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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 247. The Glory of Strength
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Samson's tragic story has been treated in three ways.
(1) Some commentators on the Book of Judges have treated it as an excellent piece of Hebrew folklore. They have collected out of all the ancient books of the world wonderful tales of giants, and heroes, and demigods, with their astonishing feats of strength in war, in love, in jealousy, and in revenge-feats more or less like the feats of strength and of revenge we have in Samson.
No one with a modicum of the critical faculty can read the bizarre story of Samson without recognizing that it is unique in the Bible record. It stands out as a heterogeneous patch-and a decidedly coarse one-in the sober, prosaic history to which it has been very imperfectly assimilated. It may come somewhat as a shock to some readers to be told that the Hebrews, like every other people, had a childhood which they outgrew, a period in their early history when they delighted in stories of adventure, abounding in exploits of superhuman prowess, from which even a coarse comic element was not excluded. That some traces of such early folk-tales should have survived and been preserved in the literature of the Israelites is only what might be expected; and if one of them became so closely interwoven in the texture of one of their books that it could not afterwards be disentangled and discarded, this need not surely give offence or pain to any pious reader who recognizes how fully the human element abounds in the Sacred History, especially in its earlier chapters.1 [Note: A. Smythe Palmer, The Samson Saga, viii.]
Samson's extraordinary strength, which he displays in a number of feats, led even in olden times to a comparison of him with Hercules, and recently such comparisons have gone the length of vain attempts to count up exactly twelve exploits of Samson. After it came to be recognized or believed that the Hercules legend is a solar myth, many in our own century proceeded to take the story of Samson also as a sun-myth, and to interpret it so in detail. The derivation of the name tells indeed rather against than in favour of this view, for it is not the way with a nature-myth to borrow or even to derive the name of its hero from the cosmical object which it describes. The derivation from Beth-shemesh is a much more natural one. But such mythical explanations are not capable of being refuted in detail, because the elements with which they operate are so simple that any one so disposed may find them in any history, and for the most part in opposite ways.1 [Note: K. Budde, in Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible, iv. 380.]
(2) Some evangelical preachers, again, have gone to the opposite extreme, and have displayed Samson to us solely as a type and pattern of Jesus Christ. They have selected texts out of Samson's extraordinary history, and they have suspended excellent New Testament sermons on these adapted texts, hanging great weights on small wires.
It is easy to allegorize the whole life of Samson-easy, for example, to find in his falling in love with a selfish and faithless Philistine woman a type of our Lord's loving the Church, alien as she was, and unloving and apt to betray Him; in Samson's slaying the lion that met him on his way to his bride at Timnath, and finding honey in the carcase when he returned, you may, if you please, see a picture of Christ fighting His way to His bride through many dangers, and of His bringing meat and refreshment out of the most roaring and formidable and ravenous of His foes, even death itself. In the thirty Philistines vaunting their solution of Samson's riddle after they had coaxed and threatened it out of his bride, you may think you see a very apt and significant and not too sarcastic representation of the men of science and philosophers of the present day who vaunt their knowledge of all the mysteries of nature, human and Divine, while they forget that this their enlightenment is at bottom due to the discovery Christ has made to His Church of the deepest problems of existence; that they could never have made these discoveries any more than the Greeks and Romans but for the impulse which Christianity has given to all knowledge, and for the actual disclosures made by Christ on earth for the sake of His Church.2 [Note: Marcus Dods, Israel's Iron Age, 119.]
(3) The former is the mythical way of dealing with Samson's history; the latter is the mystical way. But there is a third way. And the third way is the way that St. Paul takes, not only with Samson, but with all the patriarchs and judges and kings and great men of Old Testament times. We have this Apostle's way with all those Old Testament men and women set before us again and again in his own conclusive words: “For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope.” “Now all these things happened unto them for ensamples, and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come. Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.” The story of Samson is a parable of the way in which the noblest opportunities of birth and the largest endowment of personal power may be prostituted, and how, accordingly, a life which begins with the fairest prospects may end in the deepest gloom. The age in which the life of Samson was lived was one of the darkest and least civilized in the history of Israel. Lawlessness and confusion were so great that only the establishment of David's monarchy saved the state from destruction and the religion of Moses from oblivion. In particular, the moral life of the Hebrews had sadly deteriorated. Multitudes had gone after the gods of the Philistines and those impure Phœnician deities whose worship was an infamy, whose service was open sin. The whole nation was corrupted by these associations and, as might be expected, fell a prey to their heathen neighbours. For forty years the Hebrews were subject to the Philistines. The spectacle presented is that of utter weakness-weakness as a nation, weakness as a religion, weakness as a people, and as individuals.
The story of Samson's life partakes of the rough and unmoral character of the times. There is much about him that appeals to the imagination, especially to the youthful imagination. We have all wondered at the feats of physical strength stated to have been performed by him-how he slew the lion; carried away the city gates during the night; slew a thousand of the Philistines with the jawbone of an ass; and how, greatest in the moment of death, he brought the heathen temple in ruins upon himself and his enemies. But though his physical strength was unparalleled, he was so deficient in the essential qualities of a leader that he failed to find any following, and he ended by betraying his trust.
There was every expectation that one called of God, as Samson had been before his birth, and sanctified from the womb, endowed with just those gifts of faith, courage, and physical strength out of which heroes are made, would become an effective instrument for the work of God. And yet he failed, as many another has failed, partly because he persuaded himself that restraint in one direction allowed licence in others; partly because he trusted to the outward sign of his consecration to carry him through. He had faith and audacity, great confidence in his gifts, and a supreme contempt for the enemy; and he supposed that these might take the place of that restraint of the body which his strong nature specially needed. So he roamed free in fancy, imagination, and mind. He allowed the other passions to centre and gather force.1 [Note: G. H. S. Walpole, Personality and Power, 146.]
In his picture of Samson, that strange Hebrew Hercules, whose character and life are altogether unlike the other heroes of sacred story, Watts has depicted a type of man such as the Hebrew tradition probably commemorates and had as its original Samson Agonistes. We think of him as light of heart, and full of sportive mirth, but Watts paints him in his picture in serious thoughtful mood, with a far-away look in his eyes that yet seem to see nothing, feeling how far short he has come of his great consecration; how the Spirit's power has been to him a gift endowing him at times with supernatural strength, but not a sanctifying grace always abiding in him and transforming his nature. And perhaps this was a more common mood with him, though he does not give way to it, than the joyousness which overflowed in mirthful tricks and plays upon words which is associated with him. His story, if we rightly consider it, was pathetic and tragic in the highest degree.2 [Note: H. Macmillan, The Life-Work of G. F. Watts, 160.]
In one of his lesser known poems, Whittier represents the wife of Manoah as thus describing to her husband a vision she had had of her baby son's “future dark”:-
Before me, in a vision, rose
The hosts of Israel's scornful foes,-
Rank over rank, helm, shield, and spear,
Glittered in noon's hot atmosphere.
I heard their boast, and bitter word,
Their mockery of the Hebrew's Lord,
I saw their hands his ark assail,
Their feet profane his holy veil.
No angel down the blue space spoke,
No thunder from the still sky broke;
But in their midst, in power and awe,
Like God's waked wrath. our child I saw!
A child no more!-harsh-browed and strong,
He towered a giant in the throng,
And down his shoulders, broad and bare,
Swept the black terror of his hair.
He raised his arm; he smote amain;
As round the reaper falls the grain,
So the dark host around him fell,
So sank the foes of Israel!
Again I looked. In sunlight shone
The towers and domes of Askelon.
Priest, warrior, slave, a mighty crowd,
Within her idol temple bowed.
Yet one knelt not; stark, gaunt, and blind,
His arms the massive pillars twined,-
An eyeless captive, strong with hate,
He stood there like an evil Fate.
The red shrines smoked,-the trumpets pealed:
He stooped,-the giant columns reeled,-
Reeled tower and fane, sank arch and wall,
And the thick dust-cloud closed o'er all!