Naso - Samson Rabbi Dr Charles H Middleburgh 7 June 2008

Rabbi Dr Charles H Middleburgh is Senior Lecturer in Rabbinics at Leo Baeck College London.

One of the most enigmatic characters in the entire Hebrew Bible is the one who figures in the traditional haftarah for this Shabbat.  I am talking about Samson, known in the Hebrew Bible as a shofet, a judge, though behaving in his life as far removed from the behaviour of the wigged and robed judges of our own dear land as one could possibly imagine.  

The haftarah is chosen for today because the portion of Naso contains the laws for the temporary Nazirite, the man or woman who voluntarily swore to forego any intoxicating drink, or other by-product of the grape, to keep away from the dead, and not to cut their hair until the period of their naziritehood was over.  

It is a strange oath to undertake, and one the rationale for which is impossible to decide with any degree of precision.  Archaeological evidence has shown that in various pagan religions the donation of hair to a god – seen in some cultures as the embodiment of the person’s vitality –was a regular custom, so at least part of the Nazirite ritual may have been a direct, contradictory practice to keep Israelites away from paganism.  

There are two prominent men in the Hebrew Bible who are permanent Nazirites, though in both their cases they do not take the vow upon themselves but have it taken on their behalf by their mothers.  Samson is one, and Samuel, the last judge and the first prophet, is the second.  The two men are very different from each other in every particular apart from this; even their judgeships, in Samuel’s case deeply moral in Samson’s the complete opposite, divide them.  

Samson is born to a Danite couple; his father’s name is given, Manoach, his mother’s is unknown though she takes a much more prominent role in the beginning of Samson’s story than his father.  Manoach’s wife receives an angelic revelation that she will give birth to a son, and that he shall be a Nazirite from the womb, effectively barring her from grapes or a tipple until after he has been born.   

She informs her husband who receives the news that his wife is pregnant in a passively suspicious way – especially as they had been trying unsuccessfully to have a child for some time – but in the end accepts his impending fatherhood with a reasonably good grace.  The other piece of news accompanying the boy’s arrival both parents receive less well:  he shall be the first to deliver Israel from the Philistines (Judges 13.5).  

The implication of this is clear:  God has chosen Samson to be a soldier in the service of his country.  His parents are a means to an end; they will raise him but rather than him being a comfort and support to them in their middle and old age they will lose him.  His service will be not to them but to God and to his people.  In this construct they play no part at all.  It must have been crushing news to bear:  no child at all, then one is promised, oh, but by the way, he will never really be yours.  

In the end this may have been something of a relief to Manoach and his wife, for Samson is the son not of dreams but of nightmares.  He grows into a strapping lad of abundant strength, his uncut hair streaming from his head like the rays of the sun:  it cannot be coincidental that his name, Shimshon in Hebrew, combines two words – Shemesh  meaning sun and On meaning strength and also virility.  

Samson is to display an abundance of both:  on his way to Timnah after a woman he encounters a lion which he rends in two with his bare hands, like one tearing a kid asunder, the text states.  In Timnah he marries the woman he fancies (the text only tells us he ‘noticed’ her), against the objection of his parents, for she is a Philistine, but then causes a serious brawl with Philistine guests at his own wedding feast.  This woman is but the first of many, as Samson seems to have strength not only in his hair but also in his loin-cloth, and he kills abundant numbers of Philistines along the way in the sort of casual manner that only Quentin Tarantino would love, including memorably 1000 of them with the jawbone of an ass.  

Samson judged Israel for twenty years, according to the book, and one must assume that his womanising and gratuitous anti-Philistine violence continued throughout.   

We know that the former is true because after the statement of his period of rule, the book of Judges introduces the chain of events that are to bring about Samson’s downfall.  First of all, he narrowly escapes death after dallying with a prostitute in Gaza , and then he meets his nemesis in the sensuous form of the Bible’s ultimate femme fatale, Delilah.  

Delilah is the only one of Samson’s women that the text says he loves, and it is she who is to betray that love in the most devastating way.  It is clear from the beginning that Delilah is a Philistine through and through, and that whatever Samson’s feelings for her may be she does not reciprocate them.   

Working with the lords of the Philistines she seduces Samson – an easy task by all accounts – and then uses his infatuation with her to wheedle the source of his strength from him. Now Samson comes across throughout his story as a bit of a muscle-bound wonder with an under-abundance of brain, but here he is at his most stupid.  Each time she asks him his secret Samson plays a trick on Delilah and gives her a false reason; each time he does so she announces the arrival of the Philistines to capture him.  Yet she persists and in the end he tells her the truth, knowing as he must what the consequences will be, bringing about a short back and sides and his arrest in one fell swoop.  

Samson’s fate is a brutal one:  the Philistines blind him – and they wouldn’t have used an anaesthetic, and then they mock him and turn him into a slave and a freak show.  But the story has one final twist, a sting worthy of the most poisonous of desert scorpions.  The Philistines bring a blind and shackled Samson to the temple of their god Dagon to celebrate his capture and to glorify the god.  The place is packed and Samson, this great hulking wreck of a man, is forced to dance for his tormentors.  

But then Samson, now once more hirsute, rests against the pillars of the temple, prays to God for strength so that he may avenge even one of his two eyes and brings the temple down on himself and all inside by pulling the pillars together.  He asked to avenge even one of his lost eyes:  he kills three thousand people.  Not a bad tally – 1500 per eye.  

It is a brutal end to a brutal story and one that, try as we might, we can find little that is praiseworthy and nothing that is moral within it.  Samson dies as he has lived, violently, and that is an end of the matter.  Except there is a tiny postscript, so tiny that it is easy to miss:  after his death his brothers – mentioned here for the first time and suggesting that Manoach and his wife had been successful parents after Samson’s birth – come and bury their brother in the grave of his father Manoach.  

The old man has died during the course of Samson’s judgeship, but there is no mention of his nameless wife.  What of her?  Does she live long enough to know of her troubled firstborn’s fate?  Does she live long enough to bury her husband and her first child?  What must she have thought?  How must she have felt?  Samson cannot have brought her any joy, yet she must have loved him and as a result suffered terribly when he suffered and been devastated when he died.  

John Milton may have ended his majestic Samson Agonistes by writing ‘Nothing is here for tears’, though for the woman who had heard the news of her impending motherhood from an angel of God, who must have had so many hopes and dreams for her long-awaited child, who had discovered that he was to be marked out from the womb as being in a special relationship with God, and then seen that promise drowned in a welter of bloodshed and vengeance, there must have been plenty of tears, and ample justification for each and every one.  

The story of Samson is a majestic if terrible one, but when we read it, and even more when we think about it, let us not forget the impact of great lives on the lesser lives that surround them, and of the suffering and pain those other lives are all too often forced to endure.  

Amen