Judges 16
Samson loves Delilah, who extracts the secret of his Nazirite hair; captured and blinded, he pulls down the temple of Dagon on three thousand Philistines and himself.
Summary
Samson goes to Gaza and visits a prostitute. The Gazites are told he is there and they wait at the city gate to kill him at dawn. Samson rises at midnight, takes hold of the doors of the city gate and the two posts, pulls them up with the bar, and carries them to the top of the hill in front of Hebron. After this he loves a woman in the valley of Sorek whose name is Delilah. The lords of the Philistines each offer her eleven hundred pieces of silver to entice him and find out the source of his great strength. She asks him three times over several encounters. Each time he gives a false answer — seven fresh bowstrings, new ropes, weaving his hair into the web of the loom. Each time the Philistines are hidden and spring on him, and each time his strength holds. She says: how can you say I love you when your heart is not with me? You have mocked me these three times and have not told me where your great strength lies. She presses him every day with her words and urges him, until his soul is vexed to death.
He tells her everything: if I am shaved, then my strength will leave me, and I shall become weak and be like any other man. Delilah sees that he has told her his heart. She sends for the lords of the Philistines, who come with the money in their hands. She lets him sleep on her knees. She calls a man to shave off the seven locks of his head; his strength leaves him. The Philistines seize him, gouge out his eyes, bring him down to Gaza, bind him with bronze shackles, and set him to grinding at the mill in the prison. The hair of his head begins to grow after it has been shaved. The lords of the Philistines gather to offer sacrifice to Dagon their god — our god has given Samson our enemy into our hand — and to celebrate. The house is full; about three thousand men and women are on the roof, watching. They call for Samson to entertain them. He asks the servant guiding him to let him feel the pillars the house rests on, so that he may lean against them. He prays: Lord God, remember me and strengthen me only this once, that I may be avenged on the Philistines for my two eyes. He grasps the two middle pillars on which the house rests, leans his weight against them, and pushes with all his might. The house falls on the lords and on all the people. So the dead whom he killed at his death were more than those he had killed during his life.
- 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.