Poor Samson.
He’s sitting in a wet cave just on the edge of Judean territory. He’s hiding from the Philistines, who kind of very much want him to be extremely dead.
And who exactly are the Philistines? They are a Sea People, originally Aegean, who settled along the coast of Canaan. They occupy five major cities—a pentapolis—along with others villages and towns. They have a distinctive form of pottery and facility with metal. They trade across the Great Sea. They’ve gathered stories from their travels and worship Baal, Astarte, Dagon, among others.
The Israelites live in hills and smaller towns. They are provincial, contentious, loud, smelly. They have only one god. They have temples, prophets, and nazirs, like Samson, saintly types that don’t drink wine or cut their hair and are really not supposed to be in the murdering business, but what can you do? In Israel you take the saints you can get.
Samson just can’t seem to keep away from the Philistines.
But the Philistines have had enough of him. They didn’t like that he fell in love with one of their daughters. They didn’t like the weird mannerisms on display at his wedding. They thought the wager he proposed to the locals was stupid and didn’t like how, after they cheated and won, Samson went and killed a bunch of guys. And then there was the thing where he lit a bunch of foxes on fire and set them loose across the Philistine countryside.
They don’t want him around anymore.
And Samson has been hiding in this cave, crying into his hair, unsure where he can go, when he hears a voice.
• • •
“Yoohoo,” says a man standing at the entrance of the cave.
Samson is silent.
“Nu Samson, you in there? Of course you are, so come out. We brought lox.”
An Israelite!
Samson walks out of the cave and is immediately grasped. It’s a trap—the Judean “Lox Bait Maneuver.” Samson can’t believe he fell for it.
“This thing you did, I don’t know why you did it,” says the Israelite commander. “You made a lot of trouble for your poor parents. You made the Philistines angry. Did you know they marched into Israel with their soldiers? They went and bothered your family. Do you understand what I’m talking about?”
“I did what I had to.”
“Well now—that changes things. Why didn’t you say so. Listen up everybody,” the commander says. “Samson did what he had to. Guys, do me a favor. Carry a message to the Philistine army. The message is, Samson had to.”
“You see, this clears it up entirely,” he continued. “Makes sense too. We were all wondering—why’d you murder those guys. They were just standing around, you made them dead. But turns out? You had to, that’s why.”
“You can stop,” says Samson. “I get it.”
“Oh more good news, so now Samson GETS IT.”
“Look,” says Samson. “Whatever you do, don’t try to kill me.”
“Kill you? I laugh,” he laughs. “The Philistines would kill us if we did that. We have orders, you know.”
Samson looks the Israelite in the eye. “You swear on this? That you won’t try to kill me?”
“I swear, for all the good it’ll do,” the commander says. Two young men wrap Samson’s arms with thick ropes. “You know, truth be told, Israel loves a good psychopath. You remember Gideon, perhaps? Murder isn’t necessarily bad, especially when it happens to someone else. But you’re doing it wrong—for you it’s all personal. That’s no good, that’s weak.”
Led by the Israelites, Samson leaves the cave without a fight.
The Israelites march Samson directly to the Philistines, who greet him warmly.
“We miss you big time, pretty boy,” the Philistine officer says when he sees Samson.
“Now you’ve got our little Samsonele,” says the Israelite commander. “So we’ll be heading off. It was nice knowing you, Samson.” He turns to his second-in-command. “His poor mother, she worries.” They and the other Israelites leave.
Samson looks up.
The Philistine soldiers surround him. There are thousands of them, troops in position several layers deep.
The soldiers are pointing and shouting slurs. They are calling him things like “circumcised rube” and “Psycho Sammy” and “well-coifed Jew.”
But many of the soldiers are simply laughing. It reminds Samson of his wedding party, with his wife’s family and townspeople in a circle, laughing at his dumb silence.
He looks down and sees the skull of a donkey buried in the dirt. Its mouth is wide open—in thirst, or maybe in prayer, Samson thinks.
The Philistine soldiers are now converging on him, still laughing. With its flesh melted off, what remains of the donkey looks as if it’s laughing as well. It’s the dead who get the last laugh.
The soldiers take a step closer, and Samson feels a surge of strength.
Over the shouts of Philistine soldiers, Samson bursts his ropes. Soldiers dash at him. Samson lifts the jawbone from the donkey’s skull.
He swings the jawbone at an approaching soldier, crushing his throat.
Another Philistine comes close and gets his face caved-in by a swing of the jaw.
And so the massacre goes, one joyless death after another. By the end, Samson is walking away from the killing field on his own, observed from a distance by survivors. Those unlucky enough to stand in Samson’s way are now piled up in heaps.
Samson wanders away from the scene. He didn’t really need the jawbone. It wasn’t even fun.
Samson walks from one end of the pentapolis to the other. At one point he decides, hey, maybe I’ll visit a whore. A Philistine, of course—the man has his tastes.
He slinks into the city of Gaza, today known as “Gaza.”
As he enters, a silent alarm is triggered. Men trade glances, pretending not to recognize the brute. They watch him enter the prostitute’s home, and quickly devise a plan.
Night falls, and warriors begin to assemble. The plan is to lie in wait until morning, when they’ll ambush Samson and put a decisive end to his whole weird career.
It is utterly dark in Gaza. They wait.
In the middle of the night—midnight, almost exactly—a door opens. Out walks Samson. Samson finished his business quickly and didn’t have a good time. He just wants to get out of here, to keep moving.
As he exits, Samson notices men scattered about, waiting for him. He simply walks past them, he’s invisible in the darkness.
Gaza, like all ancient cities, had a gate. The gate was the chokepoint, built into the walls to give the city a measure of control over who is allowed to exit or enter. It is heavily guarded. As it is the middle of the night, the gate is of course closed.
When Samson reaches the city limits, he grasps one side of the gate and pulls hard. A large post breaks away from the wall. Samson pulls at the other post, and the gate crumbles off its hinges.
For days, he schleps the gate across hills and valleys. He finally deposits the gate of Gaza in Israel, in the city of Hebron. People think it was to punish the Philistines, but maybe Samson just wanted a souvenir.
The years pass and Samson continues wandering. Wine has still never touched his lips. His uncut hair is growing in gray at the roots. In his wandering, sometimes people recognize him, but mostly not. Israelites will ask him questions—he is a judge, sort of?—but they seem disappointed in his answers. Anyway, he spends as much time in Philistina as he does Israel.
One day, he finds himself in the Sorek Valley, not far from Timnah. Timnah was where it all began for him, where he spotted the girl he would go on to marry—what do you mean it doesn’t count as marriage if you never live together and you kill her people and she marries someone else and because of you she’s burned at the stake?? Marriage isn’t all fun and games!!
And then—something remarkable happens. Lightning strikes twice, in the very same spot. An insanely perfect coincidence that Samson takes for granted as just good luck, or divine providence, and nothing at all to be suspicious of.
He sees her from afar, just as he saw the girl from Timnah—she moves elegantly, has dark brown eyes, and an ass to DIE for. (Good news on that front, bro.) He has only felt this way once before—some twenty years before, when he was passing through the same area. But this is no girl. This is a woman.
It turns out her name is Delilah. She is charmed to meet Samson. Delilah invites him to her home, and they spend the night together.
Thankfully, there is no talk of marriage. Samson is not up for that. But she invites him back. And Samson, though not sure at first if he would, finds himself returning. Again and again.
Remarkably, Samson finds he can talk with her. With her he becomes charming, witty. He tells her stories of his past. She is not horrified. She laughs at the right parts, and grows quiet and holds his hand when the tales grow dark. He returns again and again to her home.
In time, his feelings become clear.
He loves Delilah, and wants to stay with her forever.
Oh, poor Samson.
When Delilah asks for the source of the strength, at first Samson pretends it’s all some flirtatious game. “Tie me up with fresh tendons,” he says. “Then I’ll be weak as a child. Oh dear—totally helpless.”
So she gets fresh tendons and ties him up in the privacy of the home they share, to Samson’s noticeable arousal.
When Philistine soldiers bound through the door, Samson bursts free and chases them away. He lets them run away unharmed. The old Samson wouldn’t have allowed that. But love is changing him, you see…
…just kidding! Samson breaks their spines and tosses their bodies in a ravine.
Then it happens again. This time Samson tells Delilah that fresh ropes should do the trick. She ties him up—Samson really likes this bit—and when he’s tied up, the Philistine soldiers come crashing in again. That ravine sure is getting crowded. Samson and Delilah go back to bed.
But when it all happens again, do we really think Samson doesn’t see what’s happening?
For a third time, Delilah asked him for the source of his strength. He told her some nonsense about weaving his hair into the loom. He just wanted her to get close to him, so he could feel her fingers slink across his head one last time. And once again, Philistine soldiers entered at his moment of supposed fragility. And again, afterwards, Samson and Delilah are alone.
“Oh Samson,” Delilah says. “How can you say that you love me when you lie to me?”
And Samson, no matter what he was telling himself before—now he knows where he stands.
And it came to pass, when she pressed him daily with her words, and urged him, that his soul was wearied unto death.
So he confides in her. He admits that all these years, he has been fastidiously keeping his mother’s oath to the Israelite god. That this oath, somehow, he knows to be the source of his power. That if he we were ever to break this oath, his very existence would be at stake.
And one last time, they go to bed in each other’s arms.
Is he surprised in the morning when he wakes to find that his hair has been cut, that his strength is gone, that he has been captured by the Philistines?
No, he is not surprised.
He is relieved.
The Philistines gouge out his eyes and bring him to the Temple of Dagon. They bring him out to dance for the pleasure of the gathered crowds at their festival.
He has the strength of an ordinary man, and not even that, so the dancing tires him easily. He reaches out in his blindness for something he can lean on.
His hand lands on a pillar of the Philistine temple.
He prays to God—to his one god, YHWH—and does not ask for forgiveness or mercy. He does not ask for freedom or life. He knows better than that.
No, he asks for something he wanted even more.
Samson cried, “Let me die with the Philistines!” and he pulled with all his might. The temple came crashing down on the lords and on all the people in it. Those who were slain by him as he died outnumbered those who had been slain by him when he lived.
And Samson the Israelite was buried, as he wished, among the Philistine people.
CREDITS
Play the song as the credits roll.
CAST (in order of appearance)
SAMSON
ISRAELITE COMMANDER
ISRAELITE SOLDIERS
ISRAELITE SECOND-IN-COMMAND
PHILISTINE COMMANDER
DEAD PHILISTINE #1
DEAD PHILISTINE #2
DEAD PHILISTINE #3
DEAD PHILISTINE #4
DEAD PHILISTINE #5
DEAD PHILISTINE #6
DEAD PHILISTINES #7-#1000
PHILISTINE WHORE
PHILISTINE WHORE #2 (UNDERSTUDY, WINK WINK)
SAMSON BODY DOUBLE
ANGRY GAZANS
DELILAH
DEAD PHILISTINE #1001
DEAD PHILISTINE #1002
DEAD PHILISTINE #1003
DEAD PHILISTINES #1004-#1008
EYE-GOUGING PHILISTINES
DANCING PHILISTINES
BLIND SAMSON BODY DOUBLE
YHWH
