Delilah, paid by Philistine rulers, wears Samson down until he reveals that his strength lies in his uncut hair; blinded and enslaved after his capture, he pulls down the temple of Dagon in his final act, killing more Philistines in his death than in his life.
Further context
2 min readDelilah is the only woman in his life who is named, and whether she was Philistine is never stated. The rulers of the five Philistine cities each offer her eleven hundred shekels of silver to find out where his strength lies, which is a very large sum and indicates how much of a problem he had become.
She asks him directly, four times, and each time he lies and each time she tests the answer immediately with Philistines waiting in the room. Seven fresh bowstrings. New ropes never used. Weaving the seven braids of his hair into a loom. Each time she says the Philistines are upon him and each time he breaks free.
The remarkable thing is that he keeps coming back. He watches her test three separate lies with armed men in the house and stays, and when she nags him day after day until he is tired to death, he tells her everything, including the vow he has been breaking his whole life.
She has his head shaved while he sleeps on her lap, and this time when she wakes him the strength is gone. The sentence describing it is the saddest in the whole sequence: he did not know that the LORD had left him.
They gouge out his eyes, take him to Gaza, bind him with bronze shackles and set him to grinding grain in the prison, which was work normally done by women or animals. Then a single clause changes direction: the hair on his head began to grow again after it had been shaved.
The Philistine rulers gather for a festival to Dagon, their god, to celebrate, and while they are in high spirits they send for him to entertain them. Three thousand men and women are on the roof watching. He asks the servant guiding him to put him where he can feel the pillars the temple rests on, and prays: Sovereign LORD, remember me. Please, God, strengthen me just once more, and let me with one blow get revenge on the Philistines for my two eyes.
He pushes and the building comes down, and he kills more in his death than in his life.
Dagon was long thought to be a fish god, on the strength of a medieval Jewish etymology connecting the name with the Hebrew word for fish. The connection is now generally rejected: the name is more plausibly related to a West Semitic word for grain, and Dagan is attested as a major deity at Ebla and Mari a thousand years earlier, associated with agriculture and with kingship. The god the Philistines were thanking for capturing Samson was a grain god, at a harvest festival, in a country where the man had burned their standing crops.
Philistine temple architecture with two central wooden pillars on stone bases supporting the roof has been excavated at Tell Qasile near Tel Aviv, which makes the mechanics of the collapse plausible in a way they were not before the 1970s.
He is the only deliverer of the whole period to be listed later among examples of faith, which has puzzled readers for a long time, and his last recorded prayer asks for revenge for his eyes.