide to go to war against the Philistines, another time he would decide not to, like a bell that strikes this way and that.’

Yet a simple reading of the text reveals that Samson is not stirred by any calling or inspiration but rather in a different, unexpected direction. For what does the young man do when he is aroused by the spirit of God? Does he begin gathering an army in order to redeem his people as soon as possible from
the Philistines, or amass political power within his tribe, or try to get the blessing and support of a high priest? Not at all: Samson awakens to
love
.

‘Samson went down to Timnah; and while in Timnah, he noticed a girl among the Philistine women.’

Straight away he goes back up the hill, home to Zorah, turns to his father and mother, and declares: ‘I noticed one of the Philistine women in Timnah; now get her for me as a wife.’ And although the word ‘love’ is not stated here explicitly, one can sense in Samson’s words the determination and depth of feeling that churn inside him. It is hard to know if he himself is capable at this moment of differentiating his tangled emotions, of separating love from the great new ‘divine spirit’, but is this so surprising? Love, and first love all the more, is doubtless likely to arouse in a person the sense that he has just been born and that a new, powerful, and unfamiliar wind is coursing through him.

Here is the place to explain – for those who puzzle over this speedy coupling of a Nazirite with a woman
– that the Nazirite in Judaism is not the same as a monk in the Christian or Buddhist traditions.
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In the Torah (see Numbers, Chapter 6), the Jewish Nazirite is commanded to refrain from three things: he is forbidden to drink wine or to eat grapes or their derivatives; he may not cut his hair; and he may not go near a dead body (a prohibition not specified in the case of Samson). On the other hand, he is not forbidden to marry or to be intimate with a woman. Still, the reader is advised not to harbour expectations of juicy escapades akin to the tales of lecherous monks in Chaucer or Boccaccio. The biblical writer – who, like most authors, is a natural-born killjoy – is quick to remark, regarding Samson’s attraction to the Philistine woman, ‘that this was the Lord’s doing; He was seeking a pretext against the Philistines, for the Philistines were ruling over Israel at that time.’

In other words – not love, or lust, or romance, and above all not free will: Samson is drawn to the Philistine woman because God is looking for an excuse to strike the Philistines who are oppressing
the Israelites. This is the sole motive the Bible offers for the desire that Samson feels. But this presentation of events cannot prevent the reader from wondering about the role of Samson
the man
in this story. For he himself surely does not experience his feelings of love as someone else’s ‘pretext’ – not even God’s – and his strong and immediate reaction to the woman from Timnah proves that he, the man, the flesh-and-blood Samson, seeks and needs love! Is he in any way capable of understanding that this burning love is not entirely ‘his’, and that he is merely a political and military tool in God’s hands? Is there any man who could understand such a thing? Is there anyone who could endure the knowledge that, just as he was not his parents’ ‘natural child’, so too now, as a man, his natural desire for a woman has been confiscated, or else installed in him?

And as we raise these questions, a sad possibility becomes increasingly apparent: that the hero of our story is a man who does not know, and perhaps will never really understand, that God, even before his
birth, has
nationalised
his desires, his love, his entire emotional life.

‘Get her for me as a wife,’ Samson half-asks, half-demands of his parents. It is interesting to note that, in contrast with the typical biblical scene in which a son asks his father to bring him a particular woman as a wife, here Samson takes his request to both his father and mother. And from here on, they will almost always be mentioned together, the father and the mother, as again and again the biblical storyteller makes it clear that Samson’s mother is at least as important as his father.

And they also answer him together, in one voice (‘His father and mother said to him’), what parents typically say to Samsons in such situations: ‘Is there no one among the daughters of your own kinsmen and among all our people, that you must go and take a wife from the uncircumcised Philistines?’ In other words – why don’t you marry one of our own?

For it is not only that Samson chooses to marry a foreigner, the daughter of another people, but that this particular people, the Philistines, are among the
worst and bitterest of Israel’s foes: with the advantage of iron weapons they repeatedly engage in the conquest and enslavement of the tribes of Israel, while preventing them from developing iron-smithing of their own, ‘for the Philistines were afraid that the Hebrews would make swords or spears’.
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Indeed for the past forty years, as is told in the beginning of our story, they have dominated and provoked the Israelites. And it is also known that the tribe of Dan, Samson’s tribe, dwells in the borderlands and finds it hard to build a homestead there, as it is continually embattled with stronger nations, the Philistines and others. These continued struggles have exhausted the tribe, depleted it and stripped it of cultural, political, and social influence within the Israelite nation.
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(In this light it is possible to read as somewhat unrealistic the blessing of Dan by his father Jacob before the patriarch’s death, the expression of both a hope and a wish: ‘Dan shall govern his people as one of the tribes of Israel.’ After which Jacob adds, perhaps with a heavy sigh: ‘I wait for your deliverance, O Lord …’)
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This is the larger national context in which the relationship between Samson and the Philistine woman begins to blossom. But no less fascinating is what happens here between the young man and his parents: first of all, they are confused, because they know (or at least his mother does) that Samson is destined to save his people from the Philistines, so what is he doing with a Philistine woman? Next, when they say to him, ‘Is there no one among the daughters of your own kinsmen and among all our people, that you must go and take a wife from the uncircumcised Philistines?’ there is a clear echo of blame and complaint: ‘Why can’t you be like everyone else?’ We may read this with a smile, as it sounds like one of those tired lines so many of us have heard from our parents (and sworn never to say to our children), but the Samson story is anything but a comedy. It is a tragic tale; not least because the strangeness of
this
child, his difference from his parents, is so sharp and clear-cut that it sometimes seems that he and they belong to two entirely different dimensions of human existence, realms that are
separated by an unbridgeable chasm. And therefore, that trite parental line is uttered here with incurable, heart-rending anguish.

For it can be assumed that by now Samson’s parents have gathered that, with every step he takes, his strangeness and otherness will become more and more pronounced, that it will become clear to one and all that he, in a sense, is made of different ‘stuff’ – from some alien, unknowable essence that infiltrated him even in the womb – on account of which he will never, in all likelihood, be able to connect naturally and harmoniously with his family or his people.

And even though they know well – having been the ones, after all, who were given the news – that Samson, by his nature, cannot be ‘like everyone else’ or like other human beings, they blurt out the plaintive question because it is so hard for them, as parents, to finally come to terms, without hesitation, with the grand divine plan that confiscated their son and made him what he is. They feel, both of them, the pain of the umbilical cord so roughly torn, which will stay sundered forever.

One can imagine that at this moment – as his parents try to protest his decision – Samson looks straight into his father’s eyes. He wants to make it clear to him, with that look, just how ‘right’ this woman is, in his opinion. Facing him is the indecisive, fearful Manoah. Manoah, ever suspicious of this son who hatched so suddenly in his nest, like the chick of a strange bird, unexpected and dangerous. Manoah – a man so utterly unlike his energetic, obsessive, determined, brave, and excitable son, Samson. According to the text, Samson does not respond to his father’s and mother’s question. We don’t know if this is because he is indeed so determined, or whether that pained parental query – ‘Is there no one among the daughters of your own kinsmen and among all our people, that you must go and take a wife from the uncircumcised Philistines?’ – triggers, for a second, an unsettling sensation, the vague glimmer of possibility that the reason he is so attracted to this Philistine girl may not be so obvious, or entirely ‘natural’.

Again he says to Manoah: ‘Get me that one, for
she is the right one for me.’ This time, Samson only addresses his father. Possibly he does so because he senses that Manoah is weaker and more easily swayed. But it may also be that he feels compelled to avert his eyes from his mother, for when he speaks about a woman who is ‘the right one’, he is incapable of looking straight at the woman who was a senior partner– if an unwilling one – in ordaining his tangled, troublesome destiny.

Samson and his father exchange duelling glances. This is a decisive moment in Samson’s personal history. Other difficult struggles await him, but this is the first time he has had to rebel openly against his father’s authority (and his mother’s). Without a doubt it has been abundantly clear to everyone, even before this situation, that Samson is not the same as other people. Stories told within the family and spread among the tribe have buttressed this impression, stories about the unusual circumstances of his conception and the exalted task for which he has been chosen. His long hair, too, which has never been cut, has singled him out before one and all as
sui
generis
. But this, now, is the moment when Samson declares himself not merely different, but also to be someone who is closer in his soul to the foreigner, the enemy.