Lion's Honey (6 page)

And there is also their clear realisation that he will not accept their authority. Not in the matter of the Philistine woman he insists on marrying, nor apparently in any other matter, because he is subject to the authority of a power greater than theirs. And they know painfully, even with a sense of shame, that he is fated to make his way alone in life, along his own path that resembles no other, and that they can’t teach him a thing. Nothing in their lives or experience has prepared them to be the parents of such a person. Even this honey – which came from God knows where – they taste half-heartedly, sensing that a secret is dripping out here but unable to fathom it
any more than they can decipher what their son is trying to tell them.

And precisely because of their limited understanding of him, we get a strong feeling that Samson wants to calm their anxiety about him and the oppressive mystery hidden within him. He envelops them in sweetness and tries to bind them to him with the sticky honey, and he pleads with them to believe in him and trust him and be completely certain that he is really theirs, that they are really his parents despite the abnormal circumstances surrounding his conception, and that he, in his strange way, is loyal to them.

For there is betrayal in the air. It is unspoken, undefined; nor is it necessarily a ‘typical’ betrayal, of the sort commonly imputed to Samson’s birth – his mother cheating on his father with the mysterious stranger – but possibly deeper and more destructive. For if you have a child who is suffused, even in his mother’s womb, with a sense of strangeness – perhaps there was a flinching, an instinctive rejection as fleeting as a single contraction of the uterus around the
embryo – and if there is always wonder and fear and even suspicion of the child and what may erupt from him: if all these hover in the family air, there is a permanent feeling of betrayal. To be more specific, a sense of being betrayed. Hidden, deep,
mutual
. None of them wanted it, of course, but so it was decreed, for all three. And Samson will live with this feeling all his life, and all his actions will be dedicated to understanding this feeling at close range, or grieving over it, or replaying it over and over.

Three people in the world. A couple whose son was ‘nationalised’ even before his birth. A son who is born, in effect, an orphan. How difficult is Samson’s twofold, self-contradictory mission in life: to be himself, with all his unusual inclinations, and at the same time, to be faithful to the parents from whom he differs so much. We’ll leave them for now: all the honey in the world cannot sweeten the moment.

Samson goes back down to Timnah, to get married. This time he goes there with his father alone, and we wonder, was this the custom, or did his mother decide, for some reason, not to participate in her son’s wedding ceremony? And if so, how should we interpret this blunt gesture? Is this her way of protesting against Samson’s decision to disobey her and marry the Philistine woman? Or perhaps she refused to give her consent to the marriage because she felt, with her sharp motherly intuition, that nothing good would come of this, not necessarily because of the bride but because her son, Samson, for subtle reasons she cannot express in words but recognises nonetheless, is not the marrying kind?

‘And Samson made a feast there, as young men used to do.’

Here, muses the reader, here at last Samson is trying to do something ‘like everyone else’. But it turns out that even this simple wish is destined to go bad quickly: when the Philistines see him, they choose thirty
mere’im
, ‘companions’, to accompany Samson during the wedding feast. Why they do so,
we do not know, but it would seem that his appearance, his obvious strength, and perhaps also an air of disquiet and wildness that he carries with him always, prompt them to surround him this way, to prevent any trouble. The narrator does not say who these companions are, but it is fairly obvious that a man like Samson has no
friends
, not even at his wedding, but rather
mere’im
(the very sound of which, implying the Hebrew word
ra
– evil – does not bode well).

No sooner does the wedding feast begin than Samson sets his guests a challenge: ‘Let me pose you a riddle,’ he says. ‘If you can give me the right answer during the seven days of the feast, I shall give you thirty linen tunics and thirty sets of clothing; but if you are not able to tell me it, you must give me thirty linen tunics and thirty sets of clothing.’

And when they agree to the conditions, he poses the riddle: ‘Out of the eater came something to eat/ Out of the strong came something sweet.’

In point of fact, almost every time Samson opens his mouth a surprising bit of poetry pops out. After
all, as his actions testify, he is a man who inspires fear and repulsion: a bully capable of unlimited mayhem and destruction, who leaves a trail of blood wherever he goes, a kind of Golem, in effect, who has been planted in the world and operated as a lethal weapon of divine will.
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But, suddenly, a riddle. Clever, subtle, lyrical.

He could have entertained his guests with a demonstration of the power of his enormous muscles. Or executed some amazing physical stunt, nothing dangerous, like collapsing the pillars that supported the building, but definitely a feat that would have left them open-mouthed.

But instead he poses a riddle. And no ordinary riddle, but rather one that he knows there is no chance of them solving: for this is not a riddle whose solution is based on something they already know, or a puzzle of logic that they can think through. Which means that he asks them a riddle that, as far as they are concerned, has no solution.

Three, five, seven days they get caught up more and more in the trap he has set for them. The party
goes on, but the atmosphere grows foul. There is a mystery in the air and little by little it becomes greater than the riddle itself, until the attention of the reader cannot fail to turn from the riddle to the one who asked it, and his motives.

For seven full days Samson circulates among his guests, toys with their unknowingness, their curiosity, their mounting anger. Now and then he listens to their clumsy attempts to solve the riddle and shakes his head again and again, politely, with mild mockery and undisguised pleasure. Owing to the Nazirite prohibition, he does not drink the wine served to the guests. They of course do not refrain from drinking, but rather try to drown their frustration and rage, and Samson’s abstention from the collective boozing only intensifies their antipathy toward him. In short, one can assume that within the first day or two the Philistines were fed up with the riddle, and surely from the outset had no intention of plumbing the depths of this bizarre stranger’s soul. The whole situation infuriates them – not least the thirty linen garments and sets of clothing they will have to pay him.

‘Out of the eater came something to eat/ Out of the strong came something sweet.’

It would seem that that there are few things that can make a person crazier than the unabating abuse of an unanswerable riddle. (The case of Samson’s riddle is probably the only place in the Bible where even a consummate Jewish patriot can identify greatly with the Philistines.) And as for Samson, one can truly feel how he secretly derives profound pleasure from what is happening. From their inability to solve the riddle, and from the intimate, quasi-erotic friction – as perceived by the riddler – between those who seek the answer and the elusive answer itself.

And perhaps –

Perhaps he asks them an impossible riddle like this precisely because a man who lives his whole life with a big riddle inside – a mystery that he too cannot solve – feels a great compulsion to create puzzlement in any way possible? For after three, five, seven days like these, the riddle-maker himself turns into a riddle, into a large vessel containing a
bubbling secret, straining to explode …

And maybe this is what motivates Samson, and not only in this instance. He goes through life like a walking enigma, marvelling over his secret, his riddle. He enjoys approaching the dangerous brink of being found out by others. Yet, on second thoughts, the word ‘enjoys’ is inaccurate: more likely he is
driven
to this, compelled to confront this feeling, this bitter-tasting knowledge that he is impenetrable, that he cannot be released from his strangeness, nor from the mystery within.

On the seventh day the companions are sick and tired of the whole thing. In no uncertain terms they say to Samson’s wife: ‘Coax your husband to provide us with the answer to the riddle; else we shall put you and your father’s household to the fire.’

‘During the seven days of the feast,’ reads the text, ‘she continued to harass him with her tears.’

In other words, on top of the ‘companions’’ growing rage, Samson all week long has endured an earful of his wife’s weeping! For seven days she has been crying and pestering him to tell her the answer, and
he keeps silent. This woman, who pleased him to the point that he ignored his parents’ entreaties not to marry her – suddenly he is prepared to cause her such anguish, indeed to abuse her.

But why? Is it because he is trying to tell her, this first woman in his life, that even she will never know him fully? Or perhaps these seven days are a kind of exhausting initiation rite that he has set up for himself, a private ceremony of boundary definition, setting the limits of his willingness to allow another person, even a loved one, to enter the
sanctum sanc-torum
of his soul, the place where his secret is hidden?

‘You really hate me, you don’t love me,’ she wails bitterly. ‘You asked my countrymen a riddle, and you didn’t tell me the answer …’

And for a moment, on reading her words, it seems that in the complaint of the young bride there is a faint echo of something much broader and more complicated than a family quarrel, a hint of a riddle many times greater and more complex: namely the conundrum of the Jewish people as perceived by the nations of the world from antiquity until our own
time, the wonderment and suspicion that have accompanied – and still often accompany – the Jew in his contact with other people, and the aura of mystery, otherness, and isolation that surrounds him, in their view. But let us leave such deep reflections aside and return to the young man and woman, to their first spat, which goes on for a whole week and is soaked in tears and nagging and stubborn refusal, until in the end the husband runs out of patience and snaps at his wife: ‘I haven’t even told my mother and father, and I should tell you?’

And the narrator perhaps did Samson a favour by not recording his wife’s response.

‘Hence a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, so that they become one flesh,’ says the Book of Genesis,
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and indeed the very meaning of marriage is, among other things, that a man departs from his parents and chooses a woman to be his intimate partner. But from the sound of Samson’s words one gathers that, for him, the matter is not so clear-cut, and there is a certain looseness and ambiguity in the practical implementation of
leaving the parents and becoming ‘one flesh’. ‘If I haven’t revealed the secret to my parents’ – he says, in effect, to the woman he has just married – ‘then it goes without saying that I won’t tell you!’ In other words, in the midst of his wedding feast, Samson declares with heavy-handed childishness, with rather infantile condescension, that his parents still take priority for him in all that concerns closeness and intimacy.

But in the end, after all her nagging, or maybe because of the very ordinary human temptation to boast a bit to his wife, Samson’s resolve falters and he tells her the answer. The text doesn’t say exactly what he tells her, nor, more importantly,
how
he tells her: does he show off as he describes his fight with the lion? Or is he modest? And does he convey only the dry facts, or in the heat of storytelling does he add a few colourful details, describing, for example, the extraordinary sight – the honey glistening amid the lion’s sun-bleached ribs, the buzzing swarm of bees …

And if he in fact tells her everything, what
happened to him during the fight and how he felt afterwards, as he stood before the carcass, and the taste of the honey and the humming of the bees, is he telling her this in the hope of igniting a new spark of attraction? Does he hope she will understand what his parents did not?

And what happens next? Does she look at him with astonishment, with wonder? With confusion, or maybe revulsion? And maybe a new, wild arousal toward this man of hers, whom she suddenly realises is far more than he seems? Does she sense that with these words he is handing over something extra, not only the answer to this particular riddle, but also a clue to the solution to the riddle that is
him
?

And if so many questions pile up here, it’s because this is, after all, a fateful moment for Samson: even if he only gave her the barest hint of what lies behind the riddle, this is the first time he has exposed something of his miraculous, hidden side to anyone, and has spoken of the event that he had not even revealed to his parents.

But the woman, torn every which way by simultaneous pressures both internal and external, is not equal to the task of secret-sharer. Scared to death of her countrymen, she tells them the answer.

Let us, for a moment, wishfully consider the possibility that this woman, whose name we do not even know, was in fact worthy of the trust Samson placed in her. What would have happened next, and what might Samson’s life have looked like later on, if she had been able to look straight into him, to see him as he really was? To fathom what had befallen this foreigner even before he was born: a state of eternal non-belonging. To see a man who tears a lion apart with his bare hands and then melts before the sheer poetry of the honey in its carcass. To embrace the miraculous possibility that his greatest wish is that one person love him simply, wholly, naturally, not because of his miraculous quality, but in spite of it.

And although it is not stated explicitly that Samson loved this woman, what is written about her was apparently very important to Samson: she looked
‘right’ to him.
Yesharah
, reads the Hebrew, twice, from the word meaning ‘straight’ or ‘honest’. In other words, there was something in her that seemed honest to him. And if so, she seemed like a person who was free of the innuendo and duplicity he had encountered from others throughout his life. This ‘straightness’ of hers promised him the possibility of peace of mind, of tranquillity. From the way she looked at him he got the feeling that he was at last accepted for what he was, and quite likely it was mainly because of this that the woman from Timnah was the one he first chose.