Judges 14
Samson demands a Philistine wife, kills a lion barehanded on the way, and poses a riddle at the wedding feast whose solution is extracted from his bride under threat.
Summary
Samson goes down to Timnah and sees a Philistine woman who seems right to him. He tells his parents to get her for him as his wife. They protest: is there not a woman among your relatives, or among all our people, that you must go to take a wife from the uncircumcised Philistines? He insists. His father and mother do not know that this is from the Lord, who is seeking an opportunity against the Philistines. Going down to Timnah, Samson turns aside into the vineyards, and a young lion comes roaring toward him. The Spirit of the Lord rushes upon him and he tears the lion apart with his bare hands as one tears a young goat, though he tells no one. He speaks to the woman; she seems right to him. Returning later to take her, he turns aside to see the carcass of the lion, and there is a swarm of bees in the body of the lion, and honey. He scrapes it into his hands and eats as he goes, giving some to his father and mother; he does not tell them it was from the carcass of the lion.
His father goes down to the woman. Samson makes a feast there, as the young men customarily do. Thirty companions are given to him. Samson says: I will pose a riddle to you. If you solve it within the seven days of the feast, I will give you thirty linen garments and thirty changes of clothes. If you cannot, you must give me the same. They agree. He poses the riddle: out of the eater came something to eat; out of the strong came something sweet. For three days they cannot solve it. On the fourth day they say to his wife: entice your husband to tell us the riddle, or we will burn you and your father's house with fire. She weeps and presses him for seven days. On the seventh day he tells her. She tells the men, who give the answer. Samson says: if you had not plowed with my heifer, you would not have solved my riddle. The Spirit of the Lord rushes upon him and he goes down to Ashkelon and kills thirty men, takes their spoils, and gives the garments to those who had solved the riddle. His wife is given to his companion.
- Judges 1Chapter 1 functions as a historiographical preface to the whole book, cataloguing the success or failure of each tribe to dispossess the Canaanites after Joshua's death.
- Judges 2Chapter 2 is the hermeneutical key to Judges.
- Judges 3Chapter 3 introduces the judge cycle in action for the first time.
- Judges 4Chapter 4 is the prose account of the same events that chapter 5 will sing.
- Judges 5The Song of Deborah in chapter 5 is widely considered one of the oldest pieces of Hebrew poetry in the entire Bible, possibly dating to the twelfth century BCE, nearly contemporaneous with the events it describes.
- Judges 6Chapter 6 is the opening of the Gideon narrative, which runs through chapter 8 and is the longest major-judge story in the book.
- Judges 7Chapter 7 is the central action of the Gideon narrative and one of the most memorable military scenes in the book.
- Judges 8Chapter 8 is the darkest portion of the Gideon narrative.
- Judges 9Chapter 9 is the longest chapter in Judges and the only episode in the book devoted to an anti-judge — a man who makes himself king by violence and holds it for exactly three years.
- Judges 10Chapter 10 performs two functions.
- Judges 11Chapter 11 is one of the most morally complex chapters in the Hebrew Bible.
- Judges 12Chapter 12 begins with a conflict that is structurally parallel to the Ephraimite quarrel after Gideon's battle in chapter 8, but this time Jephthah's response is not diplomacy — it is war.
- Judges 13Chapter 13 is the birth narrative of Samson, and it is the most elaborate annunciation scene in Judges.
- Judges 14Chapter 14 introduces the adult Samson and establishes the pattern that will govern the rest of his narrative: a desire for a Philistine woman, a display of supernatural strength, a riddle or trap, betrayal by intimacy.
- Judges 15Chapter 15 escalates the private vendetta between Samson and the Philistines into a series of increasingly spectacular acts of violence.
- Judges 16Chapter 16 is the climax and conclusion of the Samson narrative.
- Judges 17Chapter 17 begins the two-part appendix with which Judges closes, and the shift in tone is immediate.
- Judges 18Chapter 18 is the first of the book's two closing appendices.
- Judges 19Chapter 19 is one of the most disturbing chapters in the Hebrew Bible, and the text makes no attempt to soften it.
- Judges 20Chapter 20 is the longest military account in Judges and is remarkable for what it shows about what has gone wrong with Israel as a political and moral community.
- Judges 21Chapter 21 closes the book and extends the moral horror of chapter 19-20 in a different register: the horror of improvised solutions to self-inflicted catastrophe.