Judges 15

THE minds of many intelligent readers of the Bible are more or less confused over the Israelitish history, as broken in upon and mixed up with Philistine interventions and wars. A little systematic attention to the history, in connection with the geography, would not only remove this confusion, but at the same time throw a new charm around some of the most romantic and some of the most pathetic passages of the Old Testament. The Philistine territory is the southern portion of the great maritime plain of Palestine—the portion extending from the desert on the south northward to the neighborhood of Jaffa. Lying thus on the sea, and moreover affording the great highway of communication between Asia and Africa, it was the part of the Holy Land first and best known to the Greeks, who therefore gave the name Palestina, or land of the Philistines, to the whole country of which it was a part. In thinking of Philistia, we may picture vast expanses of grain-fields stretching from the sand-downs of the coast back to the mountain barrier of Judea. “The vineyards and the olives,” of which we read, may have been interspersed amid the grain-fields over the whole extent of the country; yet the eastern border of the country, broken by spurs of the Judean hills and abounding in ravines and hill-slopes, would naturally be preferred for these. And so, when Samson, in the time of wheat-harvest, came down from his home in the rocky fastnesses of Dan among the neighboring Philistines, and incensed against them, caught three hundred jackals and let them loose with lighted fire-brands attached to them, it is precisely natural that these, betaking themselves to the hills, should kindle a conflagration destructive not only of the standing corn and the shocks of the harvest, but also, as we read, of “the vineyards and the olives.” There were five principal cities of the Philistines: Gaza on the south, Ekron on the north, and Askelon, Ashdod, and Gath, between. Of these, Askelon alone was actually on the sea-coast. The rest, except Gath, were near the coast. The Philistines appear to have been a thick-headed, plodding sort of people. Evidently David presumed on their dulness when pursued by Saul he fled to Gath—the very city of Goliath, their champion whom he had slain, and deceived them by a very shallow device. Samson, too, with grim and grotesque humor, made perpetual game of them. Yet, dull of intellect as they may have been, they were not destitute of a spirit of enterprise and of a purpose wonderfully steady and obstinate. N. C. B.

11-13. The fact that the people of Judah, in whose tribe Samson afterward found a retreat in a cleft or cavern of some unknown rock then called Etam, actually delivered him up bound at the demand of the Philistines; and the anxiety they feel and express lest these proud heathen should take offence at their harboring their own great champion, shows how completely the nation had lost heart. Kit.—Their spirits were broken by the base bondage which their iniquities had brought upon them, and instead of bravely setting Samson at their head to fight for their liberty, they meanly resolve to make a sacrifice of him to his enemies! Instead of honoring him for his courage, they blame him for his rashness, and desire him peaceably to submit to their bonds! Swear unto me, that ye will not fall upon me yourselves. Though he had abundant occasion to expostulate with them on account of their ingratitude and to upbraid them with their cowardice, yet he generously forbears reproaches, and merely demands assurance that he should receive no harm at their hands. He does not make this stipulation for fear of them, for he could as easily have freed himself from the hands of his brethren as from those of the Philistines, but he would avoid the necessity of acting toward them as enemies. Bush.

Contrast with those men of Judah the feelings and the conduct of Samson. Conscious of Divine aid and of having unfailing strength in God, his courage never drooped in the darkest days of the Philistine oppression. Conscious of his own high calling and of the election of Israel to be the people of God, he could not brook the notion of being ruled over by the uncircumcised, nor did he lose the hope of some great deliverance. And even the feeling that he stood alone did not quench his spirit. He did not lose sight of hope, because he did not lose sight of God. A. C. H.

15. A most vivid and stirring description! The Spirit of the Lord with that suddenness which marks his extraordinary movements, came upon Samson and mightily strengthened him in his outer man. The strong new cords snapped asunder in an instant, and before the Philistines could recover from their terror at seeing their great enemy free, he had snatched up the heavy jawbone of an ass recently dead, and with it smote the flying Philistines till a thousand of them had fallen under his blows. A. C. H.

18. Then in the moment of his triumph came to him to teach him his weakness without his God the sore thirst under which his mighty strength fainted. He cried unto the Lord in a prayer which witnesses in its every word to his deep sense of his being in these acts no mere pursuer of personal vengeance, but in very deed an instrument in the hand of Jehovah for the rescuing of his people. “Thou hast given this great deliverance into the hand of thy servant, and now shall I die for thirst and fall into the hand of the uncircumcised?” He did not cry in vain, for in the rock at Lehi He who bringeth water out of the great deeps opened its fresh springs, and when the thirst-found hero had drunk his spirit came again and he revived. Wilberforce.

19. The statement is quite clear that God clave the hollow place which is in Lehi, and that a spring of water came out, to which Samson gave the name Es-hakkoreh, the spring of him that called upon God, which name continued till the time of the writer. A. C. H.

20. Great at this time was the glory of Manoah’s son. Terrified by the utter failure of their last attempt, the Philistines withdrew themselves into their own borders. Samson judged his people, and though the heathen yoke yet dishonored Judah, it was little more than an empty token of subjection, while Samson was at hand to avenge upon their trembling hosts any act of aggression or of wrong. For twenty years it seems that this long pause lasted; and then the last and greatest of the judges falls before the temptations of the flesh, and ends in shame and ruin, his life of bright but fitful splendor. It is a dark and miserable history, to be told in a few mournful words, to be stored up by all for closest self-application in their heart of hearts. The mighty man “who had burst the fetters of his foes could not break the cords of his own lusts” (Ambrose). Wilberforce.

16 : 1. And Samson went to Gaza. It may have been many years after his victory at Lehi, toward the latter part of his twenty years’ judgeship. Gaza, now Ghuzzeh, one of the five chief cities of the Philistines, once a strong place, but now a large open town. It was the last town in Southwest Palestine on the road from Jerusalem to Egypt. It played an important part in history in all ages. A. C. H.

In Samson we note a strange blending of courage and physical strength with a weakness toward women. Was it partly for the sake of the moral lessons enforced by such an example that these painful facts were permitted to occur and the record of them to appear in the sacred history? We read it with a painfully quickened sense of the weakness of some of the strongest men. Moreover, it does undoubtedly throw light upon the dangers continually incident to the close social contact of Israel with the Canaanites remaining in the land. Those families of ancient Canaan had art, culture, beauty; and when these qualities were found by the men and women of Israel, associated with an attractive sensuous idol-worship, we can readily see how subtle and perilous the temptation became. H. C.

Is it a puzzling fact that Gideon, and Jeph-thah, and Samson should not be more free from the passions and temptations incident to human beings, incident to men of their tribe and race and of their peculiar age, incident to special gifts and position, than all those whom we have heard of before? The conscience of mankind has answered this question. It has said very decidedly, “This would not have been a true book and therefore certainly not a Divine book, if it had been otherwise. Above all, it would not have been a book for men. We should have had no sympathy with it; it would have given us no warnings. It might have been useful for the people of another planet; it would have proved itself not to be intended for ours.” Maurice.

The history of Samson here closely follows that of Israel. As Israel claimed for self, and would have used for self the gifts and calling of God; as it would have boasted in its Nazarite-strength and trusted in it, irrespective of its real meaning and the object of its bestowal, so now Samson. He goes down to Gaza, one of the fortified strongholds of the Philistines, not impelled by the Spirit of Jehovah, but for self-indulgence, confident and boastful in what he regards as his own strength. Nor does that strength yet fail him, at least outwardly. For God is faithful to His promise, and so long as Samson has not cast away His help, it shall not fail him. But already he is on the road to it, and the night at Gaza must speedily be followed by the story of Delilah. A. E.

3. Took the doors of the gate.** Not the great gate itself, but the two smaller doors or leaves, constructed within the large gate, and which alone were opened on ordinary occasions. The posts, bar, etc., of these were different from the more solid and massy fixtures of the great gate. It was indeed an instance of Divine forbearance at which Samson had occasion to wonder that his supernatural strength was yet continued to him, notwithstanding his aggravated offence. Bush.

Samson and Delilah.

5. Entice him.** The princes of the Philistines knew already where Samson’s weakness lay, though not his strength, and therefore they would entice his harlot with gifts to entice him.

15. As a hoodwinked man sees some glimmering of light but not enough to guide him, so was the case with Samson, who had reason enough left to make trial of Delilah by a crafty misinformation, but not enough upon that trial to distrust and hate her: he had not resolution enough to deceive her thrice, nor wit enough to keep himself from being deceived by her. Thrice had he seen the Philistines in his chamber ready to surprise him, yet will he needs continue a slave to his traitor. Warning not taken is a certain presage of destruction. Bp. II.

16. His soul was vexed unto death.** He was so racked by two contrary passions struggling within him, love of Delilah and regard for his own life and strength, that he became weary of life and careless what became of him: God now forsook him because he abandoned himself to sensual pleasure; and his love of the harlot prevailed over his care of himself. Bp. Patrick.

17. Told her all his heart.** Alas! how are the mighty fallen! Well could Samson now adopt the language of Solomon;—“I find more bitter than death the woman whose heart is snares and nets, and her hands are bands: whose pleaseth God shall escape from her; but the sinner shall be taken by her.” Bush.—We wonder that a man could possibly be so sottish, and yet we ourselves by temptation become no less insensate: sinful pleasures, like a common Delilah, lodge in our bosoms; we know they aim at nothing but the death of our soul; we will yield to them and die. Every willing sinner is a Samson: let us not inveigh against his senselessness, but our own. Nothing is so gross and unreasonable to a well-disposed mind, which temptation will not represent fit and plausible. No soul can out of his own strength secure himself from that sin which he most detesteth. Bp. II.

If I be shaven, then my strength will go from me. Not that his strength lay in his hair, for this in fact had no natural influence upon it. His strength arose from his peculiar relation to God as a Nazarite, and the preservation of his hair unshaven or unshorn was the mark or sign of his Nazariteship, and a pledge on the part of God of the continuance of his miraculous physical powers. If he lost this sign, the badge of his consecration, he broke his vow and consequently forfeited the thing signified. God abandoned him, and he was thenceforward no more in this respect than a common man; he was deprived of supernatural strength. Bush.—As one writes: “The superhuman strength of Samson lay not in his uncut hair, but in this, that Jehovah was with him. But Jehovah was with him only so long as he kept his Nazarite vow.” Or, in the words of an old German commentary: “God allows his strength to be destroyed, that in bitter experience he might learn, how without God’s presence he was nothing at all. And so our falls always teach us best.” A. E.

19. Contrast the scene in which the angel stands before his awed but happy parents, making the promise of his birth and of God’s deliverance by him, with that in which the son of such a promise lay with his Nazarite head in the lap of that Philistine woman, and suffered his unholy passion to make betrayal of Jehovah’s trust! No wonder that when his locks were left upon her knees “the Lord was departed from him.” No wonder the Philistines were suffered to take him and put out his eyes. The infatuated man had consented to all that. He knew that he was dealing with a traitress, yet, step by step, he went straight on till the fatal end was reached. And at every step he was himself traitor to his Divine commission. Ganse.

20. Samson wist not that the Lord was departed from him.** It is a sad but sure sign that a soul is becoming thoroughly carnal when the man is unconscious of the withdrawal of the Holy Spirit, and flatters himself, amid his lusts, that his spiritual strength is the same still as when he was consecrated to God. A secure state is often also associated with a vaunting and fluent tongue: “I will go out, as at other times before, and shake myself.” But when Jehovah has departed from any one, Ichabod is written upon him, the glory is departed, and he is utterly powerless against every foe. A. R. F.

21. The Philistines took him when God was departed from him; those that have thrown themselves out of God’s protection become an easy prey to their enemies. If we sleep in the lap of our lusts, we shall certainly wake in the hands of the Philistines. His eyes were the inlets of his sin, and now his punishment began there. Now that the Philistines had blinded him, he had time to remember how his own lust had blinded him. The best preservative of the eyes is to turn them away from beholding vanity. They brought him down to Gaza, that there he might appear in weakness where he had lately given such proofs of his strength, and be a jest to those to whom he had been a terror. They bound him with fetters of brass. Poor Samson, how art thou fallen! How are the glory and defence of Israel become the drudge and triumph of the Philistines! Let all take warning by his fall, carefully to preserve their purity, and to watch against all fleshly lusts; for all our glory is gone and our defence departed from us, when the covenant of our separation to God, as spiritual Nazarites, is profaned. H.

22. The sacred text expressly has it: “And the hair of his head began to grow, as it was shorn”—that is, so soon as it had been shorn. Then began a period of godly sorrow and repentance, evidenced both by the return of God to him, and by his last deed of faith, in which for his people he sacrificed his life. A. E.—The loss of his hair had deprived him of strength, only because it took him out of that condition of Nazariteship with which his strength was inseparably connected; so that from the return of his strength with the growth of his hair, we can only understand that he repented and renewed voluntarily the vows of devotement which had been imposed upon him before his birth, and which he had so miserably broken. Kit.—The God of mercy looked upon the blindness of Samson, and in these fetters enlarged his heart from the worse prison of his sin. His hair grew together with his repentance, and his strength with his hair. God’s merciful humiliations of his own are sometimes so severe that they seem to differ little from desertions; yet at the worst, he loves us bleeding; and when we have smarted enough, we shall feel his love. Bp. H.—The world outwits itself when it presses hard on God’s deserters, and thus drives them to repent. God mercifully takes care that his wandering children shall not have an easy time of it; and his chastisements, at their sharpest, are calls to us to come back to him. A. M.

Doubtless in that prison the work of God which he had so often counteracted was wrought indeed with him. Doubtless in those lonely hours of darkness, with no familiar voice to cheer their blackness, with no sound of kindness to mingle with their gloom, conscience would arouse itself in all its power; doubtless he who needed so severe a discipline of love for his perfecting, had grace given him to yield himself to all its cleansing and purifying power; for his name, by the hand of God the Holy Ghost, has been engraven in the golden catalogue of the faithful; doubtless he, beyond all others, now that his earthly strength had departed from him, was, in the higher sense of the great words, “out of weakness made strong.” The days, the weeks, the months, passed on, and down in the dark hold of the heathen dungeon, in his blindness angels visited the lonely man, nay, the God who had made his Nazarite strength so strong was with him in the prison. Wilberforce.

24. They said, “Our god hath delivered into our hands our enemy and the destroyer of our country.” These cries must have struck upon Samson’s heart. He now saw with deep intensity of shame and sorrow how the name of the Lord had been dishonored through his misconduct, seeing that they ascribed to their own god that triumph over the covenanted servant of Jehovah, which they owed only to his own folly and sin. He knew that in the view of the Philistines the triumph over him was equivalent to a triumph of their god over the God whose servant he professed himself to be, whose protection he claimed, and whose people he in some sort represented. Yet out of this despair he gathered hope. He was aware that Jehovah was a jealous God, and that He knew well how to vindicate the honor of his own great name. The question was now put upon a different ground. It was no longer a matter between Samson and the Philistines, but between Dagon and Jehovah; and he might venture to think that, fallen as he was, he might yet hope for the Divine assistance in any effort which occasion might present to strike one great blow in discharge of his mission as the destroyer, seeing that thereby he would vindicate the superiority of the Lord over the miserable idol which the Philistines worshipped as their god. The opportunity he desired was offered and in such a shape as to confirm his purpose, by his being compelled to be present at their odious triumph and by being himself the object of their keen taunts and bitter scorn. Kit.

28. It is not a private wrong, merely, that he would avenge; he would vindicate the liberties of his people and the honor of his God. O Lord Jehovah, . . . O God: This accumulation of Divine titles indicates the earnestness of his petition, while they severally represent different aspects of the Divine Being on whom he reposes his confidence. This confession of his faith he utters in loud tones, in the audience of these idolaters, making his last appeal to God, who had strengthened him in former times, that he would now strengthen him. W. H. G.—He prayed to God to remember him and strengthen him this once, thereby owning that his strength for what he had already done he had from God, and begged it might be afforded to him once more to give them a parting blow. That it was not from a principle of passion or personal revenge but from a holy zeal for the glory of God and Israel that he desired to do this, appears from God’s accepting and answering the prayer. II.—There is the true core of religion in the prayer. It is penitence which pleads, “Remember me, O Lord God!” He knows that his sin has broken the flow of loving Divine thought to him, but he asks that the broken current may be renewed. Many a silent tear had fallen from the blind eyes before that prayer could have come to his lips, as he leaned on the great pillars. Clear recognition of the Source of his strength is in the prayer; he had recovered his conscious dependence amid the misery of the prison. A. M.

He sues to that God who was a party in this indignity for power to revenge His wrongs more than his own. It is zeal that moves him and not malice; his renewed faith tells him that he was destined to plague the Philistines; and reason tells him that his blindness puts him out of the hope of such another opportunity: knowing, therefore, that this play of the Philistines must end in his death, he collects all the forces of his soul and body, that his death may be a punishment instead of a disport; and that his soul may be more victorious in the parting than in the animation: and so addresses himself both to die and kill. Bp. II.—His privation of eyesight, had he lived, would have been the perpetual memorial of his unfaithfulness to God, and of the foe’s spiritual and bodily triumph over him. The avenging of his eyes was therefore inseparably connected with the avenging of God’s cause and the deliverance of Israel; for he was the elect nation’s representative both in his faithfulness and his backsliding. A. R. F.

29,30. Amid all that thronging, garrulous crowd he is alone with his God. Blindness, sorrow, captivity, and loneliness have done their work upon the solitary man. All his great soul is turned inward. He scarcely hears or sees anything around him. His thoughts are with the past: with the days of his Nazarite youth; with his early associations; with his witness for his God; with his wanderings from Him. What is there yet that he can do, what is there that he can suffer, for his Lord? There is but one last offering he can make; it is the offering of himself: he is again in outward form a dedicated Nazarite. Has the God in whom he has now learned was all his early strength—has He come to him again? Will Jehovah accept even from one stained as he has been the offering of his all? He puts forth out of his deep heart the cry for one more gift of strength whereby the enemies of Israel may be humbled, wherewith Jehovah may yet triumph over Dagon. He prays his last prayer; offers to his God his life; grasps with those arms of iron the massive central columns which support the wide-spanned roof, and bows himself with all his might. There is a shaking of the pillars; a cry of terror upon this side and on that—a wild rush beginning, and on it all settles down, with one loud crash, mingling like the deep thunder with the cries of the dying, the vast proportions of the crumbling building. At last Jehovah has triumphed. Dagon has fallen before the God of Israel. The Hebrew judge has indeed wrought the destruction of the Philistines; the eyeless captive has done more than Samson in his might. “The dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.” Wilberforce.

Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it. The penitent heroism of the end makes us lenient to its flaws; and we leave the last of the judges to sleep in his grave, recognizing in him, with all his faults and grossness, a true soldier of God, though in strange garb. A. M.

31. Samson’s brethren and his father’s house come down. From the ruins they search out the mangled body of the Nazarite. No one cares to interfere with them. Unmolested they bear away the remains, and lay them to rest in the burying-place of Manoah his father. And so ends the period of the judges—not in battles of tribes, but with the mighty solitary achievements of one individual, who is to teach what a Nazarite is, and what a Nazarite can do. We feel that Samson could have no successor among the judges. He is followed by another Nazarite, Samuel, who ushers in a new period, when repentant Israel will, in the strength of the Lord, fight and conquer the Philistines. A. E.

Nothing is more noteworthy in this history than the illustration it affords of the difference between physical and moral courage. Samson had physical courage; it was the natural accompaniment of his extraordinary strength. But he lacked the moral strength which lies not in nerve, nor in brain, but in a humble yet vivid sense of the presence of God. H. P. L.—Unrivalled bodily strength co-exists with abject moral weakness. What we call the strength of passion is really its weakness. It is not passion but the repression of passion which is really strong. And the strongest character is that in which what are called the strongest passions are held in leash by the sternest will. Being such as he was, Samson naturally fell lower and lower. He falls first, in choosing a Philistine wife; then, from wife to harlot, and from harlot to traitress. Then he is beguiled of secret, vow, strength, will, eyesight. Then, in darkness, in the deeps, he feels some mysterious stir of returning strength. Thus nerved for one supreme effort, his ten giant deeds are crowned by the eleventh, of a tremendous self-immolation. Bp. W. Alexander.

Samson’s strength lay in being a Nazarite; his weakness in yielding to his carnal lusts, and thereby becoming unfaithful to his calling. In both respects he was not only a type of Israel, but a mirror in which Israel could see itself and its history. Israel, the Nazarite people—no achievement, however marvellous, that it could not and did not accomplish! Israel, unfaithful to its vows and yielding to spiritual adultery—no depth of degradation so low, that it would not descend to it! The history of Israel was the history of Samson; his victories were like theirs, till, like him, yielding to the seductions of a Delilah, Israel betrayed and lost its Nazarite strength. And so also with Samson’s and with Israel’s final repentance and recovery of strength. Viewed in this light, we can not only understand this history, but even its seeming difficulties become so many points of fresh meaning. We can see why his life should have been chronicled with a circumstantiality seemingly out of proportion to the deliverance he wrought; and why there was so little and so transient result of his deeds. When the Spirit of God comes upon him, he does supernatural deeds; not in his own strength, but as a Nazarite, in the strength of God, by whom and for whom he had been set apart before his birth. All this showed the meaning and power of the Nazarite; what deliverance God could work for His people even by a single Nazarite, so that one man could chase a thousand! Thus also we understand the peculiar and almost spasmodic character of Samson’s deeds, as also the reason why he always appears on the scene, not at the head of the tribes, but alone to battle. A. E.

We may see how those who for the highest purposes have been endowed with the highest gifts, on whose intellectual powers the mighty spirit of God’s strength has rested, that they may work some deliverance for his people, may idly throw away, first, their noble trust, and then, at last, themselves. The employment of their high gifts at the mere bidding of the selfish will, for sport, for gain, for the gratification of a vain daring, for the pleasure of unbridled speculation, is the fulfilment in a higher sphere of the casting away of the sensual, wayward judge of the tribe of Dan. Wilberforce.

That the system of Divine administration under the judges was as effectual in securing their obedience to the Divine law as from their situation and character we could reasonably expect, may appear when we recollect that, of four hundred and fifty years which elapsed from the settlement of the Israelites in Canaan to the first election of a king in the person of Saul, above three hundred and fifty seem to have passed with no material apostasy from the national religion, and no material interruption of the public tranquillity and prosperity by the punishments which always attended such apostasy. It is peculiarly necessary to notice this circumstance, because by a superficial reader of the history the whole period under the judges may be easily mistaken as one uninterrupted series of idolatries and crimes; from his not observing that the lapses which incurred punishment, and the Divine deliverances which attended repentance, are related so fully and distinctly as to occupy almost the entire narrative; while very long periods, when under the government of their judges the people followed God and the land enjoyed peace, are passed over in a single verse, as productive of no occurrence which required a particular detail. Graves.