found an original explanation for Samson’s anguish, commenting that Delilah ‘at the time of the consummation pulled away from under him’. 27 Arguably such a gross rejection mightmake a man lose his lust for life, yet all the same, the unique biblical wording calls for an alternative explanation, another motive for Samson’s behaviour with Delilah.
For it is also possible to see it this way: that all of Delilah’s banging on Samson’s door, her unrelenting interrogation, ‘What makes you so strong? And how could you be tied up and made helpless?’ – in other words, what’s your secret, who are you really, what kind of man are you inside that mystery and what would you be without it? – all this aroused feelings in Samson that no other woman had ever aroused. And thus, though he suspected her motives, she was the only woman who asked him the big, essential question of his life; the only one who knew the right question, and thus in effect asked him to hand over the keys to his secret, which other women were uninterested in, or perhaps feared. And therefore, amid the tempest of confused and conflicted feelings that her actions stirred in him, it’s conceivable that a small hope was aroused too, that Delilah would be the one who wouldsucceed in wresting some sort of ‘answer’ from him, a solution to the riddle that was entrenched deep inside him and that even he had not managed fully to understand.
Maybe somewhere deep in his soul, beneath the mountains of muscle, a voice told him that that it would be Delilah’s persistence that would succeed in salvaging the buried self that had never managed to be redeemed in any other way; the self that very much wants to be revealed, to give of itself, to remove all that blocks and separates it from the rest of the world; to cast off the burden of mystery and riddle and accursed alienation; and to be at last ‘like an ordinary man’ – and, if so, might Samson also become intelligible to Samson himself?
For we have already recognised that an aura of discomfort always hovers around Samson, the enigma of the incompatibility and discord between his blessed divine mission and his earthy, material, corporeal (and often childlike) character and personality. Sometimes it is clear to the reader that Samson doesn’t know himself at all, doesn’t understand therole he fills in his own life story. But it is also possible – and this is truly a disturbing thought – that God, from the outset , had no interest in Samson’s being conscious of who he really was under the mantle of his mission, and what part he plays in the story, and what instrument he is in God’s hands (and it suddenly seems that the ‘use’ to which God puts him – shimush in Hebrew – is the hidden meaning of Samson’s name, Shimshon ).
In which case, Samson is revealed here in all his misery. A lonely man, forever tortured, enslaved by a God who has chosen him for a demanding mission – the salvation of Israel – a task for which his personality and character are too weak; a man who manages time and again to become entangled in personal feuds with the enemies of Israel, thus endangering, failing, and disappointing his people, as well as the God who sent him.
And then it seems that Samson’s entire physical essence is no more than a huge set of muscles that metamorphosed into great iron doors, ‘city gates’ designed to protect a fragile, vulnerable, interiorhuman kernel; or, in fact, intended to prevent that kernel, which was in such dire need of redemption and self-revelation, from cracking open and finally becoming ‘like an ordinary man’.
How can a man be redeemed? What is the natural, most desirable way for a man to open slightly the oppressive doors that wall him in, and allow that vulnerable kernel to reveal itself, to give and perhaps also be received?
‘He fell in love with a woman.’
And perhaps into that one word is compressed Samson’s small, bold, human, and bootless
For it is also possible to see it this way: that all of Delilah’s banging on Samson’s door, her unrelenting interrogation, ‘What makes you so strong? And how could you be tied up and made helpless?’ – in other words, what’s your secret, who are you really, what kind of man are you inside that mystery and what would you be without it? – all this aroused feelings in Samson that no other woman had ever aroused. And thus, though he suspected her motives, she was the only woman who asked him the big, essential question of his life; the only one who knew the right question, and thus in effect asked him to hand over the keys to his secret, which other women were uninterested in, or perhaps feared. And therefore, amid the tempest of confused and conflicted feelings that her actions stirred in him, it’s conceivable that a small hope was aroused too, that Delilah would be the one who wouldsucceed in wresting some sort of ‘answer’ from him, a solution to the riddle that was entrenched deep inside him and that even he had not managed fully to understand.
Maybe somewhere deep in his soul, beneath the mountains of muscle, a voice told him that that it would be Delilah’s persistence that would succeed in salvaging the buried self that had never managed to be redeemed in any other way; the self that very much wants to be revealed, to give of itself, to remove all that blocks and separates it from the rest of the world; to cast off the burden of mystery and riddle and accursed alienation; and to be at last ‘like an ordinary man’ – and, if so, might Samson also become intelligible to Samson himself?
For we have already recognised that an aura of discomfort always hovers around Samson, the enigma of the incompatibility and discord between his blessed divine mission and his earthy, material, corporeal (and often childlike) character and personality. Sometimes it is clear to the reader that Samson doesn’t know himself at all, doesn’t understand therole he fills in his own life story. But it is also possible – and this is truly a disturbing thought – that God, from the outset , had no interest in Samson’s being conscious of who he really was under the mantle of his mission, and what part he plays in the story, and what instrument he is in God’s hands (and it suddenly seems that the ‘use’ to which God puts him – shimush in Hebrew – is the hidden meaning of Samson’s name, Shimshon ).
In which case, Samson is revealed here in all his misery. A lonely man, forever tortured, enslaved by a God who has chosen him for a demanding mission – the salvation of Israel – a task for which his personality and character are too weak; a man who manages time and again to become entangled in personal feuds with the enemies of Israel, thus endangering, failing, and disappointing his people, as well as the God who sent him.
And then it seems that Samson’s entire physical essence is no more than a huge set of muscles that metamorphosed into great iron doors, ‘city gates’ designed to protect a fragile, vulnerable, interiorhuman kernel; or, in fact, intended to prevent that kernel, which was in such dire need of redemption and self-revelation, from cracking open and finally becoming ‘like an ordinary man’.
How can a man be redeemed? What is the natural, most desirable way for a man to open slightly the oppressive doors that wall him in, and allow that vulnerable kernel to reveal itself, to give and perhaps also be received?
‘He fell in love with a woman.’
And perhaps into that one word is compressed Samson’s small, bold, human, and bootless
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