Samson 3 - Judges 14

There is a lot going on here in chapter 14 and we’ll be using a lot of cultural context here to understand what’s really going on. According to TB, Samson lived up in the foothills at about 800 feet elevation in a town named Tzorah. Below them was a Philistine city called Timnah and one day while Samson was down in the Philistine city, he saw a woman and saw one of the “daughters of the Philistines” and wanted her to be his wife. Interestingly, TB suggests that the phrase “saw a woman” “means more than to notice her existence; it means he saw her unveiled face, meaning from typical Middle Eastern cultural norms this was an immodest girl.” I’m not the expert on these matters, and he clearly knows more than me, and I put this out there because I thought that it was interesting because it possibly speaks to her character, but I’m going to take it with a grain of salt. I’m always wary of a man condemning a woman as being immodest, regardless of who either party is, it could be true or it could be a way to demonize her and I usually withhold my judgment on the situation.

Samson sees her and tells his parents that he wants to marry her and to make the arrangements. The parents answer “is there never a woman among the daughters of thy brethren, or among all my people, that thou goest to take a wife of the uncircumcised Philistines?” They had an angel announce his miraculous birth, Samson is supposed to be a Nazarite, and they want him to marry a Israelite woman as was commanded by God. Samson just tells them “Get her for me; for she pleaseth me well.” TB says that his attitude towards his parents is very disrespectful.

The writer of this story comments, “But his father and his mother knew not that it was the of the Lord, that he sought an occasion against the Philistines: for at that time the Philistines had dominion over Israel.” I’m going to push back a little here and say what I think this verse means. I don’t think that it means that God made Samson want to break the commandments and marry this girl because he needed to an excuse to attack the Philistines. God doesn’t need an excuse to do anything, he could have made these arrangements even without Samson breaking the commandments. And I don’t think that God even makes us break the commandments, because that’s contrary to His nature, we are responsible for our own decisions. However, I do think that God can create the circumstances that he knows we will fall into sin if it serves His purposes.

That sounds kind of twisted but it’s something that I noticed and I’m still working it out. For instance, God needed Moses to leave his plush life in Egypt to go be mentored in the desert by Jethro, so it’s possible that God created a circumstance where Moses killed that Egyptian because then he absolutely had to flee rapidly and coming back peacefully wasn’t an option. Moses still made that choice though, he was still responsible for it, God didn’t force him to kill that guy, but it’s possible He set the circumstances up. Is that this situation? Maybe. The other part of this is that God doesn’t force us to commit sin, but when we do, He can and will use it to further his own purposes. Like when Lamoni killed his servants who had the sheep scattered, God used that to eventually create the entire community of the anti-Nephi-Lehis, or the people of Ammon. Could that be what’s happening here? Probably. God is using Samson’s poor choices to serve His own purposes, and that happens a lot.

One thing that sticks me in this situation is that the parent go along with it, they go down to Timnath, the Philistine town where this girl lives, and negotiates with the girl’s parents so that their daughter can marry Samson. I wonder what it would have looked like if the parents had refused? I’m sure that this wasn’t the first time that Samson had made some outrageous request and his parents were probably just exhausted at this point trying to get him to make the right choices, and I speak from experience, you can not force someone to make correct choices if they do not want to. But it also begs the question, where is the line between support, acceptance that you can’t for them, and enabling these poor choices. And I can’t even give these parents a hard time because I have been there, to the detriment of my own children. Reading this just brought back a lot of my own parental guilt and questioning where I went wrong and what I should have done differently.

The parents agree to go try to make the arrangements, so the parents go down to Timnath one way and Samson goes down to Timnath another way. TB says that it’s because, as a Nazarite, Samson isn’t supposed to be around grapes that the quick way that the parents took was through a grape vineyard, so he went a different way to avoid it. This explains why, when a “young lion roared against him,” his parents weren’t around to see what happened. Interestingly, TB says that there are 5 words in Hebrew used to mean “lion,” and the word they use depends on the age of the lion. He says that the word “gur” is used to mean a baby lion, or a cub, and the words range up to “layish” which is a full sized, big daddy type lion. The word used here is “kephir” which is the stage just above a baby cub, “so what Samson fought was a nature cub, but not even a young adult lion. So the typical illustrations of a large male lion with a flowing main is a little over the top.” I thought that was interesting.

Another point to make is that when Samson is going to fight this lion it says “the Spirit of the Lord came mightily upon him” and he used that Spirit to kill the lion. The IM points out that our usage of the Phrase “the Spirit of the Lord” in our modern age means that someone “is a spiritual person, that is, he is close to God, has a testimony, demonstrates spiritual power, and so on. And such spiritual power comes only through obedience and righteousness.” But instead of this phrase meaning that Samson was a spiritually strong and obedient man and that spiritual strength was what enabled him to kill the lion, the IM says that the phrase was used 3 times in the account of Samson, saying “but in every case it has reference to Samson’s demonstration of great courage and physical strength. Samson’s remarkable strength was a gift of God derived from and sustained by the Nazarite vow he was under. Perhaps when the author of Judges used the phrase ‘the Spirit of God’ he did not use it a sone does today, but used it more in the way that one would now use the phrase ‘spiritual gifts.’… Samson’s first was strength, and each time he used that gift in a remarkable manner, the writer of the scripture gave credit to the Lord, the true source of the gift, by saying ‘the Spirit of the Lord’ came mightily upon him.”

It would be such a disconnect to see all that Samson does and still say that he is a spiritually mighty man because he was constantly disobedient and contemptuous of God’s laws and commandments. But it is possible that Samson was given gifts by God, usually of strength, at certain times to help Samson carry out certain tasks. I don’t know why killing a young lion cub would further God’s purpose, but that doesn’t mean anything, God doesn’t have to explain his purposes to me. Anyway, the lion is killed and left in the desert, and Samson goes and meets his parents in Timnath and he doesn’t tell his parents what happened, why? I don’t know. He talks to the girl and still wants to marry her, they make the arrangements and go back up the hill to wait until the right time.

After the right amount of time waiting, Samson goes back down the hill to marry the girl, and his parents take a different route. While on the way back down the hill, Samson comes across the spot where he killed the lion last time and sees it’s body and within the body is a bunch of bees and honey. So Samson takes a huge scoop of honey out of this dead lion carcass and continues back down the hill and by the time he reaches his parents, his still has some honey left and he gives them some and they eat it, but again, he doesn’t tell them about the lion or where the honey came from. TB notes that the reason Samson doesn’t tell his parents where the honey came from because they would have been horrified because not only were Nazarites not supposed to touch anything dead, especially an unclean dead animal carcass, but to eat something that came out of that would have resulted in a very long and expensive ritualistic cleansing process. Even though Samson’s parents weren’t Nazarites, the rules in the Torah were such that eating honey out of dead lion body would have resulted in the same purification rules.

The wedding festivals at that time lasted 7 days and were basically a party for 7 days, a short ceremony put on by the parents, but then the marriage wasn’t finalized until the end of the 7th day when the couple went into their house and consummated their marriage and the bed cloth that we covered several months ago was displayed, proving that the girl was a virgin, then the marriage was official. Until that last part happened, the couple was not considered married, regardless of how far into the wedding week they were. This is important for later.

The wedding week starts, and the timeline gets fuzzy because there are mentions of third and seventh days and all that. TB says that there references of how many days into the wedding celebration they are and also the numbered day of the week, all mixed together to get what we have now. Anyway, at some point, Samson is entertaining the guests, and tells them “I will not put forth a riddle unto you: if ye can certainly declare it me within the seven days of the feast, and find it out, then I will give you thirty sheets and thirty changes of garments: but if ye cannot declare it me, then shall ye give me thirty sheets and thirty changes of garment.” They all agree to the riddle. TB notes that these sheets referenced here were really soft pieces of clothing that were worn between the skin and the harsh, itchy outer clothing.

The riddle is “out of the eater came froth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness.” This is obviously referring to the lion that Samson killed and the honey that came out of it, but TB says, “Who could ever guess such a thing? This is nothing that logic or deductive reasoning or cleverness could ever penetrate; one had to be there at the lion incident to have any idea what Samson was talking about Solving such a riddle is impossible. Here again is Samson’s character flaws showing themselves; he organized a sucker bet at this own wedding, taking advantage of his own guests… after 3 days of all 30 men working together to solve this unsolvable riddle, they knew they had been had. Yet apparently they continued to try various methods to find the answer. Unsuccessful, they were beginning to realize that not only had Samson made a fool out of them but that they were going to leave the wedding feast a little poorer than they had arrived. This infuriated them.”

These men couldn’t figure out the answer, so they did the only thing they could think of, they threatened the life of the girl Samson was marrying, sure, makes sense. They tell her, “Entice thy husband, that he may declare unto us the riddle, lest we burn thee and thy father’s house with fire.” Tell us the answer or we’re going to kill you and your family. What choice did she really have here? So she cries to Samson to tell her the answer, and he resists almost the entire time, until the very last day, when he finally gives up and tells her the answer to the riddle. The men of the city come to Samson and tell him the answer and he knows that this girl betrayed him. So now he has to pay these guests all this clothing, so what does he do? Again, the only thing that makes sense, he goes to a nearby town and kills 30 men and takes their nice fancy clothes to give these guys, and then he leaves the wedding feast without consummating it and goes home back up into the hills.

Why did he kill these men? Unless I’m missing something here, this is just murder, and not even murder for a good reason, just so that you can pay a debt to people that you tried to trick in the first place? Like this makes no sense. Again, it says that “the Spirit of the Lord came upon him” that he had the strength to do this. I find it difficult to believe that God gave Samson the Spirit in order to murder these men, but it makes sense in the context that the IM said, great strength was Samson’s gift of the Spirit, therefore in that capacity, it was used. Also in the way that God uses people’s terrible choices for his own purposes, to sow discord between Israel and the Philistines. Because if God can’t get his people to leave their intwined relationships with the unbelievers, He will sow division so that the Philistines will end the relationship with Israel. This is what happened with my ex-huband. I wouldn’t leave him, so I think God encouraged him to leave me. I needed out of that relationship and I wasn’t going to leave. Similar here, Israel needed to leave their relationship with the Philistines in order to worship God properly, but they wouldn’t do it, so God made the Philistines hate Israel to severe that relationship.

This whole ordeal hasn’t been great for the girl, I think. She was marrying a jackass and had her life and family threatened by her wedding guests, then her soon to be husband left her at the altar basically. She ended up marrying Samson’s companion, who was his best man. I wonder how that relationship went. I hope it was good, for her sake.