A) Birth narrative (all of chapter 13)
a. The Angel of the Lord appears to the sterile, nameless wife of Manoah and explains what part of the Nazirite vow she must keep herself and what for the child
b. On hearing of the visitation, Manoah asks through prayer for the “man of God” to come again to give more details about how to raise Samson. The Angel of the Lord again appears to the woman, who then goes to fetch her husband.
c. The Angel of the Lord repeats what he had told the woman in the first visitation (13:13-14), No grape products, no fermented drinks, nothing unclean
d. Manoah offers hospitality, but is told that the 'man' will not eat his food, but if he prepares a burnt offering, he should offer it to the Lord (13:15-16)
e. Manoah asks the 'man’s' name so that they may honor H/him when H/his word comes to pass, but is told that H/his name is beyond understanding
f. Manoah offers goat and grain, and as he and his wife watch the flame blazing up from the altar toward heaven, the Angel of the Lord ascends in the flame!!! (13:19-20)
g. When they realize who their visitor was, Manoah fears that they will die. But his (nameless) wife reasons that H/he would not have accepted their offering or revealed all of these things if he intended to kill them (after all, Samson could not then be born)
h. Samson is born, a boy. (13:24) (How would this tale have gone on if a girl had been born!!)
i. God blesses him and the Spirit of the Lord begins to stir him while he is in Mahaneh Dan, between Zorah and Eshtaol.
B) Arranging a Marriage to a Philistine
a. Samson sees a Philistine woman at Timnah and goes home to insist that his parents get her for him-parenthetical insert says that this was really part of God’s plan to confront the Philistines, but does not explain how it can be God’s will to break His own laws about marrying a non-Hebrew) 14:1-4
b. Samson and his parents go to Timnah and are attacked by a young lion which Samson tears apart with his bare hands under the Spirit of the Lord
Problem: The subnarrative here, v. 5-7) has parents & Samson traveling together, but as they approach the vineyards, a young lion comes roaring toward him-He killed the lion and didn’t tell his parents—where were they? Also, are we not meant to find it meaningful that it was as he approached the VINEYARD, a threat to his Nazirite vow, that he faced this challenge?
c. He goes and talks to the woman and he likes her (14:7)
d. (Returning home) he finds bees and honey in the lion’s carcass, which he not only eats against God’s law, but gives to his parents to eat unknowingly, so that he makes them sin in ignorance.
C) The Wedding
a. Wedding riddle-the point here seems to be that marrying a woman from among your enemies is not smart. He ends up telling her the answer to the riddle to prove his love for her (or to make her stop crying, which she has done for 7 days!), and she, of course, betrays him by telling the answer to his people, where her highest loyalty still lies.
b. To pay for the riddle with 30 sets of clothes, however, Samson KILLS 30 Philistines and gives the clothes from off their bodies to those who had answered the riddle.
c. He then he goes home in anger without his bride, with whom he is, no doubt, somewhat disenchanted,
d. Since he abandons her, the Philistines give his wife to the friend who had attended him at his wedding, presumably the best man. It does not say whether Samson’s best man is a Philistine or not.
e. Samson gets over his anger and swings back to lust, the two poles that seem to govern his passion driven life, goes to be with his wife and learns that she has been given to his friend.
f. Swinging back to rage, Samson uses 300 foxes (how he comes by 300 foxes is not explained) with torches tied to their tails, to burn the Philistine wheat harvest.
g. In retaliation, the equally passion-driven Philistines kill both the wife (presumably to hurt Samson) and her father (presumably because he indirectly caused the burning of the harvest) by burning them to death, thus fighting fire with fire.
h. In retaliation, Samson kills many more and then retires to a cave near Etam. (15:7-8)
D) Slaying Philistines with a Jawbone
a. The Philistines camp IN Judah (pretty cheeky!) and demand the Israelites turn Samson over to them so they can repay him for his latest attacks.
b. Three thousand men from Judah go to Samson in the cave and point out that the Philistines have been/are, for all intents and purposes, rulers over the Israelites, just in case he hadn’t noticed. They consider his escapades a liability rather than an asset saying, What have you done to us?? He replies in the spirit of “an eye for an eye,” I merely did to them what they did to me, without concern about how his act may affect others of his own people. They negotiate with Samson, agreeing to bind him and turn him over alive to the Philistines (wonder how many of them expected Samson to do something spectacular).
c. As Samson moves toward Lehi, the angry Philistines come running toward him shouting (curses? Insults to his God?) and the Spirit of God comes on him in power (does not say he prayed for it), he breaks the ropes, grabs a jaw bone, and kills a thousand men (all in a day’s work).
d. Samson composes a song or poem about this exploit. (15:16). With a donkey I have made a donkey out of them…
e. Samson gives credit to God and prays for water and God answers. When he drinks of this water from God, his strength returns.
E) Prostitute in Gaza
a. Samson spends the night with a prostitute in Gaza. When the townspeople get wind of this, they surround that place with the intention of killing him at dawn, when he is all worn out. Instead, he leaves in the middle of the night and tears the city gate out of the wall, carrying it over his head (?) on his shoulders to the top of the hill that faces Hebron. If the gate was on the East side that means he turned his back to Gaza. Gaza was part of the Philistine Pentapolis at the time. Hebron was one of the highest points (3,040 feet above sea level), so I’m thinking it might have been visible from the hill where Samson stood. Since the story ends here I imagine there is meant to be a symbolic message in this act and the mention of direction.
F) Delilah
a. Samson’s 3 lies, Delilah’s 3 Tests: Samson actually falls in love with Delilah, though there is NO mention of her love for him. Whatever her motive in letting this relationship develop, she is soon working for a mother load of money, 1100 shekels of silver from each Philistine ruler, however many there were.
b. Her 3 tests were
i. To be tied with fresh thongs (seven)
ii. To be tied with new ropes
iii. To have his seven braids women into fabric on a loom.
For each of those requests Delilah only says, Please tell me the secret, don’t make a fool of me, don’t lie to me again.
c. But for the fourth attempt, Delilah appeals to Samson’s love for her, and nagging him like this for many days she finally wears him down until he is “tired to death” and tells her the secret that if his head were shaved he would be as weak as any man. So Delilah calls a man to cut off the braids and Samson’s strength leaves him, but he thinks he will not be weakened. Samson himself does not believe the truth he told anymore than he believed his own lies. He seems unable to identify truth. And underlyingly, he must believe that he is invincible, quite apart from obedience. It is unclear to me whether and at what level he might understand his strength to be a gift from God. At any rate, 16:20b reports, But he did not know that the LORD had left him.
d. The Philistines seize him and unceremoniously gauge out his eyes and take him back down to Gaza where he is bound in brass shackles and forced to grind grain in a prison like a common beast of burden-the man who lives by his passions like an animal gets treated like one. Having lived by bulk, to the neglect of his higher faculty of reason/intellect/wisdom, he is only taking on a visible role that accords with the way he had already been living. But his hair begins to grow, and the Philistines must not have truly believed the secret of his strength either, since they leave it unattended.
G) Samson "Entertains" at Festival for Dagon
a. Singing the praises of their false god, the Philistines call for Samson to be brought out to entertain them (and be living evidence of the power of their God, Dagon).
b. Samson actually prays for strength to avenge HIMSELF. A servant (could he have been a Jewish servant?) helps him find and feel the pillars that support the temple.
c. He pulls down the central pillars and kills all the rulers and people, about 3,000-- more when he dies than he had during his whole life.
d. Samson is buried in his hometown by his father’s whole family, ending 20 years of “leading” Israel.
Samson was called by God (as his elaborate birth narrative illustrates), gifted by God, and used by God, though he seems to have been used in spite of himself—God had to take his selfish acts and cause them to achieve His higher purposes.
Was Samson ever happy? Did he ever find peace or fulfillment in God or elsewhere? How would the Samson narratives be different if Samson had loved God and yielded to His Spirit at all times, not only when his selfish passions overcame him and God had to step in and use evil for good? All things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to His purpose (Romans 8:28)…In this case, God was working things out for the good of the Israelites… From that perspective, might we compare Samson to Balaam, or maybe Balaam's donkey?! (Numbers 22).
As is true for us in different ways, Samson’s strength was also his weakness: his physical power was too easy to use to solve problems. When we learn about the gifts God has given us, we also have to learn the positive and negative uses for each, powers for good and powers for evil. The power to build, nurture and strengthen versus the power to destroy… The power to not use a particular gift in a particular context if that’s what love calls for…
We do not (are not to) compare ourselves to others (Galatians 6:4), but according to the gifts God has given us as individuals. These gifts are not for us alone, but belong to the Body of Christ—if we do not use them (obediently) we deprive the whole Body, not just ourselves, as Samson deprived all of Israel.
Samson ‘knows’ the source of his strength at head level, as evidenced by his ability to articulate it to Delilah, but apparently not at the level of his heart and of an intimate experience-knowledge of God in his life, so that he does not really understand that he will be powerless when the Nazirite vow is completely broken by the shaving of his head. Thus he is surprised and dismayed when he discovers that the Lord has left him. When you learn to practice the presence of God, surely you will know what His presence feels like, and thus what His absence feels like. Jesus knew when God had turned His face away on Golgotha.
Samson's gifts and his Nazirite regimen--that set of guidelines for doing God's will with his life, were not sufficient for him to connect with the Spirit of God and to know whether He came or went. The gifts themselves are no evidence of our right relationship with God.
