“205. THE BEGUILEMENT—JUDGES 16:4-18”

The Beguilement—Jdg_16:4-18

As Samson judged Israel twenty years, and as these twenty years could not well have commenced before that great action in which he singly smote the Philistines in the presence of the three thousand magnates of Judith by whom he had been delivered up, the remaining scenes of his life belong to the close of that period, when, one should suppose, he could not well be under, and was probably somewhat above, forty years of age. He is, therefore, now no longer young; but he is the same man—as strong as ever, and as weak as ever. “The princes of the Philistines knew already where Samson’s weakness lay, but not his strength,” Note: Bishop Hall—Contemplations, x. 5. His strength was so manifestly superhuman, that it was clear to them, that any ordinary means taken to destroy him must prove abortive. This admission on their part, incidentally indicated, is very important, and ought alone to satisfy those who incline to think that Samson was merely a very strong man. It shows that he was much more than this—that he was, for special purposes, endowed with powers far above any that can naturally belong to the strongest of the sons of men.

In the conviction they had attained, the object of the Philistines was to discover wherein lay his great strength—whether it consisted in the possession of any charm or amulet, the loss of which would divest him of his supernatural powers, and leave him nothing more than a strong man. We do not read of any king among the Philistines till the time of David, and then only at Gath. Yet in the time of Abraham they had a king. At this time each of the five great cities, Ashdod, Gaza, Askelon, Gath, and Ekron, seems to have formed, with its dependencies, a separate state, presided over by its own Seren Note: A peculiar title, rendered by “lord” and “prince” in the authorized version, and probably denoting, a chief or magistrate.—but united to each other by their common origin and interests, for general purposes. All these Seranim Note: The title only occurs thus in the plural. now made common cause against Samson. It was useless to bring armies into the field against an individual, and such an individual; but they were determined to support each other in the attempt to crush him, and to share among them whatever expense and trouble the attempt might involve. So they lay watchful for any advantage the proceedings of the Hebrew champion might offer. The careless hero was not long in affording them all the advantage they could have desired. They heard that he had become devoted to a woman named Delilah, inhabiting the vale of Sorek. The history does not say that she was a harlot, like the woman of Gaza; but neither is she called his wife; and had she been such, she would heave been taken to his own house, and we should not find him visiting at hers. Nothing could have occurred more opportunely for the Philistine Seranim. They repaired to her, or sent to her in one of the intervals of Samson’s visits, offering her a large bribe to entice from him the secret of his strength. The sum was eleven hundred pieces of silver from each of the five. The pieces were probably shekels, in which case the whole sum amounted to something more than six hundred pounds of our money—a sum not inconsiderable even now, and a very large one for that age and country.

In reading the record of this enticement, we should bear in mind that the facts are related with extreme brevity. In the conversations between Samson and the woman, results only are stated—the final purport only given, without any notice of the little artifices of conversation and dalliance, the watching for favorable moments and natural turns of thought and incident, which disguised the wickedness of the design, and gave a seemingly natural turn to the woman’s attempt to get possession of his secret. The various attempts on her part to betray the confidence she supposed Samson had reposed in her, are so related, also, as to appear to have followed in rapid and immediate succession. But the form of Scriptural narrative does not require us to suppose this was necessarily the case: that it was so, is against the probable truth of circumstances and natural analogies. It is far more likely that these attempts were made at different visits of Samson to the vale of Sorek, when a sufficient interval had pared to blunt the keenness of any suspicions that may have been awakened in his mind. Simple-minded and confiding as Samson was, he was not altogether so silly as an unintelligent mode of reading the narrative may make him appear.

Samson very clearly indicated his consciousness of what became him, by the siege he stood before his great trust was surrendered. He did this after a manner of his own, however; and his conduct is less becoming than formerly with his wife at Timnath. Her he told plainly that he could not disclose his secret, although that was one of small importance in comparison, But to Delilah he seems incapable of giving a distinct refusal. He shrinks from the importunity to which it would expose him; and therefore he tries to amuse her by one invention after another, which, but for the immediate test to which she subjected them—that is, if she had been, as he supposed, sincere—might have passed off with her for the real secret.

First, he told her that if he were bound with seven green withes which had never been dried, then he should become weak as another man, and unable to rend them asunder. This is interesting, as showing that ropes of crude vegetable fibers were in use among the Hebrews of that age, as they are now in many countries, composed of such things as vine tendrils, the tough fibers of trees, pliable twisted rods, osiers, hazels, and the like. Such ropes are strong enough; although less compact, and of greater bulk in proportion to their strength, than those of spun flax or hemp. The strength of such ropes may be estimated from the fact, that the legs of wild elephants and buffaloes are usually bound with them, when newly caught, in India; and it is rarely indeed that they give way to the force of the most powerful animals that the whole creation can supply. Such ropes are strongest, and less liable to break, when green—that is, newly made; but we suppose that it was not on this account Samson was led to name them, but because of some occult relation to his own strength which they might be supposed to bear. Not doubting that she should now win her reward, the faithless woman then bound him, probably while he slept, with the green ropes, which the Philistines very gladly provided. She then roused him with the words—“The Philistines be upon thee, Samson.” This was no vain alarm. They were there, probably in an adjoining room, and were to have rushed in on a preconcerted signal, were it found that he was properly secured. But Samson sprung up, and rent the green ropes from his arms like burnt tow. The Philistine liers in wait, finding this to be the case, probably did not show themselves; and the woman was thus enabled to pass the matter off as a fond attempt to test his truthfulness. This supposition that the Philistines did not show themselves, and that Samson was not aware of their presence, relieves the transactions from much of their apparent difficulty, and explains that Samson could still go on dallying with the danger. The authorized translation unreasonably places the liers in wait in the same chamber; but this needlessly perplexes the subject, and has no warrant in the original, which signifies that “liers in wait sat for her in an inner chamber.”

The second time, when he seemed to yield to her importunities, he told her that new twisted or spun ropes would do—showing that such ropes were known, although those of crude vegetable had not yet gone out of use. Flax, we know, was before this time an object of culture in both Egypt and Palestine, and with this, such ropes seem to have been made. Hemp was also probably cultivated, although the fact is not so distinctly mentioned in the sacred books. The result in this instance was precisely the same as before.

In the next invention by which Samson tried to amuse the importunity of Delilah, he approached dangerously near his great secret. His infatuation was like that of the moth, approaching gradually nearer and nearer to the flame which destroys it at last. This device was suggested by the presence of the small loom in which the women of those days wove their household stuffs—a kind of industry from which it would seem that females even of Delilah’s stamp, did not hold themselves exempt. These looms, as shown in Egyptian sculptures, and as still subsisting in the East, are very simple, and comparatively light, and must by no means be confounded with the ponderous apparatus of our own hand-loom weavers. Samson told her that if the long locks of his hair were woven in with the web, he would become as powerless as any other man. This was done; and to make the matter more certain, the guileful woman actually fastened the web, with the hair thus woven in it, with a strong pin or nail to the wall or to the floor. But this availed not; for when the alarm was given, although he could not disengage his hair from the web, he rose and went forth dragging the weaving frame, the web and the pin—the whole apparatus—after him by his hair.

At length, worn out by the woman’s importunities, who protested that his repeated deceptions, and his obstinacy in refusing to gratify her curiosity with the knowledge of a secret, of so little consequence to her but for the love she bore to him—and, above all, seeing that there was nothing in the past to give him that knowledge of the treachery which we possess-he yielded—“he told her all that was in his heart.” His hair, he informed her, was the sign and seal of his consecrated condition from the birth, by which alone he held all his superhuman strength. To take off his hair would be to cut him off from that consecrated condition, and divest him of the powers he held in virtue of it. He would then “be like any other man”—not necessarily a weak man—but not stronger than any man of his muscles and sinews might be expected to be. The woman saw, from the earnestness of his manner, that this time he had not deceived her. One might drink she would have been moved from her fell purpose by this strong proof of his regard for her—but no: the use she made of it was to revive the, by this time, wavering faith of the Philistine Seranim as to the success of their scheme, by causing such strong assurance of success to be conveyed to them, that they hurried down with the money, for which she had sold Samson into their hand. The terms of the message would almost imply, that they had given up the enterprise, at least in this form, and determined to be fooled no more as they had been—“Come up this once, for he hath showed me all his heart.”

Autor: JOHN KITTO