Samson and Delilah

A great hall packed with laughing, feasting people. Thousands more crowd the roof. A blind prisoner is led in to entertain them. He asks the boy who is guiding him for just one thing. Let me feel the pillars.

Samson is leading Israel as a judge, and he is still the strongest man anyone has ever seen. Once, in the Philistine city of Gaza, his enemies locked the city gates and lay in wait to kill him at dawn. But Samson got up at midnight, took hold of the gates, posts and all, pulled them loose, and carried them up a hill. Nobody can stop him. But Samson has a weakness, and it isn't in his muscles. He falls in love with a woman in the valley of Sorek. Her name is Delilah.

The rulers of the Philistines come to Delilah with an offer. “Coax him. Find out the secret of his great strength, and how we can tie him up and overpower him. Each one of us will give you eleven hundred pieces of silver.” It's a fortune. So Delilah asks Samson. “Tell me the secret of your great strength. How could someone tie you up?” Samson plays along. “Tie me with seven fresh bowstrings that haven't been dried, and I'll be as weak as anyone else.” So she does, while men wait hidden in the next room. “Samson, the Philistines are on you!” He snaps the bowstrings like a thread of yarn that comes too near a flame.

She tries again. “You've made a fool of me. You told me lies.” New ropes that have never been used, he says. She ties him. He snaps them off his arms like threads. Then: weave the seven locks of my hair into the cloth on your loom. She does it while he sleeps. He wakes and pulls the whole loom away. By now it's obvious what Delilah is doing. And yet Samson keeps coming back. “How can you say you love me,” she says, “when your heart isn't with me? Three times you've made a fool of me.” She nags him day after day, until he is sick to death of it. And at last he tells her everything. “No razor has ever touched my head, because I have been a Nazirite to God from my mother's womb. If my head is shaved, my strength will leave me.”

Delilah knows this time it's the truth. She sends for the Philistine rulers, and they come with the silver in their hands. She lulls Samson to sleep on her knees, and calls a man to shave off the seven locks of his hair. “Samson, the Philistines are on you!” He wakes up and thinks, I'll go out like before and shake myself free. But he doesn't know that the Lord has left him. That may be the saddest line in the whole story. The Philistines seize him and put out his eyes. They take him down to Gaza, bind him with bronze chains, and set him to grinding grain in the prison, round and round, like an animal at a mill. And then the book of Judges adds one quiet sentence. The hair of his head began to grow again.

The Philistine rulers gather for a great sacrifice to their god Dagon. “Our god has handed Samson our enemy over to us!” In high spirits, they call for Samson to entertain them. A young servant leads him in by the hand and stands him between the pillars. “Let me feel the pillars that hold up the temple,” Samson says, “so I can lean on them.” The house is full, and about three thousand men and women are up on the roof, watching. Then Samson prays. “Lord God, remember me. Please strengthen me, just this once, O God, so that with one blow I may pay the Philistines back for my two eyes.” He takes hold of the two middle pillars, one with his right hand, one with his left. “Let me die with the Philistines!” He pushes with all his might, and the temple comes crashing down. Samson dies with those inside. His brothers and family come and carry him home, and bury him in the tomb of his father, Manoah. He had led Israel for twenty years.

Could one man bring down a building by pushing two pillars? Archaeology gives us a picture of how a temple like this might be built. At Tell Qasile, a Philistine site now inside the city of Tel Aviv, the archaeologist Amihai Mazar uncovered a temple from this era. Its roof was held up by two wooden pillars standing on stone bases, close together in the middle of the hall. Take away those two supports, and the roof would fall. It isn't Samson's temple, which stood in Gaza. But it shows that his story fits the way Philistine temples were built.

Samson and Delilah. You'll find it in Judges, chapter 16. Samson gave away his secret bit by bit, and lost far more than his hair. But even in the darkness of a prison, his hair began to grow, and he called on God again. So here's something to think about. What small compromises could slowly wear away your loyalty to God?