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This article is about the Biblical character. For other meanings, see Samson (disambiguation)

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Samson or Shimshon (שמשון "Of the sun" (because he was radiant and mighty) or " Serves ", Standard Hebrew Šimšon, Tiberian Hebrew Šimšôn) is the third to last of the Judges of Israel. His life is described in the Hebrew Bible in chapters 13 to 16 of the Book of Judges .

Story

Samson is said to have lived during the period when the Israelites were oppressed by the power of the Philistines. At this time an angel from God appeared to Manoah, an Israelite from the tribe of Dan, in the city of Zorah, and to his wife, who was barren. This angel predicted that they would have a son. In accordance with Nazaritic requirements, she was to abstain from wine and other strong drink, and her promised child was not to have a razor used upon his head. In due time the son was born; he was reared according to the provisions of the Nazariteship.

When he became a young man Samson left the hills of his people to see the cities of the Philistines. While there Samson became infatuated with a Philistine woman of Timnah that, overcoming the objections of his parents, he married her.

The wedding-feast was a seven-day banquet, at which various kinds of entertainment were in vogue. One of the occasions was a riddle contest, misunderstanding the game Samson proposed a riddle that described an account of an incident where only he was present. The Philistines believed it was a true riddle and were annoyed at not being able to solve it. Samson became so certain that they would never get the answer he promised to give two cloaks to every one there is they could solve it.

The Philistines thus convinced Samson's new wife to try and discover the answer. At her urgent and tearful imploring of his bride he tells her the solution, and she told it to the thirty young men. Samson flies into a rage. Unable to meet his promise of the cloaks he leaves town and murders thirty Ashkelonites and takes their cloaks.

When Samson returns to Timnah, however, he finds his father in law has given his bride to Samson's companion, probably his right-hand man. Her father refuses to allow him to see her, and wishes to give Samson her sister. Samson again displays his wrath by setting a group foxes alight and leaving the panicked beasts to run through the orchards and farms of the Philistines. Inquiry as to the cause of this destruction leads the Philistines to burn the house of the Timnite and his daughter, who had stirred up Samson's anger.

Samson then smote the Philistines "hip and thigh," and took refuge in the rock of Etam. An army of Philistines went up and demanded from 3,000 men of Judah the deliverance to them of Samson. With Samson's consent they tied him with two new ropes and were about to hand him over to the Philistines when he snapped the ropes asunder. Picking up the jawbone of an ass, he dashed at the Philistines and slew a full thousand. At the conclusion of Judges 15 it is said that "he judged Israel in the days of the Philistines twenty years."

Ch. 16 records the disastrous end of Samson. He goes to Gaza where he falls in love with Delilah at the Brook of Sorek. The Philistines approach Delilah and induce here to try and find the secret of Samson's strength. Eventually she learns that cutting his hair will do so. Samson is captured by the Philistines and blinded.

After being blinded, Samson is brought to Gaza, imprisoned, and put to work grinding grain (Judges 16:21). As he toils in prison, his hair begins to grow again.

One day the Philistine leaders assemble in a temple for a religious sacrifice, offering thanks to their God Dagon for having had their enemy delivered into their hands. As their merriment grows, they summon Samson so that he can entertain them. Once inside the temple, Samson asks the servant who is leading him to show him where the temple's central pillars are, so he can lean against them.

In a dramatic gesture with parallels to modern suicide bombers, Samson chooses to commit suicide by pulling down the temple pillars in order to kill as many of the Philistine leaders as he can: "And Samson said, 'Let me die with the Philistines!' And he bowed himself with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords, and upon all the people that were therein. So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life." (Judges 16:30).

After his death, Samson's family recovers his body from the rubble and buries him near the tomb of his father Manoah.

In Rabbinic Jewish literature

The rabbis identified Samson with Bedan ; Bedan was a judge mentioned by Samuel in his farewell address (1 Samuel 12:11) among the judges that delivered Israel from their enemies. However, the name "Bedan" is not found in the Book of Judges.

The name "Samson" is derived from "shemesh" (= "sun"), so that Samson bore the name of God, who is also "a sun and shield" (Ps. lxxxiv. 12). As God protected Israel, so did Samson watch over it in his generation, judging the people even as did God. Samson's strength was divinely derived (Talmud Sotah 10a). Samson resembled God in requiring neither aid nor help (Midrash Genesis Rabbah xcviii. 18).

Jewish legend records that Samson's shoulders were sixty ells broad. He was lame in both feet (Talmud Sotah 10a), but when the spirit of God came upon him he could step with one stride from Zoreah to Eshtaol, while the hairs of his head arose and clashed against one another so that they could be heard for a like distance (Midrash Lev. Rabbah viii. 2). Samson was said to be so strong that he could uplift two mountains and rub them together like two clods of earth (ibid.; Sotah 9b), yet his superhuman strength, like Goliath's, brought woe upon its possessor (Midrash Eccl. Rabbah i., end).

In licentiousness he is compared with Amnon and Zimri, both of whom were punished for their sins (Lev. R. xxiii. 9). Samson's eyes were put out because he had "followed them" too often (Soṭah l.c.).

It is said that in the twenty years during which Samson judged Israel he never required the least service from an Israelite (Midrash Numbers Rabbah ix. 25), and he piously refrained from taking the name of God in vain. As soon, therefore, as he told Delilah that he was a Nazarite of God she immediately knew that he had spoken the truth (Sotah l.c.). When he pulled down the temple of Dagon and killed himself and the Philistines the structure fell backward, so that he was not crushed, his family being thus enabled to find his body and to bury it in the tomb of his father (Midrash Gen. Rabbah l.c. § 19).

In the Talmudic period many seem to have denied that Samson was a historic figure; he was apparently regarded as a purely mythological personage. This was viewed as heretical by the rabbis of the Talmud, and they refuted this view.

In Other Literature

Samson was given further consideration in 1671, when John Milton made him the sympathetic hero of his blank verse tragedy Samson Agonistes. Camille Saint-Saëns wrote an opera, Samson et Dalila between 1868 and 1877.

External link

• 'Samson' by Solomon Solomon