Lion's Honey (8 page)

To this may be added the well-known Israeli feeling, in the face of any threat that comes along, that the country’s security is crumbling – a feeling that also exists in the case of Samson, who in certain situations seems to shatter into pieces, his strength vanishing in the blink of an eye. This kind of collapse, however, does not reflect one’s actual strength, and often carries in its wake an overblown display of force, further complicating the situation. All of this attests, it would seem, to a rather feeble sense of ownership of the power that has been attained, and, of course, to a deep existential insecurity. This is
connected, without a doubt, to the very real dangers lying in wait for Israel, but also to the tragic formative experience of being a stranger in the world, the Jewish sense of not being a nation ‘like other nations’, and of the State of Israel as a country whose very existence is conditional, whose future is in doubt and steeped in jeopardy, feelings that all the nuclear bombs that Israel developed, in a program once known as the ‘Samson Option’, cannot eradicate.

After smiting the Philistines, Samson goes and establishes residence in the cave of the rock of Etam, which would appear to be located near the town of Etam in the territory of the tribe of Judah.
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There he sits by himself, in apparent retirement from society after being disappointed in mankind.

Except that now the Philistines get ready to take their revenge. They head for Judah and prepare
themselves for battle. The men of Judah, frightened by the Philistine mobilisation, come to ask why on earth the Philistines are preparing to make war upon them, and the Philistines explain: ‘We have come to take Samson prisoner, and to do to him as he did to us.’

Three thousand men of Judah proceed apace to Samson’s dwelling place in the cave of the rock of Etam. Samson, it will be recalled, is not a member of the tribe of Judah, and he is about to bring down upon them a war that does not ‘belong’ to them. ‘You knew that the Philistines rule over us’, they say to him anxiously, ‘why have you done this to us?’ Three thousand men stand around him filled with trepidation, and Samson, with simple, stubborn logic, replies: ‘As they did to me, so I did to them.’

Three thousand men steal glances at one another. One can almost hear the uneasy throat-clearing. ‘We have come down to take you prisoner’, they finally dare to tell him, ‘and to hand you over to the Philistines.’ And across the gulf of centuries one can
sense the plea gurgling in their voices: Don’t make it harder for us, just come quietly and we’ll finish this filthy business in a dignified fashion …

This episode is one that’s easy to skip past in the Samson story, since it doesn’t stand out amid the other dramatic events that are painted in such bold colours. But we, who read Samson’s story with keen interest in the frequent shifts he makes among friend, foreigner, and foe; we, who sense how Samson is fated over and over to agonise over the riddle of his strangeness in relation to his parents (and his people, and in fact the whole human race); we will dwell a while on this brief passage.

They stand before him bewildered. They are astounded by the extreme loneliness that radiates from this man who has nested in a rock. A man whose boldness may already be legendary among the tribes of Israel, but who also evokes fear and anger because of his repeated provocations of the vengeful Philistines. And not only fear and anger does he bring out in these men: for he, alone, dares to do what they, in their multitudes, do not dare do. And
maybe somewhere in their hearts, in a tiny corner that remains free, not enslaved or exhausted from the weight of Philistine conquest, they can guess that one day, in the annals of their people, it will be Samson – not they – who will be the symbol of resistance to occupation and tyranny.

We have come to take you prisoner, they mumble, to hand you over to the Philistines … there is almost no doubt that at this moment they hate Samson no less than they despise the Philistines. Were they not terrified of him, they would surely overrun him themselves and do the Philistines’ work for them. And here, amazingly enough, Samson doesn’t even argue with them. Only this does he ask of them: ‘Swear to me that you yourselves will not attack me.’ And they indeed promise not to hurt him, only to take him prisoner and turn him over to the Philistines; ‘we will not slay you.’

The exchange between Samson and the men of Judah is described rather gently, even compassionately. Something in the conversation almost tugs at
the reader’s sleeve and implores him or her to pay attention to what is going on: the men of Judah are careful not to harm Samson. Even as they are furious with him, they take pains to maintain a respectful, even worshipful, distance. The reader, who has already caught a glimpse of Samson’s inner life, knows that he is likely to experience this distance not only as a sign of respect but also as an expression of estrangement and avoidance. Samson knows well this attitude towards him, the degree of respect, the awe that pushes him again, as always, into loneliness and isolation.

It will be recalled that these are his own people who are doing this to him. Members of his people, whose judge – whose leader – he is. It never occurs to them to object, even in a token manner, to the Philistines’ demands and to risk their lives for him. Nor do they offer, for example, to arrange his escape from their territory and find ways to placate the Philistines. They want to hand him over, and do not conceal their eagerness to be rid of the ongoing danger that he embodies. And he is doubtless aware
of this, of their motives and their enthusiasm, but does not come to them with complaints: ‘Swear to me that you yourselves will not attack me’ – no more than this does he ask of them at this critical moment. For he knows that they cannot kill him, that he is stronger than all of them combined, but he apparently has a touching, almost pathetic need to hear from them – from their very lips – this soothing, protective promise, these exact words, ‘we will not slay you’. As if with these words they, his brothers, can lighten the eternal burden forced upon him by his mother, when she announced his death even before he was born.

They tie him up with two new ropes. Those who have read the entire Samson story will recall that when Delilah asks him, later on, how he can be tied up and made helpless he mocks her and says ‘new ropes’; and when she ties him up he snaps them off his arms like thread.

But here he allows the men of Judah to tie him with the same kind of ropes. He stands among them, perhaps taller than them all, permits them
to wrap him in their web, feels the bonds of betrayal tightening around his flesh, lets them hand him over to the foreigners.

And this passivity raises the impression that Samson is almost enjoying this, taking strange, bitter, convoluted pleasure from the whole affair. As if he were taking part in an utterly private ritual, in which the men of Judah are mere puppets on a string; and what manipulates these strings are Samson’s deepest, most elemental needs, the need to relive, again and again, the experience of being betrayed by those close to him, the compulsion to re-enact, over and over, that primal event of being handed over to strangers, of being given up.

And then, after draining from the encounter with his countrymen every drop of that foul nectar that apparently fuels his soul, he reverts to his familiar acts of force and violence: It occurs when the men of Judah take him away from the rock, and lead him to the Philistines who stand in formation at a place called ‘Lehi’, which in Hebrew means ‘cheek’ or ‘jaw’.

Even someone who wasn’t there can conjure in his mind the sight of three thousand men of Judah in a long Lilliputian parade, carrying Samson, bound by ropes, like a giant statue. When the Philistines see him they cheer wildly, victoriously, but when they go to seize him, the spirit of God once again comes over Samson. His body is so inflamed with the passion for revenge that the ropes around his arms disintegrate ‘like flax that catches fire’. He reaches out and finds, just by chance, the fresh jawbone of an ass, with which he smites a thousand Philistines.

When he finishes the job, again the poet bursts from the bully: ‘With the jaw of an ass’, he declaims, ‘Mass upon mass!/ With the jaw of an ass/ I have slain a thousand men.’ And we too, amid the horrific slaughter, find enough poetry within ourselves to remark that this ‘trademark’ mode of expression, and Samson’s creativity and ingenuity, are enshrined in the very weapons he uses – foxes, an ass’s jawbone, bare hands against a lion, exclusively ‘organic’ materials, natural and original.

He is very thirsty ‘as he finished speaking’ (and it is not entirely clear whether this is from the exertion of wiping out a thousand men, or from composing his little poem). He calls out to God, ‘You yourself have granted this great victory through Your servant; and must I now die of thirst and fall into the hands of the uncircumcised?’ And this cry pierces the heart, because Samson is so weak and vulnerable here: he almost sounds like a boy sobbing to his father, and also like someone achingly despondent over the failure of the ‘grand plan’ that he never presumes fully to understand, knowing only that he serves it as a vessel or an instrument.

Let us tarry a bit longer over this last outburst of his, and again contemplate his sudden, sharp transition from superhero and mass murderer to a near-child: in the blink of an eye, and with astonishing ease, it’s as if the warrior’s spine has snapped, and he crumbles, crying desperately for the embrace of a caring, compassionate parent.

Samson’s cry is also surprising because, for an
instant, there is a parting of the curtain and it turns out that Samson speaks directly to God. Speech like this attests, of course, to a special relationship with multiple implications, nothing of which has been heretofore vouchsafed by the biblical storyteller. And even if it will in no way alter Samson’s well-known destiny, this revelation is a bit comforting, as it lessens somewhat his isolation among his brethren, among his fellow man.

But it may well be that within Samson’s plea lies another, very human, drama, having to do with his relationship with God: perhaps Samson understands that the affliction of thirst is a divine punishment for the arrogance he exhibited in his victory speech by suggesting that it was he alone, he and the jawbone of an ass – without God’s help – who slew the Philistines. Now, on his hands and knees on the rock, fainting from thirst, Samson promises his God that he knows well who brought about the victory: ‘You yourself have granted this great victory through Your servant,’ he gasps, and God accepts the ‘thank-you’ that includes regret and apology,
and splits open ‘the hollow which is at Lehi’, and water gushes from it.

And after all this – ‘Samson went to Gaza, where he met a whore and slept with her.’

There are, as is widely known, various reasons why a man goes to a prostitute; but before we speculate about Samson’s motives, and even before we remind ourselves that he is a Nazirite (for in Samson’s case it’s easy to forget this, since he is one of those Nazirites who is not forbidden contact with women) – perhaps we should ask why he went to Gaza at all? Why to this Philistine city, of all places, whose residents surely want him dead?

How to make sense of Samson’s bizarre compulsion to mingle with Philistines? To mingle his flesh with theirs, to mangle them with his fists: indeed all his contact with them is tangled up with the body, flesh and fluid, wrestling and writhing, piercing and penetrating. Those inclined to do so can infer
here, among other things, a dimly perceived wish on Samson’s part that his intensive contact with others, especially foreigners, will grant him something that may be missing from the root of his being: a feeling of actual, physical existence and of its tried and true boundaries.

For nowhere in Samson’s universe is there a single person who resembles him even a little. In this sense, Samson lives and functions in a vacuum. Within this void materialises his identity – elusive, defying definition, filled with contradictions, legendary, miraculous. It is not hard to imagine the confusion that reigns in such a soul, which is in constant need of ‘signals’ from the outside world and other people in order to define its limits. Small wonder, then, that a man like this is drawn again and again to rub up against another being that is utterly foreign and at first glance seems to inhabit a sharply defined, almost one-dimensional space. When he is in contact with this other being he can feel – apart from satisfaction over fulfilling his divine mission – its boundary, the fence that separates him from it, and thus he can feel
his own limit and maybe even his definition. And therefore, it is to Gaza that he goes, to the Philistine city, to be among foreigners, others, the different ones, to brush up against them, to tangle and wriggle with them, to kill and love them and then kill them again …

And another notion arises, that maybe Samson has an inner need to divide up his existence among people and places that are very different and removed from one another. That is, to compartmentalise, to spread himself around as much as possible, in order to protect the secret that is the heart and focus of his life. And therefore, out of a survival instinct of sorts, Samson must always be in motion, staying only a short while in any one place – Zorah, Eshtaol, Timnah, Ashkelon, Judah, Hebron, Nahal Sorek – and leaving abruptly, revealing a little bit and concealing more, thus creating a reality in which people everywhere will know only ‘a part of Samson’, only one piece of the mosaic, and maybe this will make it harder for them – the strangers who only catch a glimpse of him – to understand the whole
picture and to unravel, once and for all, the riddle of Samson.

(And as one reads the descriptions of Samson’s motion, frequent, forceful and slightly mad, one may get a flash of his mother striding briskly through the fields, on her way to tell Manoah about her meeting with the angel. ‘The woman ran in haste,’ reads the text, and it’s as if she imprinted upon the embryo within her the power, the momentum, and the sheer pleasure of that fast running …)

If Samson’s trip to Gaza seems curious, his visit to the prostitute seems easier to explain. Samson is alone at the moment. He has no wife. When we recall that, as soon as he became energised by the divine spirit, he went off to seek love, we can only imagine the depth of his loneliness and anguish now, in the aftermath of his sojourn in the cave of the rock of Etam. But it is certainly also possible that Samson goes to the whore because of the bitter disappointment of his previous – and sole – experience with a woman, his wife, the girl from Timnah who was given to another. And if so, with all due
respect to Samson’s robust sexual urges, his turning to a prostitute also signifies a loss of hope in finding true love and in the possibility of entrusting his secret, the keys to his soul, to another person worthy of trust.