CREEKIFICATION: Samson and the Story Thereof

If you were a little boy who had to go to church 3 or 4 times a week, you either hated the whole thing and didn't really pay much attention to any of the sermons and Bible classes OR you loved it and became a Bible geek the way other kids were Star Wars geeks.

(oddly enough, there is quite a lot of crossover between those two kinds of geeks)

For most of my childhood, I existed somewhere in the middle. I didn't always like going to church, but I was always there. And if I was there and the preacher was delivering a sermon I found to be uninteresting, I sometimes found myself falling asleep...

...but falling asleep was not a good idea. So I often found myself sitting there in the pew contemplating the really deep questions. Is it a sin to preach a boring sermon..? Is it a sin to be bored by a sermon...?

The really deep questions didn't do much to ward off my sleepiness, so my standard practice was to grab a pew Bible and leaf through it in search of something exciting.

What I discovered is that the Bible is full of fascinating tales and strange characters. And amidst that panoply of uncommon individuals, the one that stood out above all of the rest (especially in the eyes of a He-Man loving 80's elementary schooler full of Kool-Aid and Froot Loops) was, unsurprisingly, Samson.

Coloring book Samson was whitebread and milquetoast and bloodless...

...but Bible Samson was full of spit and steam and vinegar.

If you sit down and read through the actual biblical account (found in the book of Judges in chapters 13, 14, 15, and 16) you'll see what I'm talking about.

What's that..? You want ME to use the rest of this blog post to give you a summary, complete with crudely-rendered hand drawn (and hand water-colored) illustrations?

For you, dear readers, my answer must be yes...

First, some stage setting is in order.

In the book of Judges, we're told that the nation of Israel (the people adopted by the peculiar God of the Bible) forsook the Lord, "...and every man did that which was right in his own eyes." Apparently every man had blurry eyes, because what was right in them was horrible.

They didn't have a king or anything, but every now and again a leader (called a judge) would show up, do something extraordinary, provide some measure of relief from the constant deprivation and shamefulness, and then he (or she) would die and everything would go back to being awful. You've probably heard of a few of them. Remember Deborah (and her sidekick Barak)?

How about Gideon? He was a pretty popular judge.

I always liked Shamgar. His story is reduced to one tantalizing verse...

I wonder if he killed them all at once or if he did his oxgoading quietly and over a period of time, like a ninja...

But, like I said, Samson was the main event. And the tale of Samson begins, as super hero stories are wont to do, with an account of his origin. In the 13th chapter of Judges, we're introduced to his folks.

His mother was sterile and childless and she had no reason to believe she'd ever be otherwise. Until one day...

Drinking whilst pregnant is a terrible idea, but the angel of the Lord didn't show up just to provide solid prenatal advice, it was there to tell her that her boy (it was going to be a boy) was to be a Nazarite.

Nazarites, in ancient Israel, were individuals set apart from everyone else to perform some special duty for God. All of the Israelites were subject to the strictures of the legal code Moses handed down to them from God, but Nazarites had a few extra laws that they were supposed to follow.

In the case of her son, the Lord was mostly concerned with the No Haircuts part (this is really important to the story. You'll need to remember this...).

Manoah wasn't around when the angel showed up so when his wife told him the whole story, he asked God to send the angel again. The angel dutifully showed up again and repeated everything it had said before. Manoah tried to get it to stick around and eat something, he asked it what its name was, but it wasn't feeling very sociable and it told Manoah that if he wanted to sacrifice anything he should do it for God and not for an angel. Manoah thought a burnt offering would be best and the angel flew up into heaven in the flames of the sacrifice.

Manoah started to freak out and was screaming about how God was going to kill them both.

She eventually gave birth and named the boy Samson. He grew, was blessed, and the spirit of the Lord began to move in him...

Later on, Samson was hanging around the city of Timnah and saw a girl. A Philistine girl...

Israelites weren't supposed to marry Philistines because Philistines worship other gods (and worshiping other gods is the quickest way to make the God of Israel angry, and you wouldn't like him when he's angry...). I think there's a place in the Old Testament that outlines all the things a non-Israelite would have to do to become an Israelite, but Samson's parents didn't think his crush was likely to submit herself to the process. When Samson told them to go get her and make her his wife, they suggested he settle down with a nice Israelite girl instead.

So, reluctantly, his parents went back to Timnah, with Samson, to get him his Philistine wife.

As they were approaching the vineyards of Timnah, Samson and his parents were somehow separated and all of a sudden a lion came roaring towards Samson.

But the spirit of the Lord came upon him...

And he tore the lion in half.

And then he just kept on going about his business. He found his girl and started chatting her up.

Later on, he went back to have a look at the lion carcass. A swarm of bees was using it as a home and Samson, being Samson, reached in and scooped out some honey to snack on as he walked. He gave some to his parents but he didn't tell them where it was from.

At Samson's wedding feast, his father-in-law gave him a bunch of companions to hang out with. Samson told them a riddle and said he'd give them 30 sets of clothes and garments if they could guess the answer, otherwise they'd owe him 30 sets of clothes and garments.

The cohort of companions listened to the riddle, thought about it for a second, and then went to Samson's new wife and were like...

Samson's wife, not wanting to be burned to death, desperately asked him for the answer to his riddle.

When Samson eventually gave in and told her the answer, she told the men and then the men came to Samson and solved his riddle.

In response, the spirit of the Lord came upon Samson, he ran from Timnah to Ashkelon, killed (and stripped) 30 Philistines...

...and fulfilled his end of the bet by giving the clothes over to the men who'd guessed his riddle.

Samson was so upset about them figuring out the answer to his riddle that he left and went back to his parent's house. In the meantime, his wife was given to one of the companions from the wedding, which turned out to be a bad move because Samson came back into town one day expecting to see his wife (and Samson, ever thoughtful, even brought her a gift: a goat). Imagine his dismay upon discovering that his wife had been given away to one of the jerks who got all of those free garments and clothes.

Not one to take a cuckolding lightly, Samson went off and grabbed 300 foxes. He tied them together, tail to tail, in pairs, and then he tied torches to them and threw them into the Philistine's farmland.

The Philistines found out who it was that burned up all of their wheat and grapes and olives and came up with the grisly response of burning Samson's wife (and her father) to death.

Samson's response to their response was to go completely nuts. Banana nuts. Enraged, he "...smote them hip and thigh with a great slaughter." Then he went off and stayed in cave for a while.

Not long thereafter, a bunch of vengeful Philistines showed up on the scene and demanded that the Israelites give up Samson. So a mob of Israelites went down to Samson's cave.

He agreed to let them turn him in on the condition that they not kill him themselves. The Israelites agreed. Then they tied Samson with two new ropes and led him to the Philistines. The Philistines were so eager to get their hands on him that they ran up shouting with excitement.

I'm not sure what they were thinking. Samson was a proven beast, a true manslayer. And he had demonstrated a particular penchant for pulverizing Philistines. To make matters worse, some chump litterer had been walking around the area and dropped a donkey's jawbone.

Leaving a donkey bone laying around near Samson is about as ill-advised as leaving a pair of nunchucks laying around near Bruce Lee. Samson took that jawbone and used it to send one thousand Philistines to their deaths.

And then he stood over them like some kind of ancient Muhammad Ali and made up a poem.

Then he tossed the bone aside and complained to God about being thirsty. God, being generous, gave him some water.

This next bit in the Samson story, the part where goes to Gaza... I'm not sure why it's in there or how it fits into The Samson Story. I get the feeling that there were so many good stories about crazy things Samson did during his tenure as judge (he was in office for two decades) that the guy(s) who later pieced his story together had a hard time deciding what to keep in and what to leave out. The Gaza story might not fit, but it was just too good/odd to leave out.

Here's how it happened:

After Samson jawboned 1,000 Philistines to death, he just walked around without any fear of anything. One day, he just walked right into the Philistine city of Gaza, picked up a strumpet, and decided to make a night of it. Some of the Gazites heard Samson was in town and they thought it would be a good idea to secretly surround the house he was in and then ambush him in the morning.

But Samson got up at midnight, walked to the city gates, yanked the whole deal out of the ground (the doors and the posts and the bar), and then walked it out of the city to the top of a hill.

That's it. That's the story: one night, Samson yanked out some city gates and walked off with them.

Had you heard that bit before? Crazy, no?

Well, you probably already know the next part of the story, the part with Delilah...

She's the woman with whom Samson fell in love. The story says, "...and it came to pass afterward, that he loved a woman in the Valley of Sorek, whose name was Delilah." But it doesn't seem like she reciprocated his love. Delilah would hang out with Samson and he could sleep over, but when the Philistine lords showed up with the promise of silver and asked her to betray Samson, she was all too willing to oblige.

Delilah kept asking Samson about the secret of his great strength. The first time she asked him, he told her, "...if they bind me with seven green thongs that were never dried, then shall I become weak, and be as another man." So Delilah got some green thongs and used them to tie Samson up. Then she yelled out, "The Philistines be upon thee, Samson!"

She got upset that he'd lied to her and she asked him again, "...now tell me, I pray thee, wherewith thou mightest be bound." This time, Samson told her, "...if they bind me fast with new ropes that never were occupied, then shall I be weak, and be as another man." Delilah responded to this revelation by grabbing a bunch of new ropes and using them to tie Samson up. After she'd done it, she yelled out, "...the Philistines be upon thee, Samson!"

Delilah got mad again, asked him the same question again, and Samson lied again. This time he told her to tie his braids up into a loom.

Delilah, at this point, was exasperated. She told Samson that he really didn't love her at all and she started nagging at him daily.

And finally, Samson told her the truth.

Reading this part of the story, I always took it to mean that I was supposed to see Samson as a complete idiot. Delilah clearly had ill-intentions, but he told her his secret anyway...?

Nowadays, I tend not to think of Samson as an idiot. Not exactly. As far as I can tell, his idiocy is but a symptom of his tragic flaw, and his tragic flaw was pride, the kind of pride that manifests itself as entitlement.

At this point in the story, he's been an unstoppable force. He yanked a lion in half, he threw a bunch of burning foxes into some farmland, he carried off some city gates with his bare hands, he used a piece of donkey to beat a thousand men to death; Samson has been swaggering around, breaking commandments, making up rhymes and riddles, whoring, fighting, killing... why would something as trivial as a haircut make any difference to him?

Samson knew his strength was from God, but you never hear about him making any sacrifices to God or sending up any "Thank You" prayers. And the only time a person ever receives a gift without saying "thank you" is when he feels entitled to the gift.

Samson was strong because God made him strong, not because Samson was such a great guy that God owed him the gift of strength. But in Samson's eyes, he deserved to receive his gift, and if you deserve to receive a gift then you're entitled to receive a gift, and if you're entitled to receive a gift then it really isn't a gift at all.

It's like when a guy brags about how smart he is. Did you give yourself that brain?

Oh? Did you give yourself the ability to read? Did you choose to be born into a time and place and setting wherein you'd have access to all the right kinds of books?

And what if you'd had some debilitating, cancerous disease that ate away at your ability to work hard? What if you'd died tragically, randomly, before you ever had a chance to become anything? Did you keep yourself from cancer? From bad genes?

Are you tall? Did you decide to make yourself so? Are you clever? Did you make a gift of wit for yourself? Are you wealthy? Did you provide yourself with circumstances and opportunity and good fortune?

When you get right down to it, what have any of us given ourselves? What have any of us done other than take advantage of the gifts we've been given? Isn't even the ability to take advantage of our gifts also a gift? Isn't it all a gift?

...sorry about that. Sometimes I grab that bullhorn and jump up onto the nearest soapbox and before I know it I've preached an entire sermon.

Back to the narrative...

So, Delilah had Samson's secret and she wasted no time at all in using it against him. She put him to sleep in her lap and then she had one of her Philistine confederates sneak in and shave his head.

This time, when Delilah shouted about Philistines being upon him, Samson jumped up thinking things'd be the same as every other time. He was surprised, however, to find that "...the Lord was departed from him."

The Bible (and the book of Judges in particular) has a fair share of stories and scenes that contain concise, blunt descriptions of brutally violent acts. In this instance, "...the Philistines took him, and gouged out his eyes..."

Gruesome.

Then they put him in shackles and took him to prison where he spent all of his time grinding...

...and growing out his hair.

The Philistines were so happy to have finally subdued Samson, the "Destroyer of Our Country Which Slew Many of Us", that they threw a big party at a temple. The Bible says that they brought Samson out to perform for them.

I wonder what kind of performer he was... did he juggle..? Maybe he was a stand-up comic...

Whatever he was doing, there was a lad with him who led him around by the hand and Samson told him, "Suffer me that I may feel the pillars whereupon the house standeth, that I may lean upon them." The lad, obligingly, led Samson in between the pillars. That's when Samson prayed to God...

Then he pushed the pillars apart.

And the whole place fell to the ground and everyone died. In fact, he killed more Philistines in that moment than he'd killed in all of his previous ragings.

The story ends with a sad few sentences about Samson's dad coming to get his body and burying him. Samson wasn't the greatest guy in the world, but I bet his people missed him after he was gone.

Anyway, that's the story of Samson. I discovered a lot of fascinating stories and strange characters in the Bible when I was a kid. I recall finding some pretty surprising things in the book of Ezekiel too...