Bible Commentaries

Samson's Life, and Conflicts with the Philistines - Judges 13-16

Whilst Jephthah, in the power of God, was delivering the tribes on the eastof the Jordan from the oppression of the Ammonites, the oppression onthe part of the Philistines continued uninterruptedly for forty years in theland to the west of the Jordan (Judges 13:1), and probably increased moreand more after the disastrous war during the closing years of the high-priesthood of Eli, in which the Israelites suffered a sad defeat, and evenlost the ark of the covenant, which was taken by the Philistines (1 Sam 4). But even during this period, Jehovah the God of Israel did not leavehimself without witness, either in the case of His enemies the Philistines,or in that of His people Israel. The triumphant delight of the Philistines atthe capture of the ark was soon changed into great and mortal terror, when Dagon their idol had fallen down from its place before the ark of God and was lying upon the threshold of its temple with broken head and arms; and the inhabitants of Ashdod, Gath, and Ekron, to which the ark was taken, were so severely smitten with boils by the hand of Jehovah, that the princes of the Philistines felt constrained to send the ark, which brought nothing but harm to their people, back into the land of the Israelites, and with it a trespass-offering (1 Sam 5-6). At this time the Lord had also raised up a hero for His people in the person of Samson, whose deeds were to prove to the Israelites and Philistines that the God of Israel still possessed the power to help His people and smite His foes.

The life and acts of Samson, who was to begin to deliver Israel out of the hands of the Philistines, and who judged Israel for twenty years under the rule of the Philistines (Judges 13:5 and Judges 15:20), are described in Judg 13-16 with an elaborate fulness which seems quite out of proportion to the help and deliverance which he brought to his people. His birth was foretold to his parents by an appearance of the angel of the Lord, and the boy was set apart as a Nazarite from his mother's womb. When he had grown up, the Spirit of Jehovah began to drive him to seek occasions for showing the Philistines his marvellous strength, and to inflict severe blows upon them in a series of wonderful feats, until at length he was seduced by the bewitching Delilah to make known to her the secret of his supernatural strength, and was betrayed by her into the power of the Philistines, who deprived him of the sight of his eyes, and compelled him to perform the hardest and most degraded kinds of slave-labour. From this he was only able to escape by bringing about his own death, which he did in such a manner that his enemies were unable to triumph over him, since he killed more of them at his death than he had killed during the whole of his life before. And whilst the small results that followed from the acts of this hero of God do not answer the expectations that might naturally be formed from the miraculous announcement of his birth, the nature of the acts which he performed appears still less to be such as we should expect from a hero impelled by the Spirit of God. His actions not only bear the stamp of adventure, foolhardiness, and wilfulness, when looked at outwardly, but they are almost all associated with love affairs; so that it looks as if Samson had dishonoured and fooled away the gift entrusted to him, by making it subservient to his sensual lusts, and thus had prepared the way for his own ruin, without bringing any essential help to his people. “The man who carried the gates of Gaza up to the top of the mountain was the slave of a woman, to whom he frivolously betrayed the strength of his Nazarite locks. These locks grew once more, and his strength returned, but only to bring death at the same time to himself and his foes” (Ziegler). Are we to discern in such a character as this a warrior of the Lord? Can Samson, the promised son of a barren woman, a Nazarite from his birth, be the head and flower of the Judges? We do not pretend to answer these questions in the affirmative; and to justify this view we start from the fact, which Ewald and Diestel both admit to be historical, that the deep earnest background of Samson's nature is to be sought for in his Nazarite condition, or rather that it is in this that the distinctive significance of his character and of his life and deeds as judge all culminates. The Nazarite was not indeed what Bertheau supposes him to have been, “a man separated from human pursuits and turmoil;” but the significance of the Nazarite condition was to be found in a consecration of the life to God, which had its roots in living faith, and its outward manifestations negatively, in abstinence from everything unclean, from drinking wine, and even from fruit of the vine of every description, and positively, in wearing the hair uncut. In the case of Samson this consecration of the life to God was not an act of his own free will, or a vow voluntarily taken; but it was imposed upon him by divine command from his conception and birth. As a Nazarite, i.e., as a person vowed to the Lord, he was to begin to deliver Israel out of the hand of the Philistines; and the bodily sign of his Nazarite condition, - namely, the hair of his head that had never been touched by the scissors, - was the vehicle of his supernatural strength with which he smote the Philistines. In Samson the Nazarite, however, not only did the Lord design to set before His people a man towering above the fallen generation in heroic strength, through his firm faith in and confident reliance upon the gift of God committed to him, opening up before it the prospect of a renewal of its own strength, that by this type he might arouse such strength and ability as were still slumbering in the nation; but Samson was to exhibit to his age generally a picture on the one hand of the strength which the people of God might acquire to overcome their strongest foes through faithful submission to the Lord their God, and on the other hand of the weakness into which they had sunk through unfaithfulness to the covenant and intercourse with the heathen. And it is in this typical character of Samson and his deeds that we find the head and flower of the institution of judge in Israel.

The judges whom Jehovah raised up in the interval between Joshua and Samuel were neither military commanders nor governors of the nation; nor were they authorities instituted by God and invested with the government of the state. They were not even chosen from the heads of the nation, but were called by the Lord out of the midst of their brethren to be the deliverers of the nation, either through His Spirit which came upon them, or through prophets and extraordinary manifestations of God; and the influence which they exerted, after the conquest and humiliation of the foe and up to the time of their death, upon the government of the nation and its affairs in general, was not the result of any official rank, but simply the fruit and consequence of their personal ability, and therefore extended for the most part only to those tribes to whom they had brought deliverance from the oppression of their foes. The tribes of Israel did not want any common secular ruler to fulfil the task that devolved upon the nation at that time. God therefore raised up even the judges only in times of distress and trouble. For their appearance and work were simply intended to manifest the power which the Lord could confer upon His people through His spirit, and were designed, on the one hand, to encourage Israel to turn seriously to its God, and by holding fast to His covenant to obtain the power to conquer all its foes; and, on the other hand, to alarm their enemies, that they might not attribute to their idols the power which they possessed to subjugate the Israelites, but might learn to fear the omnipotence of the true God. This divine power which was displayed by the judges culminated in Samson. When the Spirit of God came upon him, he performed such mighty deeds as made the haughty Philistines feel the omnipotence of Jehovah. And this power he possessed by virtue of his condition as a Nazarite, because he had been vowed or dedicated to the Lord from his mother's womb, so long as he remained faithful to the vow that had been imposed upon him.

But just as his strength depended upon the faithful observance of his vow, so his weakness became apparent in his natural character, particularly in his intrigues with the daughters of the Philistines; and in this weakness there was reflected the natural character of the nation generally, and of its constant disposition to fraternize with the heathen. Love to a Philistine woman in Timnath not only supplied Samson with the first occasion to exhibit his heroic strength to the Philistines, but involved him in a series of conflicts in which he inflicted severe blows upon the uncircumcised. This impulse to fight against the Philistines came from Jehovah (Judges 14:4), and in these conflicts Jehovah assisted him with the power of His Spirit, and even opened up a fountain of water for him at Lehi in the midst of his severe fight, for the purpose of reviving his exhausted strength (Judges 15:19). On the other hand, in his intercourse with the harlot at Gaza, and his love affair with Delilah, he trod ways of the flesh which led to his ruin. In his destruction, which was brought about by his forfeiture of the pledge of the divine gift entrusted to him, the insufficiency of the judgeship in itself to procure for the people of God supremacy over their foes became fully manifest; so that the weakness of the judgeship culminated in Samson as well as its strength. The power of the Spirit of God, bestowed upon the judges for the deliverance of their people, was overpowered by the might of the flesh lusting against the spirit.

This special call received from God will explain the peculiarities observable in the acts which he performed, - not only the smallness of the outward results of his heroic acts, but the character of adventurous boldness by which they were distinguished. Although he had been set apart as a Nazarite from his mother's womb, he as not to complete the deliverance of his people from the hands of the Philistines, but simply to commence, it, i.e., to show to the people, by the manifestation of supernatural heroic power, the possibility of deliverance, or to exhibit the strength with which a man could slay a thousand foes. To answer this purpose, it was necessary that the acts of Samson should differ from those of the judges who fought at the head of military forces, and should exhibit the stamp of confidence and boldness in the full consciousness of possession divine and invincible power.

But whilst the spirit which prevailed in Israel during the time of the judges culminated in the nature and deeds of Samson both in its weakness and strength, the miraculous character of his deeds, regarded simply in themselves, affords no ground for pronouncing the account a mere legend which has transformed historical acts into miracles, except from a naturalistic point of view, which rejects all miracles, and therefore denies a priori the supernatural working of the living God in the midst of His people. The formal character of the whole of the history of Samson, which the opponents of the biblical revelation adduce for the further support of this view, does not yield any tenable evidence of its correctness. The external rounding off of the account proves nothing more than that Samson's life and acts formed in themselves a compact and well-rounded whole. But the assertion, that “well-rounded circumstances form a suitable framework for the separate accounts, and that precisely twelve acts are related of Samson, which are united into beautiful pictures and narrated in artistic order” (Bertheau), is at variance with the actual character of the biblical account. In order to get exactly twelve heroic acts, Bertheau has to fix the stamp of a heroic act performed by Samson himself upon the miraculous help which he received from God through the opening up of a spring of water (Judges 15:18-19), and also to split up a closely connected event, such as his breaking the bonds three times, into three different actions.

(Note: On these grounds, L. Diestel, in the article Samson in Herzog's Cycl., has rejected Bertheau's enumeration as unsatisfactory; and also the division proposed by Ewald into five acts with three turns in each, because, in order to arrive at this grouping, Ewald is not only obliged to refer the general statement in Judges 13:25, “the Spirit of God began to drive Samson,” to some heroic deed which is not described, but has also to assume that in the case of one act (the carrying away of the gates at Gaza) the last two steps of the legend are omitted from the present account, although in all the rest Diestel follows Ewald's view almost without exception. The views advanced by Ewald and Bertheau form the foundation of Roskoff's Monograph, “the legend of Samson in its origin, form, and signification, and the legend of Hercules,”in which the legend of Samson is regarded as an Israelitish form of that of Hercules.)

If we simply confine ourselves to the biblical account, the acts of Samson may be divided into two parts. The first (Judg 14 and 15) contains those in which Samson smote the Philistines with gradually increasing severity; the second (Judg 16) those by which he brought about his own fall and ruin. These are separated from one another by the account of the time that his judgeship lasted (Judges 15:20), and this account is briefly repeated at the close of the whole account (Judges 16:31). The first part includes six distinct acts which are grouped together in twos: viz., (1 and 2) the killing of the lion on the way to Timnath, and the slaughter of the thirty Philistines for the purpose of paying for the solution of his riddle with the clothes that he took off them (Judg 14); (3 and 4) his revenge upon the Philistines by burning their crops, because his wife had been given to a Philistine, and also by the great slaughter with which he punished them for having burned his father-in-law and wife (Judges 15:1-8); (5 and 6) the bursting of the cords with which his countrymen had bound him for the purpose of delivering him up to the Philistines, and the slaying of 1000 Philistines with the jaw-bone of an ass (Judges 15:9-19). The second part of his life comprises only three acts: viz., (1) taking off the town gates of Gaza, and carrying them away (Judges 16:1-3); (2) breaking the bonds with which Delilah bound him three separate times (Judges 16:4-14); and (3) his heroic death through pulling down the temple of Dagon, after he had been delivered into the power of the Philistines through the treachery of Delilah, and had been blinded by them (Judg 16:15-31). In this arrangement there is no such artistic shaping or rounding off of the historical materials apparent, as could indicate any mythological decoration. And lastly, the popular language of Samson in proverbs, rhymes, and a play upon words, does not warrant us in maintaining that the popular legend invented this mode of expressing his thoughts, and put the words into his mouth. All this leads to the conclusion, that there is no good ground for calling in question the historical character of the whole account of Samson's life and deeds.

(Note: No safe or even probable conjecture can be drawn from the character of the history before us, with reference to the first written record of the life of Samson, or the sources which the author of our book of Judges made use of for this portion of his work. The recurrence of such expressions as יחל followed by an infinitive (Judges 13:5, Judges 13:25; Judges 16:19, Judges 16:22), פּתּי (Judges 14:15; Judges 16:5), הציק (Judges 14:17; Judges 16:16, etc.), upon which Bertheau lays such stress, arises from the actual contents of the narrative itself. The same expressions also occur in other places where the thought requires them, and therefore they form no such peculiarities of style as to warrant the conclusion that the life of Samson was the subject of a separate work (Ewald), or that it was a fragment taken from a larger history of the wars of the Philistines (Bertheau).)

Birth of Samson. - Judges 13:1. The oppression of the Israelites by the Philistines,which is briefly hinted at in Judges 10:7, is noticed again here with thestanding formula, “And the children of Israel did evil again in the sight ofthe Lord,” etc. (cf. Judges 10:6; Judges 4:1; Judges 3:12), as an introduction to the accountof the life and acts of Samson, who began to deliver Israel from the handsof these enemies. Not only the birth of Samson, but the prediction of hisbirth, also fell, according to Judges 13:5, within the period of the rule of thePhilistines over Israel. Now, as their oppression lasted forty years, andSamson judged Israel for twenty years during that oppression (Judges 15:20; Judges 16:31), he must have commenced his judgeship at an early age, probablybefore the completion of his twentieth year; and with this the statement inJudg 14, that his marriage with a Philistine woman furnished the occasion forhis conflicts with these enemies of his people, fully agrees. The end of theforty years of the supremacy of the Philistines is not given in this book,which closes with the death of Samson. It did not terminate till the greatvictory which the Israelites gained over their enemies under the commandof Samuel (1 Sam 7). Twenty years before this victory the Philistines hadsent back the ark which they had taken from the Israelites, after keeping itfor seven months in their own land (1 Samuel 7:2, and 1 Samuel 6:1). It was withinthese twenty years that most of the acts of Samson occurred. His firstaffair with the Philistines, however, namely on the occasion of hismarriage, took place a year or two before this defeat of the Israelites, inwhich the sons of Eli were slain, the ark fell into the hands of thePhilistines, and the high priest Eli fell from his seat and broke his neck onreceiving the terrible news (1 Samuel 4:18). Consequently Eli died a shorttime after the first appearance of Samson.

Whilst the Israelites were given into the hands of the Philistines on accountof their sins, and were also severely oppressed in Gilead on the part of theAmmonites, the angel of the Lord appeared to the wife of Manoah, aDanite from Zorea, i.e., Sur'a, on the western slope of the mountains ofJudah (see at Joshua 15:33). Mishpachath Dani (the family of the Danites) isused interchangeably with shebet Dani (the tribe of the Danites: see Judges 18:2, Judges 18:11, and Judges 18:1, Judges 18:30), which may be explained on this ground, thataccording to Numbers 26:42-43, all the Danites formed but one family, viz.,the family of the Shuhamites. The angel of the Lord announced to thiswoman, who was barren, “Thou wilt conceive and bear a son. And nowbeware, drink no wine or strong drink, and eat nothing unclean: for, behold,thou wilt conceive and bear a son, and no razor shall come upon his head;for a vowed man of God (Nazir) will the boy be from his mother's womb,”i.e., his whole life long, “to the day of his death,” as the angel expresslyaffirmed, according to Judges 13:7. The three prohibitions which the angel of the Lord imposed upon the woman were the three things which distinguished the condition of a Nazarite (see at Numbers 6:1-8, and the explanation given there of the Nazarite vow). The only other thing mentioned in the Mosaic law is the warning against defilement from contact with the dead, which does not seem to have been enforced in the case of Samson. When the angel added still further, “And he (the Nazarite) will begin to deliver Israel out of the hand of the Philistines,” he no doubt intended to show that his power to effect this deliverance would be closely connected with his condition as a Nazarite. The promised son was to be a Nazarite all his life long, because he was to begin to deliver Israel out of the power of his foes. And in order that he might be so, his mother was to share in the renunciations of the Nazarite vow during the time of her pregnancy. Whilst the appearance of the angel of the Lord contained the practical pledge that the Lord still acknowledged His people, though He had given them into the hands of their enemies; the message of the angel contained this lesson and warning for Israel, that it could only obtain deliverance from its foes by seeking after a life of consecration to the Lord, such as the Nazarites pursued, so as to realize the idea of the priestly character to which Israel had been called as the people of Jehovah, by abstinence from the deliciae carnis, and everything that was unclean, as being emanations of sin, and also by a complete self-surrender to the Lord (see Pentateuch, p. 674).

The woman told her husband of this appearance: “A man of God,” she said(lit., the man of God, viz., the one just referred to), “came to me, and hisappearance was like the appearance of the angel of God, very terrible; andI asked him not whence he was, neither told he me his name,” etc. “Man ofGod” was the expression used to denote a prophet, or a man who stood inimmediate intercourse with God, such as Moses and others (see at Deuteronomy 33:1). “Angel of God” is equivalent to “angel of the Lord” (Judges 2:1; Judges 6:11),the angel in whom the invisible God reveals himself to men. The womantherefore imagined the person who appeared to her to have been a prophet,whose majestic appearance, however, had produced the impression that hewas a superior being; consequently she had not ventured to ask him eitherhis name or where he came from.

Being firmly convinced of the truth of this announcement, and at the sametime reflecting upon the obligation which it imposed upon the parents,Manoah prayed to the Lord that He would let the man of God whom Hehad sent come to them again, to teach them what they were to do to theboy that should be born, i.e., how they should treat him. היּוּלד, according to the Keri היּלּד, is a participle Pual with theמ dropped (see Ewald, §169, b.). This prayer was heard. The angel of Godappeared once more to the woman when she was sitting alone in the fieldwithout her husband.

Then she hastened to fetch her husband, who first of all inquired of theperson who had appeared, “Art thou the man who said to the woman”(sc., what has been related in Judges 13:3-5)? And when this was answered in theaffirmative, he said still further (Judges 13:12), “Should thy word then come topass, what will be the manner of the boy, and his doing?” The pluralדּבריך is construed ad sensum with the singular verb, becausethe words form one promise, so that the expression is not to be takendistributively, as Rosenmüller supposes. This also applies to Judges 13:17,Mishpat, the right belonging to a boy, i.e., the proper treatment of him.

The angel of the Lord then repeated the instructions which he had alreadygiven to the woman in Judges 13:4, simply adding to the prohibition of wine andstrong drink the caution not to eat of anything that came from the vine, inaccordance with Numbers 6:3.

As Manoah had not yet recognised in the man the angel of the Lord, as isobserved by way of explanation in Judges 13:16, he wished, like Gideon (Judges 6:18), to give a hospitable entertainment to the man who had brought himsuch joyful tidings, and therefore said to him, “Let us detain thee, andprepare a kid for thee.” The construction לפניך נעשׂה is a pregnant one: “prepare and set before thee.” On the fact itself, see Judges 6:19.

The angel of the Lord replied, “If thou wilt detain me (sc., that I may eat),I will not eat of thy food (אכל with בּ, to eat thereat, i.e., thereof,as in Exodus 12:43; Leviticus 22:11); but if thou wilt prepare a burnt-offering forJehovah, then offer it.”

Manoah then asked his name: שׁמך מי, lit., “Who is thyname?” מי inquires after the person; מה, the nature ofquality (see Ewald, §325, a.). “For if thy word come to pass, we will dothee honour.” This was the reason why he asked after his name. כּבּד, tohonour by presents, so as to show one's self grateful (see Numbers 22:17, Numbers 22:37; Numbers 24:11).

The angel replied, “Why askest thou then after my name? truly it iswonderful.” The Kethibh פלאי is the adjectival form פּלאי fromפּלא, for which the Keri has פּלי, the pausal form of פּלי (from the radical פּלה = פּלא). The wordtherefore is not the proper name of the angel of the Lord, but expresses thecharacter of his name; and as the name simply denotes the nature, itexpresses the peculiarity of his nature also. It is to be understood in anabsolute sense, - “absolutely and supremely wonderful” (Seb. Schmidt), - as apredicate belonging to God alone (compare the term “Wonderful” in Isaiah 9:6), and not to be toned down as it is by Bertheau, who explains it assignifying “neither easy to utter nor easy to comprehend.”

Manoah then took the kid and the minchah, i.e., according to Numbers 15:4.,the meat-offering belonging to the burnt-offering, and offered it upon therock, which is called an altar in Judges 13:20, because the angel of the Lord, who isof one nature with God, had sanctified it as an altar through the miraculousacceptance of the sacrifice. לעשׁות מפלא, “andwonderfully (miraculously) did he act” (הפליא followed by theinfinitive with ל as in 2 Chronicles 26:15). These words form a circumstantialclause, which is not to be attached, however, to the subject of the principalclause, but to ליהוה: “Manoah offered the sacrifice to theLord, whereupon He acted to do wonderfully, i.e., He performed a wonderor miracle, and Manoah and his wife saw it” (see Ewald, Lehrb. §341, b., p. 724, note). In what the miracle consisted is explained in Judges 13:20, in the words, “when the flame went up toward heaven from off the altar;” that is to say, in the fact that a flame issued from the rock, as in the case of Gideon's sacrifice (Judges 6:21), and consumed the sacrifice. And the angel of the Lord ascended in this flame. When Manoah and his wife saw this, they fell upon their faces to the earth (sc., in worship), because they discovered from the miracle that it was the angel of the Lord who had appeared to them.

From that time forward the Lord did not appear to them again. ButManoah was afraid that he and his wife should die, because they had seenGod (on this belief, see the remarks on Genesis 16:13 and Exodus 33:20). His wifequieted his fears, however, and said, “Jehovah cannot intend to kill us, asHe has accepted our sacrifice, and has shown us all this” (the twofoldmiracle). “And at this time He has not let us see such things as these.” כּעת, at the time in which we live, even if such things may possibly have taken place in the hoary antiquity.

The promise of God was fulfilled. the boy whom the woman bare receivedthe name of Samson. שׁמשׁון (lxx, Óáìøù) does notmean sun-like, hero of the sun, from שׁמשׁ (the sun), but, asJosephus explains it (Ant. v. 8, 4), éthe strong or daring one,from שׁמשׁום, from the intensive from שׁמשׁם, from שׁמם, in its original sense to be strong or daring, not “to devastate.” שׁדד is an analogous word: lit. to be powerful, then to act powerfully, to devastate. The boy grew under the blessing of God (see 1 Samuel 2:21).

When he had grown up, the Spirit of Jehovah began to thrust him in thecamp of Dan. פּעם, to thrust, denoting the operation of the Spiritof God within him, which took possession of him suddenly, and impelledhim to put forth supernatural powers. Mahaneh-dan, the camp of Dan,was the name given to the district in which the Danites who emigrated,according to Judges 18:12, from the inheritance of their tribe, had pitchedtheir encampment behind, i.e., to the west of, Kirjath-jearim, or accordingto this verse, between Zorea and Eshtaol. The situation cannot bedetermined precisely, as the situation of Eshtaol itself has not beendiscovered yet (see at Joshua 15:33). It was there that Samson lived with hisparents, judging from Judges 16:31. The meaning of this verse, which formsthe introduction to the following account of the acts of Samson, is simplythat Samson was there seized by the Spirit of Jehovah, and impelled tocommence the conflict with the Philistines.