And if we have dwelt exhaustively upon this moment, it is because we sense that someone whose mother could look upon him, if only for a moment, from such a distance, whose mother mourned him even before his birth, will always be somewhat alienated and remote in his dealings with others. He will always lack the capacity for simple human contact that comes so naturally to most people, and will never be able to be – as Samson himself phrased it, toward the end of his life – ‘an ordinary man’.
And thus, even if Samson’s mother has been miraculously ‘cured’ of her barrenness, it would seem that she has directly passed along to her son the barrenness-as-metaphor that sets a person apart from the vital core of human existence – a unique case of ‘hereditary sterility’.
Yet it is God, and not Samson’s mother, who has decreed that he will be a Nazirite, in other words, a person who places a partition between himself and life – and indeed in the Hebrew word nazir we hear a suggestive conflation of the root ndr, meaning ‘vow’, and the word zar, ‘stranger’. Nevertheless, it is hard not to feel that it is also the mother’s view of her son – her intimate gaze upon the embryo she carries, and her chilling verdict – which no less than God’s command has determined the fateful course of his life until his dying day.
* * *
The strangeness conferred upon the unborn child is soon multiplied. Manoah, taken by surprise, prays to God and requests further instructions: ‘Oh, my Lord! Please let the man of God that You sent come to us again and let him instruct us how to act with the boy that is to be born.’
‘The boy that is to be born?’ Still in his mother’s womb, Samson is already classified by his father, assigned a formal, arm’s-length definition. For even if Manoah’s lips have longed for many years to pronounce the words ‘our son’, ‘my child’, ‘my boy’, he takes care to use the term used by the man of God as quoted by his wife, perhaps because he senses that he must, even now, maintain an awestruck distance from one who will soon be an exalted figure.
And Manoah perhaps guesses something more: that it will be necessary to handle this child like a precious vessel – maybe too precious – which is possibly beyond the spiritual means of its own parents; and that this will not be a child who can be raised according to one’s natural instincts alone; and God, I beg of you, kindly furnish additional instructions …
And indeed, the angel returns, but again chooses to appear before the wife as ‘she was sitting in the field and her husband Manoah was not with her’. And thus the impression is strengthened that the angel for some reason prefers to entrust the information, the secret, to the woman, and that he endeavours to meet with her when she is alone, and not merely ‘alone’, but when her husband is not with her. But she – perhaps for fear of gossip, or out of loyalty to her husband and a sense of their shared destiny – wants Manoah to be present at the meeting. This time, the narrator goes into a bit of detail: ‘The woman ran in haste to tell her husband.’ And we can imagine her strong legs racing through the stalks of corn, her arms pumping, slicing the air, the thoughts flying through her head, as she reaches Manoah and tells him that the same man, ‘the man who came to me before’, has appeared to her once again.
Vayakom vayelech Manoah aharei ishto: ‘Manoah rose and followed his wife.’
The ring and resonance of these words convey the slow, heavy movements of Manoah, whose name means ‘rest’ and, in more recent Hebrew, also means ‘late’, in the sense of ‘deceased’. Thus, in five words that stand in amusing contrast to ‘the woman ran in haste to tell her husband’, the narrator sketched a sluggard of sorts who drags after his quick, energetic wife. Indeed Manoah was chastised by the rabbinic authors of the Talmud, who labelled him an am ha’aretz, an ignoramus, for transgressing a cardinal rule of gender: ‘A man does not walk behind a woman on the road, even his own wife – and, even if he finds himself on a bridge with her, she should be beside him, and whoever walks behind a woman when crossing a river will have no share in the world to come.’3
So Manoah follows his wife, meets the stranger, attempts to size him up. Although he had earlier explicitly requested that the Almighty bring back the ‘man of God’, Manoah may not yet be free of a nagging suspicion about the fellow whom his wife met alone in the field – twice – after which she knew immediately that she was to bear a child. ‘Are you the man who spoke to my wife?’ he demands, and the reader can imagine, beyond the words, the dejected look he directs at the angel, and hear the mixture of mistrust and jealousy and the irritable humility of a man who cannot help but recognise his own inferiority.
Note that Manoah does not ask ‘Are you the man who came to my wife?’ Perhaps something restrains him from using that blunt word, whose utterance in such a charged setting – two men, one possibly pregnant woman – could well push the three into out-and-out confrontation. Yet at the same time, Manoah calls the stranger a ‘man’ and not ‘the man of God’, and juxtaposes the words ‘man’ and ‘wife’, coupling the two in an intimate cocoon while he stands outside, thus exposing further his suspicions and the jealousy that flickers behind his question.4
And the angel answers, curtly: ‘I am.’
‘May your words soon come true,’ says Manoah, adding: ‘What rules shall be observed for the boy?’ And here again there seeps an undertone of wariness toward the stranger, and maybe toward the promised son too, and it is clear that Manoah still does not believe he is conversing with a man of God, much less an angel, for if he did he would surely fling himself upon the ground and not speak to him as he has, with a lack of courtesy and not one word of supplication.
And here arises the question: has the angel changed his appearance in between his two ‘performances’, before the wife and now the husband? For it is clear that in Manoah’s eyes he does not appear unmistakably to be ‘an angel of God, very frightening’. Did the woman exaggerate, for some reason, in her description – or perhaps the angel’s appearance has not changed at all, but rather the real difference lies in the abilities of the man and the woman to ‘read’ the hidden identity of their interlocutor?
The angel, once again, provides detailed instructions regarding the right conduct that will ensure the proper birth and rearing of God’s Nazirite. At the same time, it is hard not to notice that, throughout the conversation, he speaks to Manoah with obvious reluctance, as if under protest, thus emphasising the man’s superfluousness, his second-class status in relation to his wife: ‘The woman must abstain from all the things against which I warned her.’
Upon re-reading we notice that the angel too, when he repeats the instructions to Manoah, does not mention the prohibition against cutting the child’s hair. What is the meaning of this repeated omission, this time on the angel’s part? When the woman did so, it could be attributed to her temporary confusion. But this time the omission takes on a more serious aspect: Samson’s weak spot was, of course, his hair, and the shearing of his locks was what, in the end, brought about his death. Can it be that the woman and the angel wished, for some reason, to conceal from the father the secret of the son’s weakness? Is it possible that that the two of them sensed that in a matter so critical to the life of ‘the child that is to be born’ Manoah could not be relied upon to keep the secret?
Even after the outlining of the instructions, the tension between the husband and the angel continues. Manoah’s situation is intolerable: a sea of information overwhelms him from every side; he is flooded by harsh, conflicting feelings, foremost the nagging suspicion that his wife and the haughty stranger are weaving an elaborate conspiracy against him. Even someone far quicker and cleverer would feel, at a moment like this, that his mind was growing dim. In his distress, Manoah attempts to draw closer to the angel: ‘Let us detain you and prepare a kid for you,’ he offers. The angel declines, for no apparent reason, in a hostile and judgmental manner: ‘If you detain me, I shall not eat your food,’ he says, adding that Manoah should sacrifice the kid to God, not to him. Maybe he suspects that Manoah merely wants
to detain him, in order to try to figure him out. ‘For Manoah did not know that he was an angel of the Lord,’ reads the text, and this lack of knowledge, even after a few minutes have gone by, further attests to the dullness of Manoah’s character.
Embarrassed, Manoah asks the angel’s name, appending a clumsy explanation to his question: ‘We should like to honour you when your words come true,’ in other words, when your prophecy comes to pass. But the angel rebuffs him: ‘You must not ask for my name; it is peli,’ miraculous, unknowable. ‘Peli,’ he retorts; in other words, beyond your ken, too big for you. One can assume that this word, spoken out of a clear desire to silence Manoah, will long be etched in his memory. An insult like this cannot but echo in days to come, when he will face his son and will run into – as into a wall – his unfathomable, strange, miraculous deeds.
Manoah, hesitant and confused following the angel’s off-putting reply, places the kid and the meal offering on the rock. The angel performs a miracle, produces fire from the rock, and then ascends heavenward as Manoah and his wife watch and fling themselves face downwards on the ground. And only now, finally, does Manoah believe that indeed this was an angel of God. ‘We shall surely die, for we have seen a divine being,’ he tells his wife, his voice quivering with fear – a fear not only of God and angel but of everything that the astonishing encounter is destined to bring about in their lives. And maybe it is also a fear of the unborn child, their child, for whom they had waited and prayed, who even now is surrounded not only by amniotic fluid but by an impenetrable membrane of enigma and menace.
‘We will surely die,’ mumbles Manoah, and his wife responds with simple logic, perhaps also with subtle scorn that she draws from the angel’s air of chilly condescension, which still hovers over them: ‘Had the Lord meant to take our lives, He would not have accepted a burnt offering and meal offering from us, nor let us see all these things, and He would not have made such an announcement to us.’
And so, this woman, who until moments earlier had been reducible to the epithet ‘the childless one’, grows larger in the reader’s mind with every passing verse. Perhaps it is the new pregnancy that empowers and ennobles her, or perhaps what instils new confidence, despite all her doubts and anxieties, is the knowledge that she carries a child who is one of a kind. It is hard to imagine, moreover, that a woman as sharp as she is had failed to notice that the angel opted – twice – to appear to her alone.
But it may also be that these guesses are incorrect, confusing cause and effect; and it is rather that she has been this way all along, a strong and quick-witted woman, resourceful and brave, and precisely for these reasons the angel preferred to bring her, and not her husband, the news. It is interesting to note in this connection that Rembrandt, when he drew the encounter between the couple and the angel, ‘pushed’ Manoah face down into a submissive, even ridiculous position – at first glance he resembles a sack of potatoes – whereas the wife, in contrast to the biblical account, sits erect beside her fallen husband, exuding nobility, confidence, and determination. It is clear that Rembrandt too, like many who have read the story, sensed that the woman is the strong, dominant one. And if this is so, we can already imagine how decisive her influence, and that of the words she has just spoken, will be upon Samson – from the womb until his dying day.
* * *
Zorah today is a kibbutz, located not far from a tel, or mound, that almost certainly sits atop the archaeological remains of the biblical settlement. Its founders, members of the socialist ‘United Kibbutz’ movement and veterans of the legendary Palmach fighting force, settled there towards the end of 1948, in the midst of the War of Independence that had broken out when the armies of four Arab countries invaded the newborn State of Israel. During this war, as in the wars in the time of the Judges, the Judean lowlands were of great strategic importance and therefore a focus of the warring forces. When the Israeli army drew near the Arab village of Sar’a, most of its inhabitants fled, and the ones who remained were expelled. All became refugees, most of whom ended up in the Deheishe refugee camp not far from Hebron, where their families reside to this day.
It is mid-October 2002. A hot, gloomy day in the lowlands. The radio reports heavy traffic at the Samson Junction, between Zorah and Eshtaol. A dirt path winds away from the main highway into a forest, leading the hiker into the abandoned gardens of Arab Sar’a. There, hidden in a small grove, suddenly appear two figures, a mother and son, Palestinians who have come from Deheishe to harvest the olives from trees that once belonged to their family. The woman vigorously shakes the branches of the tree and beats at them with a stick, and her son, a boy of about ten, swiftly and silently gathers the black hail of olives on a sheet spread out beneath the tree.
Here, roughly three thousand years ago, in this same brown, rugged landscape, amidst olive and oak trees, terebinths and carobs, the wife of Manoah lay down to give birth. Here she gave the boy his name, Shimshon, which in Hebrew connotes ‘little sun’, and perhaps also a conflation of shemesh and on – sun plus strength, virility.
There is, of course, great similarity between Samson and other ‘sun-heroes’ such as Hercules, Perseus, Prometheus and Mopsus, son of Apollo.5 In the Talmud, Rabbi Yohanan sought to ‘purify’ Samson of any hint of paganism: ‘Samson was called by the name of the Holy One, Blessed be He, as it is said, ‘For the Lord God is a sun and a shield’ (Psalms 84:12) … as God protects the entire world, so too Samson in his time protects Israel.’6 Whereas the first-century Judeo-Roman historian Josephus Flavius, in his Jewish Antiquities, asserts that ‘Samson’ means ‘strong’, adding that ‘the child grew apace and it was plain from the frugality of his diet and his loosely flowing locks that he was to be a prophet’.7
‘The boy grew up, and the Lord blessed him’, the Bible tells us, and the Talmud comments, ‘He was blessed b’amato’, the word amah (literally, ‘cubit’) being a euphemism for penis: ‘His amah was like that of other men’, continues the Talmud, ‘but his seed was like a fast-flowing stream’.8 Even if this rabbinic commentary ventures fancifully far afield, Samson’s subsequent deeds do substantiate the general thrust of its assumption. And no less important than this particular divine blessing is what comes thereafter: ‘The spirit of the Lord began to move him in the encampment of Dan, between Zorah and Eshtaol.’
What exactly is this divine ‘spirit’ that begins to ‘move’ the lad? Was it a sense of mission, a calling, or an interior burst of inspiration? Lefa’amo, reads the Hebrew, from the root ‘to beat’ or ‘throb’, a clear echo of the human heartbeat, which pounds louder as one’s emotions are stirred. Indeed this sound, persistent and agitated, will surge from Samson’s body and soul at every stage of his life. The Jerusalem Talmud, attempting to give concrete physical expression to Samson’s arousal, declares that, when the holy spirit came upon him, each of his footsteps was as great as the distance from Zorah to Eshtaol, and the locks of his hair would ring like a bell – pa’amon in Hebrew, from that same root – and the sound would carry for that distance as well.9 The Zohar or ‘Book of Splendour’, the central work of Jewish mysticism, offers an appealingly vivid description: ‘Lefa’amo. The spirit would come and go, come and go, and never properly settle within him. And it is therefore written, “The spirit of the Lord began to move him,” for this was the case from the beginning.’10 The medieval commentator Gersonides, in another play on words, interprets Samson’s arousal from the hero’s rational point of view: ‘One time (pa’am) he would decide to go to war against the Philistines, another time he would decide not to, like a bell that strikes this way and that.’
Yet a simple reading of the text reveals that Samson is not stirred by any calling or inspiration but rather in a different, unexpected direction. For what does the young man do when he is aroused by the spirit of God? Does he begin gathering an army in order to redeem his people as soon as possible from the Philistines, or amass political power within his tribe, or try to get the blessing and support of a high priest? N
ot at all: Samson awakens to love.
‘Samson went down to Timnah; and while in Timnah, he noticed a girl among the Philistine women.’
Straight away he goes back up the hill, home to Zorah, turns to his father and mother, and declares: ‘I noticed one of the Philistine women in Timnah; now get her for me as a wife.’ And although the word ‘love’ is not stated here explicitly, one can sense in Samson’s words the determination and depth of feeling that churn inside him. It is hard to know if he himself is capable at this moment of differentiating his tangled emotions, of separating love from the great new ‘divine spirit’, but is this so surprising? Love, and first love all the more, is doubtless likely to arouse in a person the sense that he has just been born and that a new, powerful, and unfamiliar wind is coursing through him.
Here is the place to explain – for those who puzzle over this speedy coupling of a Nazirite with a woman – that the Nazirite in Judaism is not the same as a monk in the Christian or Buddhist traditions.11 In the Torah (see Numbers, Chapter 6), the Jewish Nazirite is commanded to refrain from three things: he is forbidden to drink wine or to eat grapes or their derivatives; he may not cut his hair; and he may not go near a dead body (a prohibition not specified in the case of Samson). On the other hand, he is not forbidden to marry or to be intimate with a woman. Still, the reader is advised not to harbour expectations of juicy escapades akin to the tales of lecherous monks in Chaucer or Boccaccio. The biblical writer – who, like most authors, is a natural-born killjoy – is quick to remark, regarding Samson’s attraction to the Philistine woman, ‘that this was the Lord’s doing; He was seeking a pretext against the Philistines, for the Philistines were ruling over Israel at that time.’
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