as frail as an ordinary man.’
Haliti is the word he uses – literally, ‘I would become ill’ – which the medieval commentator Radak reads more moderately as ‘I would weaken.’
Delilah wastes no time. She takes new ropes, thick and rough, ties him up and says again, ‘Samson, the Philistines are upon you!’ The ambusher is poised to attack, but Samson casually snaps these ropes too, as if they were threads.
You deceived me, Delilah says again, you told me lies. How can you be tied up? Samson obviously realises that she is stubbornly repeating exactly what she said before, signalling her unwillingness to give up. ‘If you weave the seven locks of my hair with the warp-threads of a loom,’ he says, ‘then I will surely weaken’. We can only guess at the gleam in his eye and the timbre of his voice, but the words he speaks reveal something new: until now he has spoken to her in a different way. ‘If I were to be bound,’ he has said – twice – in impersonal, generalterms, without specifying who would be doing the binding, or might harm him. But here he turns to her directly, with clear comprehension: ‘If you weave,’ he tells her, if you , Delilah, weave the seven locks of my hair …
(And in the midst of this game that is not a game, and as sort of a momentary distraction from the terrible thing that will very soon happen, it is possible to muse over the fact that only now, towards the end of the story, is the reader informed that Samson had seven locks of hair. Something in this small new detail hints that Samson loved his hair, took good care of it, scrupulously separated and braided his tresses, lock by lock … And more: anyone who has grown very long hair knows how hard it is to take care of it on one’s own; and here, a moment before these glorious locks will be shorn by a woman, our thoughts drift to a different woman, Samson’s mother, who maybe helped him, during his childhood and youth, in braiding and combing and curling and washing – and perhaps did so even when he was grown up, in between his other women?)
Samson falls asleep. Maybe he was exhausted by the lovemaking, maybe he is starting to crack. Delilah does not rest. She weaves his hair into a loom with a warp-thread and also pins it with a peg, to hold it firm, and says to him again, a third time, ‘Samson, the Philistines are upon you’, and Samson wakes up and in one motion pulls out the weave and the peg.
Thus, in what seemed at first like love-play but which gradually turns bitter, he surrenders himself to Delilah and her cords and ropes and tendons. And here it may be noted that Samson’s whole life story is an endless braid of knots and ropes: foxes tied together, new ropes with which he is bound by the men of Judah, damp bowstrings and locks of hair woven into a loom, and time after time we see Samson’s passion to tie and be tied, and also to be ensnared, and we may read this serpentine jumble of ropes – this tangled web – and wonder, how many ropes does a man need to replace one umbilical cord that was never properly spun?
Three times Delilah cries out, ‘Samson, thePhilistines are upon you’, and each time, nonetheless, Samson suspends his suspicion of her machinations, and continues to cooperate in her transparent plot. Over and over he recognises that she is using his answers in an attempt to harm him, yet he does not protest or accuse her. 26
But of course he is drawn not only to the treacherous Delilah but to the ‘ambusher’ who has been with them all along in the room, the stranger always hidden in the background, who in a certain sense needs to be there in order to complete, deep in Samson’s soul, the primal scene of his life, the moment he was traumatised in the womb: mother, child, stranger.
And then, after Delilah has pestered and pressured him constantly – va-tiktzar nafsho la-mut , ‘he was wearied to death’.
Nowhere else in the Bible does this phrase appear. The rabbis of antiquity
Haliti is the word he uses – literally, ‘I would become ill’ – which the medieval commentator Radak reads more moderately as ‘I would weaken.’
Delilah wastes no time. She takes new ropes, thick and rough, ties him up and says again, ‘Samson, the Philistines are upon you!’ The ambusher is poised to attack, but Samson casually snaps these ropes too, as if they were threads.
You deceived me, Delilah says again, you told me lies. How can you be tied up? Samson obviously realises that she is stubbornly repeating exactly what she said before, signalling her unwillingness to give up. ‘If you weave the seven locks of my hair with the warp-threads of a loom,’ he says, ‘then I will surely weaken’. We can only guess at the gleam in his eye and the timbre of his voice, but the words he speaks reveal something new: until now he has spoken to her in a different way. ‘If I were to be bound,’ he has said – twice – in impersonal, generalterms, without specifying who would be doing the binding, or might harm him. But here he turns to her directly, with clear comprehension: ‘If you weave,’ he tells her, if you , Delilah, weave the seven locks of my hair …
(And in the midst of this game that is not a game, and as sort of a momentary distraction from the terrible thing that will very soon happen, it is possible to muse over the fact that only now, towards the end of the story, is the reader informed that Samson had seven locks of hair. Something in this small new detail hints that Samson loved his hair, took good care of it, scrupulously separated and braided his tresses, lock by lock … And more: anyone who has grown very long hair knows how hard it is to take care of it on one’s own; and here, a moment before these glorious locks will be shorn by a woman, our thoughts drift to a different woman, Samson’s mother, who maybe helped him, during his childhood and youth, in braiding and combing and curling and washing – and perhaps did so even when he was grown up, in between his other women?)
Samson falls asleep. Maybe he was exhausted by the lovemaking, maybe he is starting to crack. Delilah does not rest. She weaves his hair into a loom with a warp-thread and also pins it with a peg, to hold it firm, and says to him again, a third time, ‘Samson, the Philistines are upon you’, and Samson wakes up and in one motion pulls out the weave and the peg.
Thus, in what seemed at first like love-play but which gradually turns bitter, he surrenders himself to Delilah and her cords and ropes and tendons. And here it may be noted that Samson’s whole life story is an endless braid of knots and ropes: foxes tied together, new ropes with which he is bound by the men of Judah, damp bowstrings and locks of hair woven into a loom, and time after time we see Samson’s passion to tie and be tied, and also to be ensnared, and we may read this serpentine jumble of ropes – this tangled web – and wonder, how many ropes does a man need to replace one umbilical cord that was never properly spun?
Three times Delilah cries out, ‘Samson, thePhilistines are upon you’, and each time, nonetheless, Samson suspends his suspicion of her machinations, and continues to cooperate in her transparent plot. Over and over he recognises that she is using his answers in an attempt to harm him, yet he does not protest or accuse her. 26
But of course he is drawn not only to the treacherous Delilah but to the ‘ambusher’ who has been with them all along in the room, the stranger always hidden in the background, who in a certain sense needs to be there in order to complete, deep in Samson’s soul, the primal scene of his life, the moment he was traumatised in the womb: mother, child, stranger.
And then, after Delilah has pestered and pressured him constantly – va-tiktzar nafsho la-mut , ‘he was wearied to death’.
Nowhere else in the Bible does this phrase appear. The rabbis of antiquity
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